In this post I want to share an easy and simple process that will give the biggest win when it comes to website speed.
The Goal:
Achieve faster website speed with minimal effort. There are many speed optimization techniques you can do, but this post is aimed at getting the biggest speed improvement by using a quick and easy process.
Measure (Set Benchmark), Backup
Before you do anything, please make a backup of your site and also measure website speed.
There are many free and premium backup plugins that you can use.
Use GTMetrix.com or Pingdom Tools to measure your website speed.
The results will show your performance grade, your page load time and total page size. Pingdom Tools also tells you if your website loads faster or slower then other sites tested there.
Reliable hosting is essential for your website speed.
Switch to a better, more reliable host and then perform steps below.
- Optimize Images
Optimizing images is the biggest win when it comes to your website speed. Images make up the majority of most sites total page weight.
Think about using fewer images. If you have a carousel (slider on home page), see if you can use fewer rotating images, or simply replace it with just 1 static image.
ShouldIUseaCarousel.com will show you if you should use a carousel.
Optimize/compress images that you have.
If you have images that you’re planning on uploading to your site, you can use a free Web Interface to drag and drop them in, optimize and then download compressed images, and upload it to your website.
https://tinypng.com (Optimizes .JPG and .PNG files)
To automate the process you can use either of these WordPress Plugins (Choose 1 you like best)
EWWW Image Optimizer Plugin – Free
Compress JPEG & PNG images Plugin – Free up to 100 images/month
Either one of these will compress images on upload. It will remove image Meta data, such as how large the image is, color depth, image resolution, date of creation, etc..
Image will also be compressed (quality change invisible to a human eye).
You can set it up to compress new images on upload, and optimize already existing images on your website.
(EWWW plugin adds Bulk Optimize option under the Media Menu. You can compress all existing images on your site and view the progress of how much space you saved)
- Caching
Utilizing caching on your website will give a super fast response time to your visitors.
It’s like storing milk in your refrigerator, so you don’t have to go to the farm/store every time you need it.
After visitor #1 goes to a web page, server stores the page in the cache, so when a visitor #2 comes to the same page, server doesn’t have to query the database and can provide that same web page much faster.
Caching plugin takes a snapshot and shows it to the next person that comes to your website.
Popular Caching plugins:
Comet Cache
WP Rocket (premium)
Managed WordPress hosting company might have it’s own Caching plugin
- Gzip compression
Gzip is a compression algorithm that will find similar strings within your files and replace them to make the size smaller. I’m sure you’ve used .zip files before.
It’s a similar process. Your server will send a zipped version of your website files to your visitor’s browser. The browser knows how to unzip and display files to the user.
In order to enable Gzip compression, you need to include this code in your .htaccess file.
.htaccess file is in the root of your site (in your public_html directory), in the same directory, where you see your WordPress folders, such as /wp-content, /wp-admin and /wp-includes.
Make sure you backup this file first!
Then insert the following code:
After you perform these steps, go back to GTMetrix or Pingdom Tools and test your site speed again.
Hope it was useful. Let me know in the comments if your speed improved.
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