I was happy to have the opportunity to present at WordCamp Jacksonville. It was held for the first time at Florida State College of Jacksonville on April 16th and 17th.
My talk was for the User track about Improving Website Speed.
Direct link to the slides from this presentation:
We discussed:
- Why you should care about your website’s speed
- How improving website speed impacted well known big companies
- What affects page speed
- Several online tools to measure website speed and interpret the results
- How fast is fast enough?
- How to compare your website speed to your competitors
- How to improve your website speed
- We also discussed new HTTP/2 protocol and how it impacts website speed
I mentioned several plugins and tools. I thought to compile a list here:
Free tools to measure website speed:
GT Metrix
Pingdom Tools
Google Page Speed Insights
Webpagetest.org
What does my site cost?
P3 Plugin Performance Profiler – measures plugin impact
Uptime Robot – notifies you when your website goes down
Resources to improve website speed:
Image optimization and compression:
EWWW Image Optimizer
Tinypng.com – Web Interface
Compress JPEG & PNG images – WordPress Plugin
Kraken.io – Web Interface
Kraken WordPress Plugin
Imsanity – image resizing
Reducing requests and concatenation:
Autoptimize
Minqueue
WP Rocket
Comet Cache Pro (former ZenCache)
Caching:
WP Rocket
WP Fastest Cache
WP Super Cache
W3 Total Cache
Comet Cache (Former ZenCache)
Gzip Compression:
GZip Compression Test
Add gzip compression to .htaccess
CDNs:
CloudFlare
MaxCDN
Remove Query Strings:
Remove Query Strings from Static Resources Plugin
Code to remove query strings
Check for broken links
Broken Link Check
Broken link Checker plugin
HTTP/2 protocol:
HTTP/2 protocol Test
HTTP/2 indicator Chrome browser extension
HTTP/2 indicator Firefox browser extension
Thank you everyone who came to hear me speak. Let me know if you have any questions.
Your talk at the 1st annual Jacksonville WordCamp was extremely informative. These tools, techniques and best practices are essential to providing a functional website. In fact, load speeds are the main reason why the new AMP project is underway. Unfortunately it is not going to be enough to be responsive, websites will have to be quick as well.
Thanks Michael. I agree, speed provides best user experience and it’s so important for any website. Glad you found this helpful.