WordPress website speed up Tips and Tricks
Site Speed refers to the amount of time needed for a website to load or open. Here are some tips on how to test your site's loading speed and quickly identify opportunities that you can take advantage of to quickly boost your site's loading time.
To determine your site's loading speed, go to Google developers tool called Page Speed Insights. And using it couldn't be easier. You just copy and paste the URL that you want to test into this box and click the “Analyze” button. And when you do that, Google will look at the code of your page and figure out how fast it probably loads.
The first one is a fast server response. Now, that's usually an issue with hosting. So if you're running a site on Bluehost or Host Gate or iPage or the other four or five-dollar per month hosts, you may want to consider bumping that up to something like Storm on Demand or Media Temple or WP Engine, that's a little more expensive because I find that drops this significantly. The response time is much, much faster.
Avoid redirects. All that means is if you have a lot of redirects on your sites, like link redirects or image redirects, that's usually not a big problem for most sites. And reduce [blocking] resources. When they want asynchronous resources, that just means that they want your page code layout to load more at the top than at the bottom, OK, and that's just better for user experience.
In terms of minimizing payload, that's just the sheer size of your page. Like if you have a big, fat, poorly coded page, this will be a big problem.
Also, you want to test your site on mobile, OK, because more and more people are using mobile, and mobile page loading speed is a Google ranking factor. So just run the test on your homepage or internal page again. And over here, its default to desktop, and just click “Mobile.” And what this does is it gives you mobile-specific insights.
So obviously, mobile browsers quite a bit different, and this happens to have the same score. And you'll find that a lot of the insights that they have here are similar or the same. But if you don't have, like, a mobile-friendly site, sometimes this page speed score is significantly less. So it's definitely something that's worth checking out, especially if you get a significant amount of mobile users.
How to Improve Site Speed?
Tips to Significantly increase your WordPress Sites Speed
The first thing Im going to do is install and activate a plugin called WPSupercache. This will actually help to increase your site speed.
So to really activate it, you have to click on this red link to the plug admin page. And by default, as you will see, caching is off. Click on the caching on, and then click update status. Make sure this plugin is fully optimized.
Also, install this plugin WPSmushit plugin. This plugin makes the images on your site, the file size, significantly smaller. It makes the image size smaller without reducing quality. once you've activated it, you'll be under your plugins page, and under “Media,” hover over it and click “Bulk Smushit,” and when you've done that, click on “Run on all images through WPSmushit right now.” it takes all the images that you've uploaded to your WordPress installation and smashes them by 38%.
Install this plugin WPOptimize. This plugin takes some of the bulk on your WordPress site and deletes it, basically. Just install it like any other plugin. Now you need to scroll to the bottom to “WPOptimize Settings”, so click on that, and you can see that they have some optimization options.
Next, install a plugin called lazyload, and basically, what LazyLoad does is that generally, let's say that you have a page with huge content, it has a lot of images on it, and just a lot of text. It has a lot of comments, it's just a huge, huge, huge page. And generally, when you load a page, it loads from up here all the way down here at once, which is not good. What lazy load does, is it loads in order of the person scrolling.
So, it'll load this, and then as the person scrolls, it'll load this, and as the person scrolls, it'll load this. And this a great way to improve the practical loading speed so the person doesn't need to see all the stuff at the bottom if they never scroll down there, so it just loads it one at a time as they scroll down, which for a user, can make the loading speed significantly different.
This is a small trick that you can do, in your WordPress dashboard, click on “Settings,” and then “Discussion,” and scroll to the bottom. And here is where they have the default avatar, and obviously, for users that have a Gravatar account who want their picture to appear, but people without Gravatar, they automatically have a mystery man.
But if you save this to blank, and then hit “Save Changes,” that can make a huge difference, because then all those comments where the mystery man was, all those images, that image is gone, and it's just blank. And no one really notices because it's not like everyone likes to see the mystery man image. And that can make a pretty significant difference in your site's loading speed.