Sprint to the finish
Have you ever visited a website and thought ‘is my internet slow?’. Your internet is probably fine, it’s just a slow website. Recently we had a client come to us to talk about how their Wordpress website was running slowly and if there was any way to speed it up. Luckily here at Quaytech we know a thing or two about fast loading websites so I’m going to talk to you about a few tips and tricks to speed up your slow Wordpress website. Before we begin I pray your website doesn’t currently look like this https://www.theworldsworstwebsiteever.com/.
To start we need to see how a website is performing in general. There are many tools out there to do this but we like to use Google’s pagespeed insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) this ranks your website on a score from 0 – 100, with 100 being the best, of how good your website is in terms of loading.
Your website is then broken down into different sections:
Lab Data
Which shows you a more in-depth breakdown of why your website was ranked so poorly.
Opportunities
These are parts of your websites where you can easily improve your page load speed.
Diagnostics
These are further areas of why your website is performing poorly.
Passed Audits
This is the good stuff, the things that your website is currently doing well.
I feel the need, the need for Speed
We all love plugins when it comes to wordpress, but have you ever thought about using plugins to speed up your website. Here are some that we use:
(Disclaimer; not responsible for anything on third-party links)
Smush
This is a winner in terms of images, it compresses, resizes and all things in between. It even removes image meta data for added speed.
What’s a cache? Good question, a cache is basically a means of storage. Your browser uses it all the time without you knowing, instead of having to load all the files of a page, it will cache them after a first load so it looks quicker next time. A wordpress website is made up of php and mysql, WP Fastest Cache will convert these to static html files so you don’t need your server to render all the php, and instead your browser can cache these files.
When it comes to minifying, hummingbird is a great way to go. What is the purpose of minifying? Well scripts that run a webpage contain a lot of blank space, bit like a word document, as it makes everything easier to read when working with them. Minifying removes all that white space and makes it appear as one big chunk of text. This is less stuff for the webpage to load, whilst still keeping everything the same, result!
Summary
There are obviously additional ways to speed up a website, but here are a couple of ways you can make a start!