In order to better your sites performance (shorten the load time), its important that you know which are the factors that affect your site’s performance. Here are some of them:
- Bad coding
- Bad/slow hosting service
- To many plugins
- To many unneeded css and js files
- Unoptimized site graphics
Ok, lets jump right into it. One of the first things we should do is change the hosting provider IF current one is to slow or has a lot of “down time”. You should choose a better quality hosting in that case. Here is a useful link with all of the best hosting companies listed: https://reviewbridge.com/best-hosting-europe/.
Now that you have that one covered, lets take a look at the plugins that you currently have activated on your site. From my experience i know that there are lot of instances where there to many plugins are being used whereas you could achieve the same goal with half of that number. One of my clients wanted me to “speed up” his site, and when i logged in and seen that he was using 2 different plugins for contact forms (contact form 7 and ninja forms) as well as 2 of the same plugins for the same purpose (mailchimp for wp and mailchimp premium), i knew exactly what will be the first task on my list :).
Having to many plugins will surely slow down your site, so i advise you keep only the ones you need and use the wordpress/theme functionality to achieve the other things you need. If you can achieve something using custom html/css for example, go for it instead of using the plugin, it will pay dividends for your sites performance, overall.
One of the biggest problems in terms of your site’s performance is unoptimized graphics (images, icons, photos, logos…). There are different ways of optimizing them and i would suggest optimizing them offline first (using Photoshop or some image optimization tool) and then optimize them further online (using batch image optimizing tools for wordpress, such as: wp smush or EWWW image optimizer).
Important: Try to “Serve Scaled Images” to your site. In other words, do not use the image that is bigger than the “container” that will hold the image on your site. Example:
„
If your „container / div / image holder” on your site has a width of 400 and height of 500px, you should make sure that the image that you are placing into it should have the same dimensions, or close to it. Very bad thing to do would be to place 2000x1000px(width/height) image there, which would decrease your page’s load speed.
“
That being done we need to pay attention to our site’ code. For starters you should remove all of the “inline css” and handle everything using 1 external css file (whenever possible). We could also minify and or compress our html and css code, removing unnecessary white space and duplicated tags/rules. You can achieve this by using some of the wordpress plugins(which will do this and more), such as: W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache etc. (but be careful as some of them could in rare occasions cause some performance problems, so make sure you have your backup ready and read the plugin documentation well).
