There are lots of web performance optimization tips available in the market. But, do you actually know which optimization tips will work with WordPress?
Achieving fast site loading speed for your WordPress site is no longer a complex task using Perform WordPress plugin. It is specifically designed to improve your site loading speed by removing the unnecessary items from your WordPress site.
So, when you combine Perform plugin with these performance optimization tips, you’ve got yourself a match made in heaven!
9 Essential Performance Optimization Tips
WordPress sites wouldn’t be as fast without following some basic performance optimization tips.
Here are some of the strategies we use, along with a list of tools and services that stand behind like a best friend.
1. Invest in Managed WordPress Hosting
There are lots of hosting providers available in the market. But, investing in a hosting that has their servers optimized for WordPress is really helpful.
We can call them Managed WordPress hosting providers.
They take all of the technical pain from the customers and let them focus on their business. This is the reason, we recommend to invest in Managed WordPress Hosting.
As WordPress is growing, there are number of WordPress Managed hosting providers also increasing. Some of them are Cloudways (for startups) and Kinsta (for enterprises).
Kinsta is one of the top-notch WordPress Managed hosting provider. They have fine-tuned their servers to speed up any WordPress site. Their servers are powered by Google Cloud Platform which is making our site more reliable than ever. They also include features such as an HTTP/2 CDN and free SSL. They also have fast server-level caching which means you never have to mess with a caching plugin ever again.
If you are serious about your business or website, go with Kinsta.
2. Compress Images without compromising quality
All the images we are using on our sites are optimized using lossy compression with Imagify WordPress Plugin. This ensures small image sizes without compromising quality and fast loading images that still look beautiful.
3. Using CDN (Content Delivery Network)
CDN is important when your WordPress site deals with lots of images. This ensures all of our assets (CSS, JS, and images) are delivered at lightning speed around the globe.
We have CDN rewrite feature implemented on our Perform plugin which will help you easily deploy any CDN service on your WordPress site.
However, we recommend one of the best CDN service named KeyCDN. They provide GZIP content delivery with HTTP/2 support.
4. Lightweight & Optimized WordPress Theme
We use GeneratePress WordPress theme in our site. It is lightweight and faster than any other WordPress theme. It also supports the new Gutenberg editor.
We recommend you to use GeneratePress WordPress theme for your blog, eCommerce store, or a personal blog.
Also, other freely available lightweight WordPress themes are Suki and Neve. You can checkout the best features out of these free themes and extend the functionality based on the need.
5. Remove unnecessary assets
There are lots of WordPress plugins which are not developed considering performance in mind. This means that activating any WordPress plugin will add load on every page of your WordPress site. This is not a good approach as it can slow down your site.
This is why we built Assets Manager in our Perform plugin. Using Assets Manager, you’ll be able to control which scripts or stylesheet to show on specific page of your WordPress site.
For Example, If you have contact form 7 plugin installed to create contact page on your site. Then, the contact form 7 JS and CSS files are loaded on every page of your WordPress site. However, you only need them on the contact page where you’ve placed the contact form. So, using Assets Manager, you can quickly disable the contact form 7 JS and CSS to be loaded only on contact page and not others.
In this way, you can save time for the loading and execution of JS and CSS files which in turn helps in speeding up your WordPress site.
Try Assets Manager now using Perform Plugin.
6. Move to System Font Stack
Web fonts, such as Google Fonts, make up on average 3.2% of a web pages overall weight. While this is not a lot, it still contributes to your overall load time. And it could be a lot more than that.
Some WordPress sites use a lot more fonts than they actually need. Big brands such GitHub, Bootstrap, Medium, Ghost, and even your WordPress admin dashboard all use what they call a system font stack. This utilizes the fonts on your computer.
A few years ago this wouldn’t have looked very good. But with today’s newer operating systems, they all have nicer looking fonts pre-installed.
By using a system font stack, there is no need to load any fonts at all on the page! This will save the major chunk of time involved in loading fonts. It can also help you get rid of any FOUT (flash of unstyled text) or FOIT (flash of invisible text) ugliness.
Check out the awesome tutorial on how to move to a system font stack in WordPress.
8. Use required font icons only
Font Awesome is great, and millions of sites use it on the web to display the icons you see on a daily basis. However, by default, it loads its entire library of icons for your site which may include lots of font icons that your site don’t need.
So, the best performance-wise approach is to package up Font Awesome for only the icons you are actually using on your site.
Check our this great tutorial on how to host font icons locally (only the ones you need).
I am using personally selected font icons by Flaticon on my site.
9. Use well-coded plugins only
There is a huge pool of plugins over 56,800 plugins on the WordPress repository and many more premium plugins. It is always hard to get rid out of bad plugins which can hamper the performance of your WordPress website. The number of plugins you use isn’t as important as long as you are using well-coded WordPress plugins.
The good news is, there are some great developers out there that do care about performance and regularly implemented best coding practices on their plugins. Here are a couple of WordPress plugins we personally use and highly recommend:
- GenerateBlocks: Ditch heavy page builders and take advantage of blocks! Our entire site is built with blocks.
And if you are still looking for help, you might need a web performance audit.