A lot of our websites are built on WordPress and we have recently been optimising a lot of our clients sites to help them attain better scores on google light house.
Google light house gives you a look under the hood as to how google might score the experience of your website. From image sizes to third party includes.
Here are a few of our tweaks
Images
Images are usually a big part of any website specially when it comes to e-commerce you want to show the client what they are buying. However images can be bulky and unoptimised slowing down your site. You can use a product such as ShortPixel to resize and compress all the images across your site and any future images you upload
JS/CSS Aggrigation & Minification
All websites have JS and CSS files included. If your using WordPress with multiple plugins you end up with lots of different JS/CSS files linked to your website. So firstly minification, when a developer writes a script the will lay it out nicely, indent functions so when it comes to changing it it’s easier. Minification removes all the spaces/indents and makes the file as small as possible . Secondly aggrigation many of your plugins will use similar include files such as JQuery or Fontawesome rather than calling it multiple times aggrigation loads it once. Using a plugin such as Autoptimise will manage all these things for you.
Compression & Caching
The aim of compression is to reduce the size of the files served by the website so the website loads quicker on the visitors PC or Mobile phone. There are several places this can be tweaked within cPanel, within your .htaccess file and with a plugin.
The aim of caching is to leave a copy of a file on the clients PC or mobile phone of files that don’t change regularly so when they visit the website elements such as CSS and JS files are already stored on their local machine reducing the time to load the website further. Plugin such as WP Super Cache can help you with this.
Missing Includes/Files
Sometime plugins or themes will access third party resources that may no longer be available. These don’t necessarily affect your browsing experience BUT if they are trying to load in the background google will include that in its loading times. So checking your site had all the resources it requires or replacing them is essential.
You can quickly spot these by right clicking and selecting Inspect site. On the right hand side look for any red escalation marks.
Reduce plugins
Are you the type of person with 17 pages of apps on your phone? And wondering why it runs slow. Same goes for your website, when installing plugins install with purpose and consider if it add enough value for the added loading time. Remove unused or non essential plugins.
Keep up to date
Keeping up to date is important from the php version on your server as well as WordPress, themes and plugins. This ensures you are using the latest technology to deliver your experience.
If you need help optimising your WordPress website, contact our team.
