How to speed up a wordpress site? This question is one of the most popular in the CIS and just mega popular on the foreign Internet.. Before I get started, I'd like to break down the value of a fast site., because not everyone understands why to do it.

What is the main value of fast websites for business owners

The impact of site speed on online stores

A fast site helps you find information faster and saves time for visitors. saving 2 seconds on site load you can easily save people about 2 minutes of working time with your site.

For example, in wholesale online stores, the number of internal clicks can reach 60 pages per visit. If you have a slow site, then this can reduce internal conversions and you will receive 1-3 page views. With a low site speed, there will be no sales of goods or services at all or they will be much less than they could be.

In the language of SEO specialists, I will say differently due to the acceleration of the site, your behavioral factor will grow, which will positively affect the position of the site in the search and reduce the bounce rate.

Website speed on mobile devices

Site acceleration helps your mobile visitors read information or buy goods while they are on the subway, minibus, train, sitting in a taxi in a cafe. Usually there will be poor sales from mobile devices if the site visitor has a very slow mobile Internet speed. A fast site allows visitors to view more products in a short free time.

Another fact that you can not argue with is the constant growth of mobile devices. (phones, tablets... ) and their availability. Websites need to change to survive.. As an example, I will give the site of one of my clients “law firm”, its number of visitors from mobile devices has reached the mark 46%, although a couple of years ago it was only 15%.

The reaction of search engines to slow sites

Search engines react badly to slow sites, tested repeatedly. Google has repeatedly stated that a fast site will not grow in search., but a slow site may crash.

What does this quote mean to us?, everything is elementary, if the user is not comfortable, then he will leave your site, and google will notice it. If there are many such users and they will leave quickly, the site will definitely go down in the search results.

An important fact about website speed. Yandex considers sites that load more 3 seconds of poor quality.

The position of your site on mobile devices and on desktop will be different. If a potential client is looking for a site in mobile search, then search engines will be more loyal to fast sites. This is always clearly visible on customer sites with high traffic on large stores or portals..

Site acceleration and GooglePage Speed ​​Insights

1. Most users measure website speed only with GooglePage Speed, which is good., but there are other indicators that Google will not tell you and will not evaluate:
   1. Google is very good at seeing which images need to be compressed in width and height., if the styles specify other sizes, will also show how much space can be saved. But for some images, compression can be done more than the google indicator without loss of quality, and the site will only benefit from this..
   2. Pictures can be prepared for different screens and different pixel densities (on retina display), a simple analysis of Google will not tell you this and you will have to delve into the documentation on how to do it correctly.
   3. GooglePage Speed will not tell you which image formats will take up less space, for example sometimes JPG is the best format, sometimes PGN, and sometimes even GIF.
   4. GooglePage Speed ​​won't tell you which images can be vectorized and used on the site. Vector images do not degrade when resized and take up less space than raster images.. Vector images are loaded immediately on page load, and since they can be embedded in styles or page code, then the php interpreter does not need to look for the file in the file system on the server.
   5. Google will never tell you which of the images could be combined into a sprite and thereby reduce the number of requests to the server to find the desired file.
2. A fast site will do less load on your server, which means you can not increase the tariff for a longer time and not make additional costs for hosting.

The danger of speeding up the site

No one can fully optimize the speed of a website., in self-written sites, this is easier to do if a good team and even hands of programmers who will continue to work with the site. But with CMS everything is more complicated.

There are several dangers and inconveniences for CMS:

1. When using plugins to compress styles, the CMS template may float, since here you need to follow the strict order of connecting scripts.
2. When using plugins for JavaScript, the functionality of the site may be disrupted and it is not always possible to notice this at the very beginning of optimization.
3. Danger when updating CMS and plugins. Very often, CMS developers include new functionality and not always this functionality is needed for old sites., for example, the WordPress development team has recently included links to the google fonts service in the box, and on the old site, these fonts are likely to be unnecessary, everything is already there.
4. Themes for CMS be it WordPress or other CMS, developers are trying to make the template flexible in customizing for any requirements, so that the owner of the template can customize it himself, as he wants, but at the same time, the size and number of styles will be much larger. For example, for a site made by hand, styles and scripts in total can take 40-50 kb., at the same time, I met topics in which scripts and styles occupied more than one megabyte. A lot of obscene!

For good, you can optimize the site loading speed on the engine if it is initially developed for high speed and quality indicators, it will take much longer and cost much more. If those who develop the site are experienced, then they will still do part of the functionality for acceleration, and if you need a site for more than one day, then the game will be worth the candle, you won't feel it right away., but when there is a lot of material on the site, you can save a lot on its promotion.

 

How to Speed ​​Up a WordPress Website / WooCommerce

WordPress out of the box is fast enough, usually the speed of the engine is hindered by additional functionality in the theme or plugins written to put it mildly terribly. But even if everything was done well on the site, you can always achieve great results by working a little with the CMS or server settings..

This is important to speed up the site.

1. Set up caching through one of the popular WordPress plugins.
2. Set up caching on the server side, so that the browser of site visitors loads images only once and then takes them from the visitor's computer.
3. You can configure lazy loading of images.
4. If financially possible, I advise you to connect a good CDN, so that images from your site are quickly accessible from anywhere in the world. If there is no such possibility, you can look for free.
5. Crop large images that prevent the site from loading normally to the desired size, instead of compressing them in different places with their styles.
6. Create sprites for icons and small graphics on the site, better yet, use vector icons and a logo.
7. Set up automatic image compression plugins, to add a product, a service or a blog entry that has an image that would be compressed to the desired size.
8. I advise you to use the SRCSET parameter (just do it right) to display images with different pixel densities and different screens. There are plugins, unfortunately good plugins are paid and to set them up you still need to tinker with the WordPress API.
9. Reduce the number of queries to the database and track down slow queries.
10. Clean up tables and options in the database. Don't forget to make a backup, before cleaning and after cleaning, check the performance of the site.
11. Compare plugin analogs on your test site and determine which one works faster. I know it's hard, but it can help a lot.. I had a case when, due to one plugin, the server response was 21 give me a sec, after the replacement began to load 0,1 seconds.
12. For the most experienced, you can disable some options from the database from automatic loading.
13. Do not forget to update WordPress lately, it has become much faster. Always make a backup when updating.
14. If you have an older version of PHP installed, switch the PHP version on the server to 7.0. (At the time of writing, there were problems with later versions).
15. Check if the WordPress theme is calling the same data within the same template, in such cases you can call them once and put them in a variable, and then use it.

How hosting can speed up a website?

1. It's great when Apache and Nginx are configured on the hosting in conjunction.
2. If you have VPS or hosting allows, then you can enable Vanish caching and Memcache. It is important that caching can work perfectly in conjunction with the CMS. Who needs good hosting, sew me, there is an excellent one for the USA and the CIS.
3. Enable script and style compression (Minify JavaScript & CSS).
4. Enable gzip compression.
5. Often the hosting itself can combine styles and scripts, but after merging, you need to tightly test the site, so that there are no problems with the functionality.
6. Move CSS Styles Before JavaScript Scripts.
7. Enable lazy loading of images.
8. Merge extra spaces.
9. Move small external css to html.
10. Optimize URL in href and src attributes.
11. Make Critical CSS, when the main styles inserted inline into the site header are loaded immediately, and the rest are loaded at the end of the page.

The list of features could be much longer., I did not list everything, each site is individual. Just check with your hosting what they can configure to speed up the site. If nothing is impossible or it is possible but not everything, I advise you to look at a new hosting. I can advise this hosting for the CIS and this hosting is for english sites, which I have been using for a long time at the time of this writing.

If you are an expert, then you can figure out my blitz story how to speed up WordPress. If you don't understand anything, from what i wrote, then order this service from specialists or you can order it from me, my contacts are at the bottom and top of the page.

Speeding up WordPress is not easy, but what a cool feeling comes when the site starts loading instantly or accelerates a couple of times!

My examples of successful site acceleration

Reducing the number of queries to the database, by patching one WordPress module. On one page of the site 4716 database queries, after optimal selection and replacement of plugins and removal of unnecessary ones, we saw the result in 149 requests. Site loaded about 21 seconds, began to load, less than one second. And this despite the fact that the site was made on an old theme with rather big functionality.

In fact, there are many such examples., as I said, not only GooglePage Speed ​​Insights can speed up sites.

Another example of a good site loading speed optimization on an old theme.

In this example, as I said on old topics, it is difficult to achieve that all indicators are in the green zone, but the site has already accelerated very noticeably.

Good luck to everyone in speeding up your sites. If you don't understand write, I will work for you.

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