Home Insights 10 ways to improve website speed
2nd June 2018 in Web Development

10 ways to improve website speed

Louise Towler

By Louise Towler

10 ways to improve website speed

Louise gave a ten minute lightening talk at the WordPress London WPLDN meetup on 28th June, on ways to improve website speed.  So here are the top tips and slides from this talk.

Why is improving website speed important

Here are some stats from Google on how page speed affects conversions:

Stats about delays in website speed

Starting in July 2018, Google will use mobile page speed as a ranking in their mobile search results. See more information on the thinkwithgoogle blog.

Here is a list of the basic actions everyone can take to improve website speed without needing too much technical knowledge.

1. Domain DNS

Cloudflare

2. Better hosting

  • Google wants less than 200ms response time
  • Cheap shared hosting is a false economy
  • We use WP Engine for WordPress hosting
WP Engine fast hosting to imporve website speed

3. Use HTTP/2

  • You have an SSL certificate don’t you?
  • Check your site using this tool https://http2.pro/
  • If not upgrade your hosting
http2 improve website speed

4. php version

php 7 improves website speed

5. Enable GZIP

Compress using GZIP to improve website speed

6. Use a CDN

  • Content Delivery Network
  • Static content stored on servers, delivered by the server closest to your browser
  • Providers include WP Engine, Cloudflare, MaxCDN
Use a CDN to improve website speed

7. Minify CSS / JS / HTML

Use grunt and gulp to improve website speed

8. Remove query strings from static resources

Remove query strings that cannot be cached to improve website speed

9. Reduce images sizes

  • Resize images to make them smaller
  • Serve images at the correct size in your theme
Tiny PNG to compress images and improve website speed

10. Only load code used

  • Do not load every script onto every page, choose the specific pages to load specific scripts required for each page
  • We use a plugin https://gonzalesplugin.com/
Conditionally load code to improve website speed

11. Review external scripts

  • Extra tracking codes, for example visitor analysis code
  • Embedded widgets, for example online reviews
  • Unused resources, for example emojis
  • Review regularly and remove as many as possible to speed up your website
Remove unnecessary scripts to imporve website speed

Tools to measure and improve website speed

There are lots of online tools to analyse your website and find performance improvements and bottlenecks.

View the slides

10 things to do to speed up your site from Louise Towler

Theme and performance reviews

To find out abut how we improved a website load time from 42 seconds to less than 3 seconds, see our blog post about speed improvements to the Grass and Holm website.

Straight A awards for site speed

If you would like a free website review contact us.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *