This article looks at a number of things that can be done by a non-technical person to improve their website performance - which is something that every site owner wants to see, because it is good for customer satisfaction. In addition, while it is not clear how much impact a website page speed has on Google rankings, there is evidence that it does have some impact. The following quote comes from a Google forum - “Page speed is a direct ranking factor for both desktop and mobile search results. This means that faster-loading websites are generally more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) than slower-loading websites.”
There are many online web performance tools that will provide reports on a web site’s performance – 3 that are worth looking at are GTmetrix, Google Lighthouse, and LoadFocus. It is worth periodically running web performance tools to see how your web site response time is rated.
Following are some of the easiest things that you can consider doing to improve website performance.
1 Reliable hosting
The cheapest hosting companies often come with poor performance. That's OK if your site is small and you don't expect much traffic, but not ok if your site is large and/or good response time is critical. Also, you may like to consider paying for a reliable hosting provider in Australia, as that will reduce the network latency. So balance your hosting cost against your performance requirements.
2 Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Consider using a domain name provider that has a CDN. This ensures better performance, more consistent service, and can protect against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
3 Optimised theme
The design of a WP theme can have enormous impact on the performance of the web-site – so it is important to choose a theme that has the lowest possible overheads. I have already done an evaluation of themes that perform well and have good functionality and I recommend Astra.
4 Install caching tools
Installing a good caching tool is essential and will have a significant impact on performance. There are many good caching plugins available, but one that I have found to be effective is WP Super Cache. It’s a free and powerful plugin, and there are many default and recommended settings, so it is not too hard to configure. By default, the plugin will cache all the pages on your site. This can be an issue if you have pages that are dynamically updated by users (e.g. a bookings page for an accommodation provider). However, the plugin allows you to add pages that you don’t want to be cached.
5 Optimise images
Ensure that images are as small as possible, but still retaining the image quality that is required. I aim for images that are less than about 200kb. Also, ensure that you use the right image format. Choosing the best image file format depends on the type of image and the end goal. Photos should use a JPG file format whereas logos and simple illustrations should use PNG or SVG files. If an image can be cropped and resized, then do that before loading it into the WP media library. And once they are in the media library, run an image optimisation tool – I like the one in the WP Optimise plugin.
6 WP database
The WP database needs to be regularly optimised to clean to clean it of history associated with changes made to the site and optimise the table sizes. This can be done easily with a tool like WP Optimise. That will improve the efficiency of the WP database.
7 Site plugins
One question is whether having too many plugins affects a site’s performance. Following is an extract from one site on this topic: "We believe the problem is not the quantity of plugins, but rather the quality. You can have dozens of good WordPress plugins running on your website, but an addition of a single poorly coded plugin can slow down your website. When this happens… troubleshooting a website with 5 plugins is much easier than troubleshooting a website with 30." So the key is to monitor any plugins that seem to affect your site's performance, but also ensure that you don't have unnecessary plugins installed.
8 Minify
Minification is the process of taking a piece of code and removing all unnecessary characters from it (think white spaces, line breaks, and so on). There are many WP plugins that allow you to turn minification on. However, the improvements were not significant in my testing, and I found with one minify plugin the page load times seemed to get worse. And other reviewer comments do not point to significant benefits, so I do not use on my websites.
8 Persistent Cache
Even if you have a caching plugin installed and running, the WP Site Health report will probably give a suggested improvement that "A persistent object cache makes your site’s database more efficient, resulting in faster load times because WordPress can retrieve your site’s content and settings much more quickly". Persistent Object Caches are specialized servers that provide an in-memory data structure store that are suitable of caching where page caches can’t be used. For example, if a user is adding items to an eCommerce cart and accessing account information, a page cache can’t help as this content is unique to that user. However, an Object cache could help with queries that are accessed more than once. So you need to assess whether a persistent object cache is applicable to your requirements.