Is your boss screaming “Make WordPress Faster”?
In this post I explain how I increased my page speed or “page load speed” by 32% percent from 54/100 to 86/100 in an hour or so. Page speed means how long it takes to download & render your website page in the browser.
Why Does Page Speed Matter?
Faster websites are important because users want them, people hate hanging around waiting for some stupid website to show its (probably boring) face. Ask yourself: what do you do when some stupid website is too slow? You click that back button faster than a fast thing, that’s what.
My WordPress website page speed started out at 48/100 for mobile and 54/100 for desktops. (Ouch!)
Consequently, the Almighty Google is also considering page speed when sorting out its rankings. In fact they famously said (something like) “the web should be fast”.
They said it, so page speed matters when it comes to SEO rankings. It’s not the be-all-and-end-all but it is a chance to get a leg-up on the competition, and Lord knows there’s a LOT of competition these days for SEO rankings. I remember 10 years ago I would just throw a simple HTML page online about a topic and get page one rankings. Those days are gone. Five years ago it wasn’t quite so easy but if you got all your on-site ducks in a row, or you just went and bought a bunch of backlinks (which I never did, Your Honour), you could still kick SEO butt pretty easily. Those days are also gone, unless you’re into some seriously obscure niche.
How I Increased My WordPress Page Speed 32% In One Hour
I am a busy guy, I have a life. Consequently, I have for a long time been “getting around to” improving my website page speed. Finally however, I decided to give it a crack the other day. First thing I did was to read about half of the entire Internet. That was some thrilling reading, I gotta tell you. But I got a good enough idea of how to proceed and the best (i.e. easiest) thing to do was to try and install a plug-in that claimed to help speed up your website.
I started out by installing WP Super Cache and reading up on the best settings to apply. I wasn’t too happy with the results.
I only got page speed readings of 50 and 58 – admittedly (I think) this plug in doesn’t “minify” so that could be why. Or I could just be doing it wrong!
Everyone bangs on about a plug in called w3 total cache, so I uninstalled wp super cache and tried w3TC…
Page speed after installing W3 Total cache with basic recommended settings
Wow. Result! By the way, the settings I used I found by Googling it. There are about a million blog posts about the best settings to use. I looked at exactly one.
Further Page Speed Increases Using Pre-Caching
I kept mucking about with the myriad settings in W3TC, running a fresh test each time. A few settings marginally slowed it all down so I undid them pronto without drama. Eventually, I found that the pre-load function (pre-caching pages) amped results up to 74 and 86 . Awesome.
That green tick gave me waaay to big a thrill. Sad really 🙂
So still need to figure out how to do the “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content” … it looks like actual hard work so I will do later. But meanwhile – contact me if you need to get “increase page speed” or “make website go faster” off your to do list, and you’d really just prefer someone else did it for you.
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