We all know that WordPress makes it easy to build beautiful responsive website and its user friendly backend makes maintaining the website much more easy for webmasters. However, as time goes by, you may notice that your WordPress website may start getting a bit sluggish and is not loading as fast as it used to be. Just like any technology or gadget, a WordPress website will also experience ‘wear and tear’ as the number of plugins, functionalities and codes accumulates. There are third party plugins out there that can help to fix that, but most of them are for temporary improvement and are far from comprehensive. To really speed up your WordPress website, the works that need to be done go way deeper than just deploying an image compression plugin, here we’ll take you through Quix’s process in giving a WordPress website a real boost of speed.

Stage 1: Analysis

The analysis of the current speed of the site and getting the current metrics that measure how your WordPress website is doing as far as speed is concerned.
We’ll scan and audit all pages of the site with SEO software, to see the speed, problem areas (broken links, incorrect redirects, etc.) for us to identify and log the main problems that can be found.
In some cases, we’ll also recommend transferring your WordPress website to a new hosting or server. If your current hosting is slow or improperly configured, this will always create performance problems.

Stage 2: Full website backup

As you will see below, optimising a WordPress website involves diving in deep to the core of the website, during the process a lot of changes, minor or major, will be made. That’s why it is important to perform a full website backup before any speed optimisation work is to be begun to make sure if anything goes wrong, we’ll have a peace of mind that we can always restore the website back to its original state.

Stage 3: Optimisation

We then begin the actual speed optimisation that involves works on the backend and frontend. There are a list of tasks that we’ll perform, depends on the site. The most common ones are:

  • Finding and eliminating speed bottlenecks
  • Reducing page size in MB
  • Reducing Page Generation Time
  • Eliminating render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content
  • Making fewer HTTP requests to the browser
  • HTML, CSS, Javascript files get compressed reducing size
  • Optimise / compress images to reduce load time
  • Selectively loading Javascript and CSS only when needed
  • Removing redundant Javascript and CSS
  • Merging Javascript and CSS reducing browser requests
  • Server speed tuning
  • JavaScript, CSS & HTML code get optimised reducing size and inefficiencies
  • Images get loaded on demand instead of all at once, improving load time for all users
  • Leveraging browser tools to speed up following page loads
  • Removing query strings from static resources
  • Adding Expires headers
  • Adding Keep Alive headers to avoid repeated unnecessary requests
  • Reducing DNS lookups
  • Using CDN support so each visitor loads the website from a location close to them if needed
  • Serving resources from a consistent URL

Stage 4: Evaluation and ongoing support

After the speed optimisation works are done, we’ll then run tests to compare before and after metrics to reveal the result of the optimisation. We’re also here to provide any support on bugs or errors that the website may encounter.

WordPress website speed optimisation is one of the most common tasks we received from our clients, as it could be a daunting task for webmaster to take on themselves. Nonetheless It is a crucial one, after all having a sluggish website not only affect user browsing experience, but it will also affect your SEO performance.

To find out how your WordPress website is doing in terms of speed, use GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed tool to run a test.