How To Improve Website Speed For WordPress Sites?
Improving site speed is one of the most technically challenging SEO topics but the concept of how to improve website speed is pretty simple. It essentially can be boiled down to the following four topics.
- Host the site on a good server (a good hosting company) = Good Time to First Byte (TTFB)
- Make the site with a fewer number of files to decrease the number of requests between the browser and server
- Make the file size smaller so they get downloaded faster
- Optimize the Critical Rendering Path so the site starts rendering faster
In this blog post, I am going to cover some of the most commonly asked questions that I came across and some of my own questions about how to improve site speed. I know there are some technical terms that we need to cover so if you find something written on this post that is not explained well enough, please let me know by leaving a comment below.
Additionally, I am also going to share with you some tips on how easy (or challenging) it could be to implement what is needed to make a WordPress site faster.
But first, let’s talk about the reason why most people want to improve their site speed – ranking higher on Google.
How Much will Improving Site Speed Affect Google Ranking?
According to this blog post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google started considering site speed as one of its ranking factors starting in July 2018. However, the post also says the following
The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries…….
We encourage developers to think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics.
In other words, even though site speed is now a part of the Google algorithm, as long as your site is not too slow when compared to your competitors, your site still has a good chance to rank high. However, if your site is too slow and provides bad user experience, that in itself could cause your site to not rank high.
How to Test Site Speed?
There are four popular site speed testing services that people use. I personally use webpagetest.org for a comprehensive site speed test and I also use the other three when I need to do a quick check on a site.
- https://webpagetest.org/
- https://tools.pingdom.com/
- https://gtmetrix.com/
- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
The key to test a site speed is to focus on the time that a site takes to render a page, and not get bogged down by the site speed score or the total amount of time it takes for a page to load (fully loaded). I discussed this in the video below.
How to Use webpagetest.org to Improve Website Speed?
The reason I like using webpagetest.org when doing a comprehensive site speed testing is because of the large selection of test settings it provides. The site allows you to test from different server locations around the world and also gives both desktop and mobile device options with realistic connection speed options.
The video below talks about the key site speed metrics that webpagetest.org provides and what they mean.
realistic connection options for both desktop and mobile device
How to Improve the Time to First Byte (TTFB)?
When someone visits your site, the browser they use connects to your webserver to ask for the website data. The Time to First Byte (TTFB) is the time your browser spends waiting on the webserver to send back the data.
A good typical TTFB for static content (simple HTML page) is less than 100 milliseconds (ms) and 200-500ms for dynamic content (WordPress page).
This is something that cannot be fixed by using a WordPress Plugin. The easiest way to improve this is to simply choose a good website hosting company. Ideally, one that specializes in WordPress. I personally use WPX Hosting and it has shown very good TTFB compare to some of the other WordPress hosting companies. WPEnegine, FLywheel, and Kinsta are also very good options.
How to Reduce the Number of Requests?
According to https://httparchive.org, the median number of resources requests of a website page is around 70. By utilizing Caching technologies such as browser caching and preload caching, the number of requests can be decreased.
If you have a WordPress site, caching can be easily done by using a plugin such as W3 Total Cache (Free) or WP Rocket (Paid). I know you are probably wondering why I brought up a paid plugin. As you might know, I run multiple websites and some of which are not compatible with W3 Total Cache. I tried and tried but just could not get it to work. So I did some research and used a few other free plugins such as WP Super Cache but without any luck and ended up paying for WP Rocket to get the job done.
Since then I came to love the simplicity of WP Rocket compare to other free plugins out there. It takes a lot less time to set it up.
WP Rocket is beneficial even if your site is hosted on hosting companies such as WPEnegine, FLywheel, and Kinsta, in which they already have some kind of caching system that came with the hosting. In fact, WPEngine has a very strict plugin restriction policy and all the major free Caching plugins including W3 Total Cache is prohibited. However, WP Rocket is authorized to be used on WPEngine!
-
Leverage Browser Caching
Instruct browser to cache the files so it won’t need to ask the webserver to send the files again. Files are stored locally at user’s browser (computer).
W3 Total Cache: Enable it under the “General setting”.
WP Rocket: Already enabled as soon as the plugin is activated.
-
Implement Page Caching
A cached version of the page is created and presented to when a user visits a site. It eliminates the need for requesting, loading, and processing files of the page, thus making the page loading faster.
W3 Total Cache: Enable it under the “General setting”.
WP Rocket: Already enabled as soon as the plugin is activated.
-
Implement Preload Caching
Page Caching occurs after a user visits a site, which means when the same user requests the same page again, it would load faster, but not when the user visited the page for the first time. Preloading solves that problem by creating the page cache before it is even loaded by a user’s browser. This will essentially speed up the page load even when the user is visiting the page for the very first time.
W3 Total Cache: Enable it under the “Page Cache”.
WP Rocket: Enable it under the “Preload” section.
-
Leverage a CDN
Content Distribution Network is essentially a network of servers spread out across the globe that are located closer to a user (someone from Asia) who is trying to access your site. Since the CDN is located closer to the user, it could deliver the files much faster compared to the hosting server which could be located on the other side of the world (USA) from the user.
W3 Total Cache: Enable it under the “CDN” section.
WP Rocket: Enable it under the “CDN” section.
How to Reduce the File Size?
-
Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML
Removing unnecessary spaces within the JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files.
W3 Total Cache: Enable it under the “Minify” section.
WP Rocket: Enable it under the “File Optimization” section.
-
Optimize Images
Reduce the size of images by changing the dimensions (for example from 1000×1000 to 200×200) and image file format (from PNG to JPG).
W3 Total Cache: None. Use another Plugin.
WP Rocket: It comes with “Imagify”.
How to Optimize Critical Rendering Paths?
-
Optimize the Critical Rendering Path
Load the files that are needed to render the webpage first. Load the files that are not critical to render the webpage later. Good examples are share buttons, audio/video players, external files, etc.
W3 Total Cache: Some manual work required.
WP Rocket: Click on a button and that’s it! Make sure to specify files that might cause issues.
-
Lazyload Media Files
Delay loading the media files (images, audio, video) until a user scrolls down the page, reaching to where the media files are on the page.
W3 Total Cache: Enable it under the “General Settings” section.
WP Rocket: Enable it under the “Media” section.
I build websites and use them for testing various SEO strategies and tactics.
LinkedIn Profile
- How To Track Keyword Ranking? - April 27, 2020
- Is Updating Old Content For SEO Worth It? - March 30, 2020
- What Is Remote Desktop Access (a.k.a RDP Or VPS) For SEO? - March 27, 2020
Great post, and great website. Thanks for the information!
If you want to improve your position in the SERPs, improving speed should be one of your priorities. CDNs boost the speed of websites by caching content in multiple locations around the world.
Redirects have some uses, but unnecessary redirects, such as 301 redirects and redirect chains, can really slow things down. It’s best to reduce the amount of additional information requests that your server undertakes.