Improving Page Speed In

WordPress

By John Locke

Why Focus on Page Speed?

• Customers expect it: 57%abandoment rate

after 3 seconds

• Google grades you on it: Page speed is a

search ranking factor

• Competitive advantage: Page weight is going

up

How Fast Are Your Pages?

• http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespee

d/insights/

Start With Hosting

• Shared hosting – You get what you pay for

• VPS Hosting: Works for most businesses

• Dedicated hosting: For heavy traffic

Optimize Your Images

• Images are usually over half the page weight

• Too-large images add unnecessary download time

• Serve small background images on mobile first

• {display:none} still downloads assets!

• Retina.js for HDPI devices

Check Your Theme

• How many HTTP requests are being made?

• Can you consolidate these better?

• Beware Theme Options that look for Google

Fonts that don’t exist

Page Caching

• Plugins: W3 Total Cache and WP Super

Cache

• Takes a snapshot of page assets, serves

those to browser

• If you use a CDN, check recommended

settings

• You can minify files as well

Minify Files When Possible

• Minification: removing white space and bytes

• W3 Total Cache > Minify > Help [add CSS

and JS files manually]

• Careful with RSS feeds, min.js files

• Can be done manually as well

GZIP

• Compresses files before downloading to

browser – like a Zip file

• Usually taken care of with caching plugins

• You can check at GZipWTF.com

CDNs

• Content Delivery Network – External servers

• Allows for multiple HTTP requests at once

• Amazon (AWS), Max-CDN, Akamai are

examples

• Jetpack Photon also (but images lose some

SEO)

DNS Prefetch

• Read this article on front-end performance

• Saves time by looking up DNS for external

files

• /* Syntax looks like this: */

• <link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//www.google-

analytics.com">

• Use sparingly – still a HTTP request

Follow-up Article

http://www.lockedowndesign.com/improve-

page-speed-in-wordpress/

John Locke

Lockedown Designhttp://www.lockedowndesign.com

@Lockedown_

/lockedowndesign

/lockedowndesign

/in/johnjlocke

/user/johnjlocke

/lockedown

Thank You.