In this post you will learn how to optimize WordPress to 100% this SUPER GUIDE to blow up your web on a 200%. ENTERS!
WE START:
Welcome to a new post.
Nowadays the speed of loading your website is a TOO important factor. For what? Behold:
- There is a study that indicates that if the website does not load in about 4 seconds, it leaves you and goes in search of another website.
- Google has released an official statement, in which it states that loading speed will be an IMPORTANT positioning factor for the web.
So, do you want to optimize WordPress to load in the shortest time possible, or not?
I guess so, so without more to say, let's go to action!
Article index
Step-by-step GUIDE: How to optimize WordPress and improve its speed in 200%
We will divide this tremendous guide into several sections, make sure you have a pot of coffee because things are going to get SUPER fun for both me and you. LET US BEGIN!
Carry out a test of the current speed
Before we start optimizing WordPress, we must first carry out a test of the speed of the web, and then see how it turned out.
Accede to GTMetrix, a website that will help us in this task and take the speed test. The result it gives you, save it, because that number is going to decrease.
Install CloudFlare CDN
A CDN distributes your content on different servers around the world. In this way, we will achieve the following:
- That our server does not carry the burden of responding to all the requests sent.
- That the web is served faster, since the server closest to the request will respond to that request.
Take a look at this GIF below so that you understand very well what I mean:
You see it? It greatly improves speed. To help you configure CloudFlare, we have written a separate article to help you better understand this process: How to set up CloudFlare CDN.
When you finish setting up CloudFlare CDN, we go to the next step.
Install WordPress plugins to improve loading speed
The next part of this guide is to install the necessary plugins to optimize WordPress even better. Follow the list!
Fast Velocity Minify
This WordPress plugin will help you a lot in improving the loading of static files, such as: JavaScript and CSS.
Install and activate it. Once this is done, I will show you the configurations that we have given to this plugin.
If you can see, the plugin is divided into "mini sections" within the "Settings" menu. So we have configured this plugin for this website:
- Admin Toolbar: option deselected.
- Troubleshooring - deselected.
- URL options: we have the option "Use dynamic '//' protocol".
- HTML options and Font options nothing marked.
- CSS Options: Checked the options "Preserve the order of CSS files", "Inline all header CSS files" and "Inline all footer CSS files".
- JavaScript Options all disabled.
- Render-blocking JS: Activated the first 2 options: "Enable defer parsing […]" and "Enable defer of JS […]".
- Everything else do not touch.
Lazy Load
Another loading problem is that the images of your entire article or site load in the foreground, which makes the web even more slow. How do we solve this? Bualá!
What Lazy Load does is that all the images are loaded in the background, and while the user is scrolling the web, they are loaded.
I assure you that this will lower that score that GTMetrix gave you even more!
You just have to install and activate it, no more settings.
IO Optimizer
Another too serious problem is that we do not optimize the images on our website, and when loading them, it is a lot of weight, and therefore: loading time of the website.
This plugin is courtesy of the people at WebEmpresa, who created the BEST plugin to optimize WordPress images: IO Optimizer.
You will not find it in the WordPress repository, so you will have to access its website to download it. Click on this button to access this precious plugin:
Download pluginDownload Optimizer.io
On the web, it will ask you to fill out a form. The plugin will be sent to your email. When you install it, proceed with the following:
1.- In your WordPress options, click on "optimizer.io" (remember that the admin options are on the left side of your panel).
2.- Subsequently, scroll down until you find the button «OPTIMIZE ALL IMAGES».
3.- They will be sent to planning. If you have a lot of images, this will take tens of minutes, even hours, so be patient.
4.- Meanwhile, go to the "Options" menu of the plugin, and check the "Auto-optimize", "Backup original images", "Optimize Thumbnails" and "Show banner" boxes.
Save the changes and that's it.
Why don't you include a cache plugin?
We are about to finish this guide on how to optimize WordPress for 100%, but this question is still unanswered.
This guide is about to end, and you ask yourself: why didn't you include a cache plugin on the web? Well, I answer below:
If you correctly configured CloudFlare CDN as detailed in our article, CloudFlare automatically has a VERY POWERFUL cache.
The reason why I did not include a cache plugin (apart from the fact that CloudFlare already has it), is because we have had problems of 500 errors for having 2 caches at the same time: CloudFlare and some plugin for WordPress.
Previously we had the plugin called "WP Super Cache", and we removed it for the reasons mentioned above, but maybe we are wrong, maybe it is something else we have.
Anyway, if you want to test it on your own, I leave you this video to configure WP Super Cache:
Take the new speed test!
The last step of this guide to optimizing WordPress is missing: See how much we have improved!
Run the new test in GTMetrix. Did you improve? On a scale of 1 to 10… how much?
Before concluding this post, I would like to tell you that we are passionate about WordPress. We write interesting content for our audience. Please visit us!
Similarly, if you are a programmer, we have many interesting things to tell you in our programmers section.
Were you able to optimize WordPress successfully? How long did you have to improve? Share your results with us in the comment box!
See you in a new post.