How To Optimize Website Speed
There are several WordPress Plugins that promise to Optimize Website Speed, usually referred to as “Cache” plugins. These include WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket and more – check https://en-au.wordpress.org/plugins/ and search for “Page Speed”and you get 49 PAGES of results; search for “Cache” and you get another 49 pages of results!
However, it will not take you long to figure out that there is not one single, push button solution that fixes everything.
If you do not understand terms like, optimising JS, “lazy loading” images, asyncing JS, and minify CSS … then it is probably time to stop reading and call Terry on 0468 420 470 to get some help on this.
Yahoo tells us that up to 80% of a Web page’s load time is spent downloading the different components of a webpage, like images, stylesheets, and scripts. A request is made for each one of these individual , so the more of them there are, the longer it takes for the page to assemble and load. If we can reduce or defer some of these requests, your webpage will load faster. Minifying and combining your files reduces the size and number of files.
Images are another culprit and perhaps a little easier to understand. If you load massive images that have to be resized before loading, this will obviously cause the page to load more slowly. The first step is to reduce the size of the image to be loaded. The second step is “deferring” the load. You may have noticed that when you scroll down on some websites images are loaded only as they come into view – this is deferred loading and saves significant time on loading all images before you show the webpage. There are other things you can defer, like loading scripts.