‘Speed Up Your Website Easily With WP Optimize’ written by Logo St. Marketing. Special thanks to Francesca Baker.
No matter how simple or complex your website may be, it is very important that it runs fast. This is because your visitors will probably bounce if your website fails to load within a few seconds. Having a faster website will also make your company look more professional. If your website runs slow then you are really hurting your brand. You do not want your competitors having faster websites which rank higher than yours, so let’s fix that straight away. Let’s show you how to speed up your website with WP-Optimize. Please note that this free plugin works with WordPress websites only.
The topics we’ll be covering in this article are as follows:
- Setting up WP-Optimize
- WP-Optimize Image Compressor
- Enabling the Cache
- Optimise JavaScript, CSS and Font Settings
Website speed is just one of several SEO tasks which is critical for appearing on the first pages on search engines. This video link explains how to install the plugin on your WordPress website and how to set it up for speed. Click here to watch the video.
Setting up WP-Optimize for high speed
Once activated from your WordPress backend, you’ll see ‘WP-Optimize’ appear near the bottom of the sidebar, on the left hand side of your screen. Please note you must have an admin account in order to configure the settings. Click on it and you will be taken to the ‘database’ screen. Here you can optimize several options either individually or in bulk. WP-Optimize enables you to remove any revisions and auto saves which builds up every time you update web content. You can remove out-dated junk files, spam comments etc and you can also optimise the tables in your database. You will also notice several options have a triangle with an exclamation mark. Personally I have never ran an optimisation for these options.
Once you have finished with optimising the database elements, click on the ‘images’ tab.
WP-Optimize image compressor
Scroll down to the bottom of this page and you will some uncompressed images in your media grid. You can now select all images in simply compress them. However, I like to optimise and compress all images before uploading them onto the website. This feature is useful if you use stock images where they can be huge in size. Large sized images which are megabytes in size will slow your website right down. By rule of thumb I always aim for website images to be under 200 kilobytes in size at 72 dpi.
Enable The Cache Tab
Click on the ‘enable page caching’ button. ‘Purge Cache’ will appear in the top admin bar. This is very important for speed and we’ll get into more detail about purging the cache later on. If you have any other cache plugins installed, it might be a good idea to de-activate them because they might clash. Trust me, you will only need WP-Optimize for caching. Then click on the ‘Minify’ tab.
Within the ‘minify’ tab, click ‘enable minify’ button under ‘Minify status’ page. You will also want to process the HTML, Java and CSS files on this page. Minifying the Java and CSS files will greatly increase the speed of your website. However, you must take great care and keep an eye on everything you do here. You might want to back up your site before adjusting the Java and CSS settings because you could break things.
How To Optimise the JavaScript, CSS and Fonts Settings
Near the middle of the page, you will see a bar of tabs such as JavaScript, CSS, Fonts etc. Click the JavaScript tab and check that ‘Defer JavaScript’ is enabled. Depending on your WP theme this will cut your site’s Java usage by around 80%, thus greatly increasing speed. This will also increase and optimise your SEO score and server settings. Try checking the before and after the ‘Defer JavaScript’ settings using this free SEO tool called SEObility.
With the CSS and Font settings, this too will depend on your theme and fonts used on your website. Most themes should allow you to enable minification and merging of CSS files, but check after changing anything on these tabs. If something fails to load properly on your site, you can always go back and deselect any previous changes.
The final steps to speed up your website with WP-Optimize
Once you’ve completed the steps to speed up your website with WP-Optimize, click the ‘Save settings’ button. Then purge your cache by hovering over the ‘Purge Cache’ tab in the admin bar. The drop down menu will then appear. First click ‘purge cache for all pages’ then click ‘purge minify cache’. If done correctly with just a little trial and error involved, you should notice your site running much faster. You can also use plenty of the SEO checker tools out there to check SEO status.
DISCLAIMER: Logo St. Marketing and/or And So She Thinks Ltd are not responsible for any changes which may occur and you use WP-Optimize at your own risk. It is highly recommended that you safely back up your website before changing any software settings.