Simple Guide to Optimizing WordPress Site Speed
Site speed is a pretty important factor for WordPress sites because it’s a significant factor in SEO ranking and it greatly affects your bounce rate. Most guides for optimizing WordPress site speed are going to introduce you to all the different plugins, compare and contrast them, and what they’re really doing is trying to just bombard you with their keywords and affiliate links so they monetize their SEO or financial incentive to write these exceedingly long articles.
That’s not what I’m going to do. I already read all those articles. I already compared and contrasted the different plugins. I did all the work and took my site from an F/F gtmetrix rating and a 16/50 pagespeed insights ranking to an A/A and a 60/92. Once again, I tried all the plugins and I put maybe a solid 40 hours into just maximizing site speed. So let’s just cut to the chase. Here’s the setup that optimizes WordPress site speed the most, for free.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a sort of pseudo-CDN combined with a caching service. Of all the things, this is likely to give you the single biggest boon to site speed. You can sign up for a Cloudflare account for free. You change your nameservers to Cloudflare’s nameservers. It’s super easy to set up.
W3 Total Cache
Once you have Cloudflare set up, you’ll want to install W3 Total Cache. This works seamlessly with Cloudflare and it doesn’t have a lot of bloat, unlike its competitors. We’re not going to use every function of this plugin, though. You want to use it for Page Cache, Object Cache and Browser Cache, and that’s basically it. It has a minification option but that doesn’t work very well. For that you’ll want to use…
Autoptimize
Autoptimize has the best minification and code deferment utilities available. It’ll get rid of WordPress’s bloated emoji code and the unnecessary (and huge) Google Fonts included in most themes. It’ll let you define critical CSS easily and defer non-critical CSS. You may get a pagespeed insights error about jquery as a render-blocking resource — just remove it from the JavaScript exclusions. Autoptimize did a lot for my site speed.
Imagify
There are tons of image compression plugins out there. They all work with varying degrees of effectiveness and cost. Imagify is the best of both worlds. You may have to pay a little bit for a 1 month play (less than $5) if you have an established site and you’re trying to compress a huge pile of images, but it’s worth it. The compression is great and it allows you to convert your images to WebP and service those. Imagify compression does a lot more than competitors like Smush, which a lot of people suggest.
Minimize the Amount of Adsense Ads
For all the grief Google gives publishers about optimizing their site speed and images, the ads they display kill your site speed. They have bloated uncompressed images, they have piles of redirect links, etc., etc. Cutting my ad stack down from ~8 ads per page to 4 ads per page increased my load speed by 6 seconds on mobile and 3 seconds on desktop. Ads still account for 50%+ of my load time.
Migrate from Bluehost to SiteGround
I haven’t done this (yet), but the one remaining factor in my site speed that’s slowing it down is the time to first byte metric (TTFB), which is affected by the complexity of your site but mostly it’s just the overall quality of your hosting service. If you’re not running a huge site that can splurge on premium Web Hosting which starts at $30/mo and goes up from there, SiteGround is your best option for optimizing TTFB
I hope that tells you everything you need to know about maximizing your site speed easily and for free with your WordPress site. Feel free to read other articles with all the comparisons between plugins. I read all those articles, I tried all the different plugins, and this is the setup that I’m recommending to you is what produced the best results for me.
