Hi,

As I draft this email, we’re passing by beautiful lakes in northern Italy. I’m headed towards Tirano, from where I catch the famous Bernina Express tomorrow.

We will be in Black Forest for a few days, and then Mallorca, before heading to Porto for WordCamp Europe 2022. If you’re attending this WordCamp, let me know. Would love to meet you in person.

Now to the topic of this email…

Speed matters.

Website load speed matters as well.

How fast your website pages load for the end-user is super important for SEO, conversion and user experience.

There are hundreds (if not thousands) of blog posts and articles focused around optimizing your WordPress site for speed. All the traditional recommendations – better hosting, caching, faster theme, better plugins, CDNs and more – they certainly help.

But you may have tried them already.

So here are 10 other methods to improve your WordPress website performance.

10 habits for faster websites

Let’s think beyond caching plugins! More important than the things that you do on the server, page load speed largely depends on the amount of bytes a browser has to load before it can display your site. So the amount of content on the page, media files, CSS and JavaScript – these have a much larger impact on site performance.

1. 720px images

   The most common reason for site slowdown is large images in blog posts. You may do all other optimizations and reduce 1MB from the total page size. But one large-size stock image may add 4MB to the page size.

   In most cases, you don’t need images larger than 720px. Find out the maximum width for images on your site and make sure you resize all images down before uploading them.

   You may use the Google Search Console coverage report to help identify images to optimize.

   And yes, I know, there are media optimization plugins and WordPress can resize images itself. But in my experience, resizing images in a graphics program is way better.

2. Lazy load everything

   Lazy loading means delaying media assets until they’re visible on the page. This is a rather smart technique that drastically improves performance. It will reduce the number of requests at page load. Images load only when visitors scroll down towards the image’s position in the page.

3. Avoid sliders

   Google’s web core vitals update focuses more on LCP, CLS, and FID. Sliders increase website loading time. They directly affect “Cumulative Layout Shift” – CLS. So as a general rule, avoid sliders. And be mindful when you use them.

4. Replace Google Captcha & remove Maps API
   • Google Captcha is good to combat spambots. But it drastically slows down websites. Try using an alternate lightweight plugin like Honeypot.
   • Many themes include a map on the contact us page. Check whether your site uses the Google Maps API script and if you really need it. Remove it if you can. You can always show an image of a map and take visitors to your location Google Maps site if you want.
5. Scrutinize other external resources, chatbots, tracking pixels and social media scripts

   A live chat widget, an additional heatmap script, a few tracking pixel scripts… All this adds up. Please remove every external resource that you don’t really need. If you do need it, see if you can conditionally load it on specific pages.

6. Optimize unused CSS & inline-style

   Removing unused JavaScript was the key idea in the previous two points. Similarly, removing unused CSS shaves off precious time from page loading speed as well. When we analyzed our sites a while ago, we had 2.4Mb of CSS loading on every page. Switching to a system that prunes unused CSS, brought down CSS size under 600kb. CSS is typically render-blocking, and optimizing CSS will improve paint your site faster.

   Then there are inline styles that you or WordPress adds. For instance, recent WordPress versions add inline code to improve the duotone style. Most people don’t need this – and removing these un-minified global inline-style saves 300 lines of code the browser has to process.

7. Remove dashicons and emojis

   Dashicons is the official icon set of WordPress admin. Some plugins and themes pick Dashicons for their front-end usage – and load them on all pages of the site. You can disable this – or load it only on pages where you need dashicons.

   Similarly, WordPress replaces emojis in post content with images. Turn this off. Today’s browsers can display emojis better than WordPress’s emoji images.

8. Disable XML-RPC, pingbacks and trackbacks

   You may have already turned them off, but if not, turn these off.

9. Delete revisions

   Revisions are good – they help you recover from mistakes. But it is a good habit to tidy up post revisions.

10. Paginate posts and comments

    Loading all posts on one page – or even 50 – doesn’t make sense. Setup pagination so you load only as many items as will be useful for the user.

Do you have any other optimization tricks? What do you do to improve your page load speeds?

Do you need help implementing any of these recommendations?

Reply to this email and share.

Link salad

🥗

A mixture of quick readings for an inquisitive mind.

• GTmetrix – free website performance testing tool
• Eesel App – browser extension to organize all your work docs
• n8n.io – free and open-source workflow automation tool
• Papaly – find what others are bookmarking
• Did you know? The first email from space was sent in 1991 by the STS-43 Atlantis crew. They used Apple’s early AppleLink software on a Macintosh Portable.

A writing prompt

✍

Have you tried gardening / growing plants at home? How was your experience? What did you learn?

Stay awesome,