Best WP Plugins to Increase Page Load Speed?

SelfTaught said:

Run a performance test on gtmetrix and post the link to the report pdf afterwards. It's hard to recommend what to use without knowing what needs improvement. Seeing a few numbers doesn't mean much. When you post a link to the report, it will show us the time line and other things which will help us recommend the right plugins.

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FBGuru said:

Google's PageSpeed is totally different from the browser's page loading speed. Higher PageSpeed score on Google doesn't mean your site will load faster to your visitors. There's a lot of factors like server load, distance between the server location and the visitor, their ISP speed,etc..,

In order to get higher scores on your GA, analyze your site on this page and follow the recommendations.

Code:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

I see you're not minifying the CSS and JS. Install this plugin to combine, minify and optimize the js/css scripts.

Code:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/

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1. A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.

FBGuru said:

From your screenshot, the first thing you must fix is the "Serve scaled images". The images aren't resized but loaded in full resolution and scaled to fit the browser window. This happens mostly with the slideshows and theme's background images.

Click on the Serve scaled images in GTmetrix and it'll expand to show you the list of unoptimized images along with how much size you could reduce on the page by scaling down the image size.

Something like this :

xxxxxxx.jpg is resized in HTML or CSS from 4404x2936 to 1182x788. Serving a scaled image could save 11.3MiB (92% reduction).

Now download that image and crop it to 1182x788(this is just an example) with any image editor like photoshop/gimp and reupload it to the slideshow or media library.

Repeat this with all the listed images.

As for the expires headers, you can follow this guide which has the recommended settings for the W3TC.

Code:

http://gtmetrix.com/wordpress-optimization-guide.html

You can also PM me your site URL so I can see and guide you with the optimization.

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SelfTaught said:

Not a problem, another good site is pingdom.

That's not the full report but eh. It's enough to recommend some things. One thing I like about this site is.. If you click on each one of those rows, it will expand and give you more detail. Once it's expanded, there should also be a "What does this mean?" link. However your mouse over that and then click "Read more" in the message bubble. Most of the time it will give you some good information about what needs to be done for improvement.

For example, if you do that on "Add Expires Headers," it will tell you that you should add the following code to your site's htaccess file which is located in the document root that your domain is assigned to (i.e. public_html or w/e):

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"
</IfModule>

I would recommend using Cloudflare for improving "Use a Content Delivery Network." A brief description of what a CDN is from google:

1. A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.

There are many CDN's providers out there but I find Cloudflare to be relatively user friendly compared to some of them. You'll need to sign up for an account on their website and then point your nameservers from your domain registrar to their nameservers. They will tell you what these are after you create an account and add your website. Because you are making DNS changes, Cloudflare states it could take up to 24 hours for their service to start working. Once it does, and you re run a performance test, you should see it go from 0% to somewhere in the range of 80-100%. This usually helps speed things up quiet a bit.

Aside from that, "Minify Javascript and CSS" and "Defer parsing of Javascript" can be improved using W3 Total Cache. "Defer parsing of Javascript" can be done by changing the Embed type under the JS section in Minify to Defer. "Minify Javascript and CSS" is also done in Minify but is done under the HTML & XML section just right above the JS section.

You can improve "Serve scaled Images" by not using images which have bigger dimensions than what they're displayed on your site. For example, if you have an image on your site that's displayed with the dimensions 400x400 but is actually 800x800 in size, the image is going to be as twice as big as it needs to be and probably take twice as long to load. IIRC there are plugins which do this for you but I don't quiet remember.

As stated above, a lot of what needs improvement can be done through W3 Total Cache. It would be wise to read through their documentation so you can configure optimal settings.

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spectrejoe said:

Christ no matter what plugins I enable / disable I just can't seem to be able to get over 73% in page speed insights >.<

If you could teamviewer with me or something like that it'd be great and see what I'm doing wrong

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