Improve my site's load speed

If you're using Wordpress there is a tool you can get from GoDaddy that will scan the site and find out which plugins are causing the most lag.

Honestly 1.3 sec load time is really good. If you want to make sure every visitor gets a good loading time I would suggest using CloudFlare on your site.

Get a VPS running Nginx and install mod_pagespeed

SEO2k said:

The problem is 60% of visitors leave the site before it loads.

Click to expand...

You should look the reason elsewhere, loading time < 3s is perfectly fine. Maybe you content or design sucks?

I have a website that I recently worked on the page load speed for, its also a fairly lightweight site, running wordpress but it was quite slow to load by default. I used the following tools to measure performance:

website optimization tool
Google Insights

I changed the following things to get the site running tip-top:

1.Uninstalled any plugins that I didnt need
2.Installed W3 total cache plugin and enabled all features
3.minify from W3 total cache was very important
4.Used all results from Google Insights
5.Loading above page elements straight away was very important
6.I added most of the CSS to the head of the site - this makes the page load fast and reduces wait time for CSS stylesheet calls
7.Remove/combine as many elements (like CSS,JS) as possible - fewer larger items to load is better
8.Change host - After all this my site was still struggling a little so I moved to an SSD host and that was the last key part.

After all of that my site was getting 100% score on Google insights and load time had been reduced by about 50%.

Ok il give you some good advice, I do this everytime I have finished building a website and I manage to get my load speed up nearly 20 points on Google page speed insights on some websites. First of all use https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to get a rough mark of where your website is at for mobile and desktop speed. Then this is what I do:

- Make sure you are using compressed images, and only jpgs not pngs for images that don't need to be transparent. There are plenty of tools online to compress images without image quality loss, then when you upload them to your server, if you are using wordpress, install a plugin called "WP Smush", this will losslessly compress your images. (You can use a plugin called "EWW Image Optimizer" after WP Smush too to get more compression from images that WP Smush has missed)

- Enable compression, I always add this to the top of my .htaccess (take a backup first):

## GZIP COMPRESSION ##
[TABLE="align: left"]
[TR]
[TD="align: left"]<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

## GZIP COMPRESSION ##


- Ignore (Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content) - This will pop up on every website and basically means not to include external CSS/JS in your websites head (which would make your source very messy)

- Finally I use w3 Total Cache (take a backup of your website before using this plugin) - for browser, database caching, look for a tutorial on how to configure these options.

- Minify your html, css, js. Now this quite often breaks websites, but seems to be fine for some and will speed them up significantly, by minifying your websites html, css, js, you can use the w3 total cache plugin to do this. Enable minification for html first, then empty your cache, check your website that everything is fine, then do the same for css, then do the same for javascript. Make sure you test your contact forms, etc are all working properly especially with having JS minified.

Note: if you happen to break your website using w3tc, go into your FTP and rename the plugins folder with say a number "9" on the end, this will disable it if you cannot access your website.

There are lots of tutorials for this stuff out there if you get stuck, but these are the things that I do and seems to boost my wordpress sites speed up heaps.

All the best

Thanks! but what does it do?

## GZIP COMPRESSION ##
[TABLE="class: cms_table, align: left"]
[TR]
[TD="align: left"]<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]


## GZIP COMPRESSION ##

Give this a read http://www.inetsolutions.org/the-ultimate-guide-to-wordpress-speed-optimization/