WordPress speed optimization without plugins?

zenaon · Sep 5, 2021

hello SlickStack .io homepage said that using the Nginx script will results all of them--

"A" Security Headers
"A" GTMetrix Score
"A" Google PageSpeed
"A" SSL Labs Score
"A" Pingdom Score
"A" WebPageTest Score
"A" ImmuniWeb Scan

that seems great but after install their script my website is not "A" scores in GTMetrix and Pagespeed Insights..... I know that WP page builder plugin like Elementor is bad for speed but I disabled already, how to make my Wordpress theme fast as their homepage loading?

I do not want more cache plugin [Nginx Fast CGI caching already]
using Cloudflare already
disabled page builder plugin already

what is the secret ? thx

hideath · Sep 5, 2021

Using Nginx on its own won't solve all of the problems, it's just a piece of the whole picture,
The 1st thing you should pay attention to is your hosting,
Also, you should use a fast theme & plugins that won't require a ton of requests/files & large files sizes,
On top of this, consider compressing and resizing your pics,
Use a caching plugin to create website cached versions of the pages, user caching/expiration rules, compressing CSS & js files

Overall, this is what you'll need mainly for a fast one, there are a few more options but these above would make most of the difference,
Other than that, using litespeed or openlitespeed is better & faster than Nginx,
and even with all of these using ads for example will slow down your website even if you optimise it as they do a load from external sources,
Just check whatever is slowing down your website using any of the tools and fix it until you get the desired speed

zenaon · Sep 6, 2021

hideath said:
Using Nginx on its own won't solve all of the problems, it's just a piece of the whole picture,
The 1st thing you should pay attention to is your hosting,
Also, you should use a fast theme & plugins that won't require a ton of requests/files & large files sizes,
On top of this, consider compressing and resizing your pics,
Use a caching plugin to create website cached versions of the pages, user caching/expiration rules, compressing CSS & js files

Overall, this is what you'll need mainly for a fast one, there are a few more options but these above would make most of the difference,
Other than that, using litespeed or openlitespeed is better & faster than Nginx,
and even with all of these using ads for example will slow down your website even if you optimise it as they do a load from external sources,
Just check whatever is slowing down your website using any of the tools and fix it until you get the desired speed

thanks but you do not understand....... Nginx is much faster and lightweight than Apache/ Litespeed cuz FastCGI cache already included

read this to see about their LS dishonest marketing
reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/f06vse/litespeed_servers_seem_like_a_marketing_scam_are/

cache plugin and bloat (htaccess junk like Litespeed) is what I want to avoided here (Nginx cache is much better)

maybe my photos is part of the problem but I have only few photos in fact??

but who can check SlickStack .io homepage and tell me how to copy their WP theme

SEO Expert & Backlinks · Sep 6, 2021

hideath said:
Using Nginx on its own won't solve all of the problems, it's just a piece of the whole picture,
The 1st thing you should pay attention to is your hosting,
Also, you should use a fast theme & plugins that won't require a ton of requests/files & large files sizes,
On top of this, consider compressing and resizing your pics,
Use a caching plugin to create website cached versions of the pages, user caching/expiration rules, compressing CSS & js files

Overall, this is what you'll need mainly for a fast one, there are a few more options but these above would make most of the difference,
Other than that, using litespeed or openlitespeed is better & faster than Nginx,
and even with all of these using ads for example will slow down your website even if you optimise it as they do a load from external sources,
Just check whatever is slowing down your website using any of the tools and fix it until you get the desired speed

Fine Answer Man

Roger Marquez · Sep 6, 2021

Robust and fast hosting provider - Cloudways it´s a great alternative
Light-weight and fast-loading theme - My top choices would be GeneratePress and Astra
Avoid page builders - Instead, either learn how to use Gutenberg or Oxygen Builder
Optimize images BEFORE you upload them - Heavily focus on mobile users and, make sure to make them responsive.
Avoid third-party scripts as much as possible - Stuff like messaging apps, hotjar, Hubspot, analytics, etc., causes more harm than good. Google fonts it´s another element you need to avoid, you´re better off by using a system font.
Content Delivery Network (CDN) - Unless you´re developing a local business the usage of a CDN it´s almost mandatory in order to further improve your site´s performance (by reducing TTFB) and be able to offer a much better UX.

These would like the foundations' EVERYONE needs to take into account in order to maximize your site´s performance.

There are other practices you can apply but, for this, you will need to know some CSS and PHP.

Cheers!!

zenaon · Sep 6, 2021

I will ignore everyone who only spam about web hosting advertising... pls READ my question before respond here

used Nginx/SlickStack already.... super fast already (faster than Litespeed)
no page builder plugin and no cache plugin
how to copy WP theme from their homepage that is so fast slickstack.io website.... my question

my server already is so fast only $5 on Vultr and Digitalocean
Cloudflare is already the CDN so it is good also (and free for my site)

OpenSSL already free in SlickStack too .... you guys spamming Litespeed forgot about

Roger Marquez said:
Avoid third-party scripts as much as possible - Stuff like messaging apps, hotjar, Hubspot, analytics, etc., causes more harm than good. Google fonts it´s another element you need to avoid, you´re better off by using a system font.

thanks its good info that I never include before

Roger Marquez said:
There are other practices you can apply but, for this, you will need to know some CSS and PHP.

pls say it here if something else cuz not sure about CSS and PHP how to make it faster? my site is fast but how can SlickStack website click load so rapidly in browser

they said it is no cache plugins and no speed plugins so what is solution cuz my WP theme is already tried GeneratePress and OceanWP

what WP theme is their homepage??

Roger Marquez · Sep 6, 2021

zenaon said:
thanks its good info that I never include before

You can always defer or, even better, delay all third-party scripts on your site. Especially those not needed for your site´s HTML to render properly like those I mention above. I know WP Rocket has this feature and Flying Scripts (free plugin) also does a great job but you ask for a non-plugin approach.

zenaon said:
pls say it here if something else cuz not sure about CSS and PHP how to make it faster? my site is fast but how can SlickStack website click load so rapidly in browser

they said it is no cache plugins and no speed plugins so what is solution cuz my WP theme is already tried GeneratePress and OceanWP

what WP theme is their homepage??

Regarding CSS you can set up rules to serve images based on the device your visitors are using. This is what I meant by responsive images. You can´t just have a desktop optimized image on your site when you should expect at least 2/3 of all the incoming organic traffic to your site to come from mobile users.

So, you need to have a desktop optimized image as well as a mobile-optimized image and, through CSS, you can serve them properly.

On the other hand, with PHP, you can do sooo much to improve a site´s performance.

For example...

You can unload unused resources
You can apply lazy loading
You can apply preload, preconnect, and prefetch attributes to resources
Control WP Heartbeat
Limit page and post revisions
Disable heavy, intensive features, plugins or functions
Disable Emojis
Among other things

StayMotivated · Sep 6, 2021

If you're using VULTR then I would go up to the $6 high frequency compute plan. That should give you a small boost in speed.

You also might want to double check and make sure gzip is active on your NGINX server.

As for photos they can be a problem, how large are the photo files? I would try to keep them under 100k (sometimes you can't, but try your best). Smaller the file size the better when delivering content. But don't lose too much image quality and don't make the images so small they look as bad as the captchas.

There are some good tools out there that can significantly compress the files and keep the quality near the same level.

Good luck !!

zenaon · Sep 6, 2021

Roger Marquez said:
You can always defer or, even better, delay all third-party scripts on your site. Especially those not needed for your site´s HTML to render properly like those I mention above. I know WP Rocket has this feature and Flying Scripts (free plugin) also does a great job but you ask for a non-plugin approach.

thanks Guys I figured out....... =D

The speed is so fast already but score in GTMetrix and Pagespeed not yet "A" .... because few more things to fix this----

Enable the Rocket Loader in Cloudflare for async JS scripts [zero plugins required]
fix CSS to be inline loading in header with the free plugin Autoptimize ... I know that is plugin solution here but no alternative available for this case

they told me SlickStack website using this trick in WP theme header.php

 
    <style>
    <?php include 'style.css'; ?>
    </style>

but just use Autoptimize easier for my situation cuz I want to not hack my WP theme files

seems enough to be "A" scores for mobile device too

P.S.
in this case images not really the problem but I did try before a3 Lazy Load free plugin is working great too.

But my site has only few photos not really a big deal and already cropping them smaller.

StayMotivated said:
If you're using VULTR then I would go up to the $6 high frequency compute plan. That should give you a small boost in speed.

You also might want to double check and make sure gzip is active on your NGINX server.

thanks and I never did try the High frequency plan yet maybe will try that for next one

for Gzip yes already enabled in SlickStack nginx.conf settings!

Roger Marquez · Sep 6, 2021

zenaon said:
thanks Guys I figured out....... =D

The speed is so fast already but score in GTMetrix and Pagespeed not yet "A" .... because few more things to fix this----

Enable the Rocket Loader in Cloudflare for async JS scripts [zero plugins required]

I have NEVER got any positive results while using RocketLoader

zenaon said:
fix CSS to be inline loading in header with the free plugin Autoptimize ... I know that is plugin solution here but no alternative available for this case

Inline any CRITICAL css and defer any non-critical it´s a common practice but, this might not be an easy task to do manually depending on the level of customization or the size of your site.

zenaon said:
they told me SlickStack website using this trick in WP theme header.php

<style> <?php include 'style.css'; ?> </style>

but just use Autoptimize easier for my situation cuz I want to not hack my WP theme files

seems enough to be "A" scores for mobile device too

Autoptimize is great for that. Also, they developed a paid plugin for that as well called RapidLoad you can use alongside Autoptimize to further enhance its capability and maximize results.

zenaon said:
P.S.
in this case images not really the problem but I did try before a3 Lazy Load free plugin is working great too.

But my site has only few photos not really a big deal and already cropping them smaller.

Nice!

zenaon said:
thanks and I never did try the High frequency plan yet maybe will try that for next one

for Gzip yes already enabled in SlickStack nginx.conf settings!

Awesome!!

good luck!

wizeman · Sep 9, 2021

following

RoyalPartners · Sep 9, 2021

So far, I have not heard anything about it. Need to study the issue

zenaon · Sep 9, 2021

@RoyalPartners

Just check the GTMetrix scores from SlickStack homepage is what I talk about here for SEO benefit
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/slickstack.io/vtgzYqZW/

Cumulative Layout Shift = 0.0

Total Blocking Time = 0.0

Largest Contentful Paint = 582ms

Performance = 100%

Structure = 94%

Fully Loaded Time = 842ms
__________

fastest loading speed and security score also "A"
https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fslickstack.io%2F&followRedirects=on
using the Nginx script for Wordpress but you must optimize your WP theme a little bit for achieving this speeds like above discussion........

inclaminated · Sep 10, 2021

Fast hosting helps a lot.
A site of mine gets 100 desktop and 97 on mobile in PSI using Elementor and Astra.
I have compressed images and use WP Rocket and Phastpress plugins.

Roger Marquez · Sep 18, 2021

zenaon said:
@RoyalPartners

Just check the GTMetrix scores from SlickStack homepage is what I talk about here for SEO benefit
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/slickstack.io/vtgzYqZW/

I don´t recommend using GTMetrix for testing purposes.

Why?

They only run performance tests based on desktop users and these will usually skew the results. I mean, you can run a mobile-based performance test but for this, you will need a PRO account.

I highly recommend you use WebPageTest. I believe it´s the best speed/performance test tool on the market today. It might not be as user-friendly as GTMetric but you can run performance tests based on mobile users and connections and this is HUUUUGE!.

AlexanderTheGreat · Sep 18, 2021

1) You can avoid WordPress and find a very lightweight CMS (or write ur own custom code, if it's a simple static blog)
2) Use Vultr / DigitalOcean / Hetzner VPS with a lightweight Linux version
3) Go for Nginx+PHP-FPM+Redis or/with Varnish
4) Go for any CDN suitable for your location/s

Even using Cloudflare alone (or with Cloudflare WP extension) will speed up anything & you can always scale performance with load balancers in case u're high traffic.

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