All about WordPress performance – 11 golden rules
Let’s review our achievements for a WordPress-based website and create something like a road map to optimize WordPress performance.
First priority actions
- Gzip of die! You must gzip all appropriate files (i.e. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ICO and Fonts). You can use here ‘on fly’ gzip approach (via .htaccess or PHP), then continue with static gzip technique, and review some external (and maybe useful) ways to apply gzip for your website. Here you can save about 20-50% of website size (it depends on how much images do you have, for this website it was 25%).
- Shrink your images. You should review and integrate any of image optimization strategy into your blog. Or use some advanced optimization tools. Anyway you can save about 30-40% of website size here (34% for this website).
- Cache everything. You can use both client side caching (even with disabled server-side support for it) and server side caching (latter eliminates a huge pack of performance issues with your website – so just apply it and forget about troubles). These techniques are pretty simple to integrate into the website and cut your traffic and save your visitors’ time. Also this increases your website capacity (just by removing server side expenses). And it’s about 10-20% speedup for new visitors.
After these 3 steps you will have 2-3x accelerated website. And all this can be applied with a few of actions (there is a lot of software to implement this automatically).
Second-priority actions
If you think your website isn’t fast enough after the previous actions you can case some more client side magic. It’s more complicated and give you less performance, but is still worth to be implemented.
- Combine CSS and JavaScript files and minify them. Gzip saved you a lot of traffic but you can save more and reduce number of HTTP requests here. Depending on your website complexity this can give your 10-20% speedup.
- Review applying data:URI or CSS Sprites technique. To increase efficiency for these techniques you can delay data:URI resource file load or convert HTML images to CSS images. Actual result here is about additional 20-40% speedup.
- Use multiple (mirroring) domains or even CDN. Actual speedup here greatly depends on how you have applied the previous steps. If all was done right – it’s about 5-10%. If you can apply some of the previous steps – speedup will be greater, about 20-50%.
- Use static images instead of dynamic ones. This will reduce server side load.
All mentioned steps are not very hard to implement for your website but can give you up to 1.5x additional speedup. So the total website performance improvement will be 3-4.5x.
Third-priority steps
If you are still not sure about your website high performance (yes, even after 4.5x speedup this can be possible). You can think about the following actions.
- Remove unused styles. Be careful with CSS – it can be used on rare internal pages. Actual performance gain here is 2-5%.
- Use HTML minify. This will make your website much faster for returned visitors (as far as they have all static resources cached). And add about 0.5-1% to website load speed.
- Remove blocking advertisement blocks. You can use simple delayed load for any ad blocks (i.e. AdSense). This will increase website rendering speed.
- Use HTML Sprites. After applied CSS Sprites and multiple hosts this technique won’t give much. Maybe additional 2-5% to website load speed.
We don’t touch cookie-free domains and website rendering optimization because in most of cases they give you nothing.
Conclusion
You can easily get 3.5-5x+ website acceleration if you implement all these rules. But more than half of actual performance you will get after first 3 simple steps – gzip, image optimization, and caching.
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