Performance improvements for presscustomizr.com

Optimizing the page load of a WordPress website is not an easy task.

The first think you need to do is to monitor your page load indicators. I usually test my websites with 4 well known online tools :

 

Results

 

Results on GTMetrix
double-A-on-GTMetrix

 

Results on www.webpagetest.org

webpagetest-results

 

 

Pingdom tool results

pingdom-tool-results

 

Google Insight Results

With this tool, I got a 87/100 for desktop, 74/100 for mobile speed and 91/100 for the user experience.

There’s room for improvement, in particular to reduce the size of the above-the-fold content.

 

Tools and techniques used

It took me honestly days of iterations and tests to get those results. I could probably have been much faster if I had followed the quite simple steps described below.

Note : My website is hosted by a french host named Planet Work on a virtual server with the following characteristics : Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP, 1000 Mo of cache memory, CPU 1200 MHz.

 

Here are the key points that have been decisive for my performance improvements :

1) I use the free Total Cache plugin with the following settings :

  • Page cache : Disk Enhanced
  • Minify CSS and JS enabled in manual mode
  • Database Cache : Enabled with disk method
  • Object Cache disabled
  • Browser cache enabled
  • CDN enabled

2) Almost all external ressources (CSS, JS, images, icon fonts) are hosted by a CDN (Rackspace) which is located close to most of my visitors (US based).

3) Images below the fold are not beeing loaded on page load. I use the excellent free Unveil Lazy load plugin for that.

4) Videos in iframes like YouTube or Vimeo are loaded on demand, triggered by a click. I use a the free plugin lazy load for videos for that.

5) All Images have been compressed

 

Useful resources

 

Hope this will help!

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