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 :

• Webpagetest.org
• Pingdom tools
• GTMetrix
• Google Insight

Results

Results on GTMetrix

Results on www.webpagetest.org

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

• Improving Smashing Magazine’s Performance: A Case Study | Smashingmagazine
• WordPress Optimization | WordPress.org
• WordPress Optimization Guide from GTMetrix
• GIF, PNG, JPG. Which One To Use? | SitePoint
• Google Code – Page Speed: Minimize payload size | Google
• Speed Up Your WordPress Site | SitePoint
• 9 WordPress Plugins To Improve Images Performance | Hongkiat
• 11 Steps To Speed Up Your WordPress Site | Paulund
• Speeding up WordPress load from 4.23s to 1.33s
• The Ultimate Guide to Boost WordPress Speed & Performance

Hope this will help!