As many hikers and campers have heard, “ounces become pounds”. It is easy to add one more of this and extra of that to your kit until it becomes too heavy to manage. The same is true for websites as frameworks, graphics, and more add up slowing you down. That allows lighter faster sites to rise in the search rankings above yours plus up to 40% of web visitors leave after just a few seconds if nothing loads.
How fast is fast?
Before you can begin optimizing, you must measure your current site speed. You can do that using the following utilities:
https://pagespeed.web.dev/
https://www.webpagetest.org/
https://gtmetrix.com/
This will help you get an idea of which frameworks, plugins, images, or other media you need to focus on. For example, you might see images, video, and remotely included javascript frameworks being the slowest before first content paint. Those can be adjusted to load later, replace them with locally loaded options, and optimize the size of media.
Images and Video: Optimizing for Quality?
Optimizing website media is one of the most effective ways to start to lighten the weight of your website. As images add together, your index page size can balloon from a few kilobytes to several megabytes or even tens of megabytes. If you add video, the size can grow even larger. This lowers your search engine ranking pushing faster sites higher in the rank above yours. What can you do? There are several WordPress plugins designed to help.
For users of Softaculous Pro:
Speedycache Pro: How to optimize Image Automatically –
and for open source options:
reSmush
For video, you can find everything you need here: Handbrake
The Handbrake application for Windows, Mac, or Linux has built in profiles for each type of device or medium you might like to target. These include legacy and current devices in all categories desktop, mobile, and tablets. You can load the video such as one from your mobile device, click the profile you need, and click convert. It couldn’t be easier.
The Framework Trap
As we mentioned in a past article “Edge Cache vs Browser Cache: The Double-Keyd Cache Problem”, public CDNs do not provide the speed boost they did in the past. The use of them for tracking and data collection forced browser makers to reduce cache effectiveness downloading the framework for every new site. This slows things down considerably vs a few years ago.
You can avoid this by locally hosting frameworks or avoiding them to speed up javascript on your site. Many easy to include javascript options have WordPress plugins that offer more options and more also supporting high speed local WordPress cache vs less effective public CDNs.
One of the worst offenders are advertising and current news offerings. These often run complex server side and browser processes as the visitor waits attempting to maximize the price or data collection. You can measure these and compare different solutions using the testing sites mentioned earlier.
Stay tuned for next time as we go over more optimizing and security