Many of the website owners want to obtain the quick loading of their web pages despite the fact that the website was made badly and incorrectly. Professionals will help you to achieve good results, nonetheless you are to think about the page speed loading web pages, not after the website is done and launched, but on the stage of planning its design, functionality and of course on the stage of its development.
In this article we will talk about websites which are developed on WordPress but many of the advice can go with most other projects. WordPress, unlike the majority of platforms allowing you to make your own page or even a so-called online store, allows you to make a really fast and qualitative website.
These are some rather important moments, which a website owner or a future website owner has to know.
The loading speed of the website pages depends:
1. On the server (hosting).
Many people don’t pay any attention to what server (hosting) they are going to place their website. The time of the server response depends not only on the scripts and code but also on the server options. Also, as for websites on the WordPress, CMS itself, plugins and theme that are used have their minimal affordable requirements.
The WordPress developers recommend to chose hosting with the maintenance of:
– PHP version 7.2 or higher
– MySQL version 5.6 and higher or MariaDB version 10.0 and higher
– HTTPS
Recommended requirements to hosting from the creators of the popular theme Avada:
memory_limit = 128M
max_execution_time = 180
max_input_vars = 4440
2. On the used theme and plugins.
2.1 A great number of website owners don’t know or don’t understand that a huge number of plugins (including libraries and plugins plugged in the theme) influence negatively on the webpage loading speed.
2.2 Page builders
Many, if not all, the drag and drop page editors generate by shortcodes, wherein the final code is being created while page loading. In addition, page builders entail the loading of huge files with styles and scripts. All these are minuses for the fast websites. Nevertheless, it is sometimes unreal to talk the clients out of using page builders.
2.3 Heavy plugins.
Besides page builders, I would relate here beloved Revolution Slider. There is a great mass of heavy sliders and different plugins. The problem is that sometimes people want to solve all the tasks with plugins. As for me, this is the wrong approach to business.
3. On the configuring of caching and the deferred loading of images iframes, fonts, styles and scripts.
The website owners usually don’t like such kind of optimization, but it’s necessary to do this. And we are to remember that the peculiarity of a website is in the simplicity of not only the design, but also the functionality. The optimal content number on the page will allow you to get rid of long ill-favored website loading. What concerns the pleasant loading, we don’t have to forget about preloaders. Very often preloader allows us to avoid the unpleasant display of web pages when they are loading.
To sum up: say “no” to overloaded websites, don’t chase after novelties and tendencies. Caching and the deferred loading of some content is just needed.
4. On the size of the website images.
Almost always images are the heaviest website content after videos and musician tracks. That’s why images have to be well compressed, their resolution doesn’t have to exceed 1200px, and I will repeat, they have to be cached.
5. On the code of plugins and the theme.
5.1 This item concerns plugin and theme developers. Every complicated task reduces to tiny and understandable subparagraphs. When you don’t have a complete realization of how you can do everything simple and understandable do not bang on the keys of your keyboard.
5.2 And the beloved postulate “Don’t repeat yourself!”. Don’t double your code.
5.3 The number of requests to the database should be minimal.
5.4 The right connection of scripts, styles and fonts, their combining – all this is the sign of a skill of a programmer. Gulp or Grant will help you, my dear colleagues.
There are a lot of nuances I would like to talk about but the article is basically focused on the website owners. I wanted to tell you about the most important moments without observation of which you wouldn’t achieve good results.
You can use the following page references for the services where you can test the speed of the website:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
https://tools.pingdom.com/
https://gtmetrix.com/
Here are some facts about the loading speed of the website’s pages without which your understanding of the term “fast website” will be incomplete:
– the loading speed of the website is measured in seconds,
– it depends on the region where the page speed loading is being tested,
– the loading speed of the website is not only the speed of loading of the main page but each page of the website separately,
– the loading speed of the website at its first testing (or at first testing after cache cleaning) can be much lower than the loading speed at the following tests. The thing is that this is the sign of well configured caching – and this is a good sign,
– 70 points at PageSpeed Insights on your mobile device or desktop or 2 seconds – are rather good results. You shouldn’t get hung up on the optimization of the speed of your website.
Have a nice day, Dear Readers. Let your websites be fast, but let them better be profitable. It goes without saying, I’ll be very glad to see any additions and questions, if there are any!