By now, I hope you have already implemented some of the tips that I have shared in the first two articles of our series on speeding up your WordPress website. If you missed out on the earlier features, here’s the first and second articles.
We are now on the final stretch of the three-part series that features some tips on speeding up your WordPress site. This time, I will share miscellaneous tips on how to tweak your WordPress installation to further boost the speed of your site.
Use full-page browser caching
One of the greatest inventions in Web history is caching. Once a caching mechanism is set up on your site, the pages browsed by your site visitors come from a stored version of your pages on a server. This automated caching feature makes for faster page downloading for your visitors, instead of relying on server requests every time someone wants to view your pages.
You have the option to cache all of your pages, or to select a few pages to be cached at predefined schedules.
Fortunately for WordPress users, a lot of plugins are available to enable caching in your site. Some of the most notable caching plugins include WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.
When you implement caching on your site, make sure to define expires headers, which denote whether the browser accesses the page through a server HTTP request or via a browser cache. You may define expires headers either through your chosen caching plugin or by manually updating the .htaccess file of your website. Check this site and copy the expires headers addition to the .htaccess code, found in the section “Leverage browser caching”.
Define dimensions on images
Loading a webpage is like decorating a room for the first time. Without an initial idea about the space dimensions in the room, you’ll spend a lot of time configuring the layout and moving furniture here and there. When the browser loads a webpage, it will attempt to figure out how each page element is displayed on the page based on the code.
To make it easier for the browser to load images, one good tip is to define the dimensions of each image. Your website might have so many images, so defining the dimensions will save up some time for the browser to load the page.
Put CSS at the header and JavaScript at the bottom
The browser will always look for a stylesheet as a basis for loading the page, so putting the CSS files at the beginning of the HTML codes would make it faster for the browser to figure out the page’s layout. On the other hand, scripts must be placed at the bottom section of the code. This way, majority of the page layout has already been displayed before the script processing runs, and so the site visitor can already see something on the page instead of waiting for the scripts to load.
Use PHP only when needed
Some WordPress themes use PHP just to display an image or a line of text. Remember that using PHP uses up server juice, which could take its toll on your site speed. If you are familiar with HTML and PHP, try to streamline your codes such that any non-dynamic elements will be displayed using HTML.
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This concludes the series on making your WordPress site zoom like crazy. I hope you can find time to use these tips, because I’m pretty sure your sites will load faster than reading this paragraph.