How To Double Your Website Speed
How To Check Your Website Speed
Our Site Speeds Before Optimisation
As you can see, even though we built our website with optimisations in mind, our speed for mobile is quite low. This is a critical issue, as mobile usability is a key ranking factor in how Google grades your website.
WordPress Websites
Firstly this works easiest for WordPress thanks to its vast selection of plugins. We will discuss some of the top tools later on, but for now, we will discuss the best fo the bunch that can really double your site speed.
If you’re using Shopify, you can see the following post from them to improve your site speed, and Five Design have written one about Squarespace websites that covers everything you need to know there.
The 10 Minute Guide
We’ve tried 100s of ways to improve websites with quick turn arounds times, they’re far and in between, but there is a really effective one. Installing our recommended plugin and setting up the features will take most people just ten minutes after reading this guide.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the best tool out there for improving your website speeds without feeling like you’ve stepped into the matrix dashboard. WP Rocket implements 80% of all website optimisations within minutes.
The Optimisations
WP Rocket implements 100s of optimisations with a click of a button, but the most important ones are to do with site speed. Page & Browser Caching, Minification, Lazy loading, Image Size Reduction and JS reductions are all implemented with a few clicks in the dashboard.
What About The Free Plugins?
Setting up WP Rocket is quick and easy. Visit WP Rocket and purchase a licence for the software which is €47. But there are free plugins you say?
We know you might be thinking, but there are loads of free plugins to do the same, there are not. There are free plugins that do some parts, and if you combine enough of them, you can get close to WP Rocket. But then you’re left with the bloat of so many plugins. All of these plugins are managing the functionality of your site, making it so easy for your site to end up broken.
We can do all of this manually ourselves, and yet we decide not to, it’s not about the cost of the plugin to us, its about the cost of our website being down for a few hours if even one of these free plugins breaks the site.
What would a few hours of lost traffic cost you?
The Setup – WP Rocket
The licence is just €47, and hopefully, you’ve considered that the website breaking for even a short period would cost a lot more than that. Now that we’re past the shock of a paid plugin on WordPress, let’s look at the setup.
After you’ve purchased your WP Rocket licence, you’ll receive a zip file to download, save this to your desktop and do the following steps.
Time needed: 10 minutes.
WP Rocket Setup
- Log into WordPress Dashboard
You can find the login page at yourwebsite.com/wp-admin. Enter your username and password.
- Install Activate The Plugin
1) Click Plugins in the lefthand column, then click add new.
2) From here click upload plugin
-> Choose the file.
3) Upload the plugin from the desktop.
4) Go to plugins again and activate WP Rocket. - Setup WP Rocket
With the plugin now installed, we can begin the setup.
Click Plugins->Wp Rocket- Settings. - Caching
1) Enable Caching for mobile devices.
2) Separate Cache files for mobile. - File Optimisation
Optimising here is the part to be cautious with, check your site content after setting these options to ensure nothing is broke. Don’t worry, disabling the setting will fix any issues.
1) Enable Minify HTML.
2) Enable Optimise Google Fonts.
3) Remove query strings from static resources.
4) Minify CSS.
5) Optimise CSS delivery.
6) Remove jQuery Migrate.
7) Minify JavaScript files.
8) Load JavaScript deferred with safe mode on. - Media Optimisation
1) Enable Lazyload for images and iframes and videos
2) Disable Emojis
3) Enable WebP Compatibility
Better yet use WP Rocket free addon app Imagify to reduce file sizes. - Preload
1) Activate preloading
The Potential Results
We know everyone says that their way is the best and it’ll always be the best results. We will simply say here is the results we got using WP Rocket, we managed to double website speed for our mobile website and get a 97/100 score for desktop, all in under ten minutes with just one plugin.
