Improve Asset Loading To Speedup Wordpress Site

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Improve Asset Loading to Speedup WordPress Site

The faster your site, the better user experience. One of the important factors that impact website speed is the time required to load all style sheets, scripts and images. Here are few tips to improve page loading performance by reducing asset loading time.

It’s more important than ever to work on improving the WordPress website performance these days.

Google recently confirmed what many website owners long suspected; Search Engine giant Google polls page speed into consideration before pushing its search results to the top of the search engine rankings.

WordPress users have long relied on the platform’s ability to help them create great websites. However, WordPress enthusiasts also tend to go overboard with plugins – for example, by downloading a plugin that slows down their website – so they hinder overall performance.

You can design the prettiest website you can imagine, using the best tools and content, but if users can’t access their content quickly, your efforts are largely worthless.

Optimizing Images

Speedup WordPress: Optimizing Images

Images contribute about 70% of your website in-terms of size. However, depending on how you’re using your images on the site, you might be able to do a few things without having to rely on an external plugin.

There are a few ways to optimize images on your site. Obviously, the best way is to use an image optimizer plugin like WP Smush Pro or Shortpixel.

Pre-compress Images

Before uploading to WordPress, use an image compression plugin like TinyPNG to reduce the file size of your images.

tinypng image compression
Tinypng Image Compression

Use a image optimization plugin

There are a number of plugins to optimize images on your site. Some of the popular ones are

File Compression

Compress CSS, HTML, and JavaScript

Code needs to be often compressed in to benefit its speed. Many plugins use outdated CSS and Javascript libraries instead of relying on the native browser support features. The result is a delayed load time for websites that actually cause them to slow down.

Check your code for opportunities to optimize it for performance. Cut any empty spaces, have irrelevant lines, and unnecessary characters.

Remove references to outdated library versions to reduce the number of HTML calls. Relying on native browser support is probably the most easy way of speeding up your application performance.

Render Blocking Scripts and Styles

Render Blocking Scripts and Styles

When referring to resources that prevent the webpage from rendering properly but are non-HTML, we’re usually talking about CSS and JavaScript.

CSS that delays page rendering will need to be careful not to slow the processing of CSS that appears in viewports.

Identify templates as media attribute on the <link> elements that pull in CSS files to identify which styles are conditional, that is, only needed for specific devices or situations.

eliminate render blocking header
Eliminate Render Blocking Header

Autoptimize and Async JS are two different free plugins from the same developer. They help you optimize the delivery of both your CSS and JavaScript resources.

autoptimize sync
Autoptimize Async

This plugin provides advanced data compression and other nice features that other lesser-known compression libraries don’t offer; for example, you can’t do any buffering with this library to prevent overheads. Here’s a list of features:

Use a CDN

Use a CDN

The load on the server might cause it to slow down or crash, rendering the site inaccessible. CDN caches static server resources such as CSS, JS, and pictures.

Static files is delivered via a network of servers placed in various geographical areas across the world.

how cdn works
How Cdn Works

Every user request is processed by the server that is closest to the user’s location. This improves page load time and makes your website substantially quicker for all users.

Let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress CDN services

Cloudflare

cloudflare cdn 1
Cloudflare Cdn

Cloudflare is a fast, free, and reliable content delivery network (CDN) with offices in San Francisco and Amsterdam. CloudFlare caches static files on their global network of servers for faster loading and improved performance.

You can easily deploy it on WordPress to get faster load times, better security, speed up your site for mobile users and improve SEO by directing visitors to the closest server across the world.

BunnyCDN

bunny cdn1
Bunny Cdn

BunnyCDN is a reliable CDN service that enables your WordPress site to load faster. BunnyCDN uses Akamai’s network of servers across the globe, so it can deliver content to your site faster than any other CDN.

BunnyCDN offers WordPress installation service to help you get up and running quickly, as well as support for custom configurations of their service.

MaxCDN

maxcdn 1
Maxcdn

MaxCDN offers WordPress installation service to help you get up and running quickly, as well as support for custom configurations of their service.

They offer a free trial tier so you can test the service and compare it to other CDN providers.

Leverage Browser Caching

Leverage Browser Caching

To make your website fast, your user’s web browser should cache content locally. This will help in quickly loading pages for repeated users.

You can easily enable browser caching for Images, CSS and JS, add those lines to your website’s .htaccess file:

## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##

Asset Cleanup WordPress plugin

Use Asset Cleanup WordPress plugin

Asset CleanUp WordPress plugin analyses your website and discovers assets on the page; while updating a page/post, you may de-select specific assets by eliminating them from your site’s HTML’s <head>.

The plugin works best in conjunction with any popular caching plugin or a service that has page caching enabled, such as Cloudflare.

asset cleanup plugin
Asset Cleanup Plugin

FAQ’s

FAQ’s on WordPress Asset Loading

How fast is fast enough?

There is no magic number that defines how fast your WordPress website should load. It all comes down to what you need on the site and how many visitors it gets each day. But if you need to know, the average website load time is around 2.5 seconds.

Why is my wordpress site slow on mobile?

Mobile devices come with a lot of restrictions, such as not being able to have large images on your site. To ensure that you can keep loading fast on mobile, try using a light-weight theme and reduce no. of active plugins

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