#it has plugins and external tools and whatnot you can use and implement into your workflow which all come together

[hua-fei-hua]

i'm starting to see why excellent fansubbing is a dying art these days. there are all these cool tools to aid in the creation of top-notch fansubs efficiently and automate the most tedious parts of the job, but the cooler the tool, the greater the computer literacy it requires to get it running, and this scales up in such a way that just installing the tools, let alone learning to utilize them to their fullest potential, can feel very daunting... like it just kind of gives the impression of being made for massive fucking geeks at a time when being a massive fucking geek meant "customizing your own operating system" and not "knowing where the file explorer is"

[addwebsolution]

A Guide To Enhance Your WordPress Site Performance - 2

One often spends an ample amount on building a site with appealing designs, images, videos and whatnot, to attract and retain their customer base. But yet, when a site fails to load faster, every other effort made goes in vain. And hence, the loading speed of your website deserves as much importance as other factors of website-building & maintenance. The ingenious team of AddWeb WordPress developers has jotted down a list of guidelines, specifically meant for WordPress Site Optimisation. And here we’re, as promised, with the second blog from this 2-blog series which shares this list of things that can help you optimise the performance of your WordPress Site.

1) Remove Unnecessary Plugins

Remove all the inactive,problematic and duplicate plugins from your site.

Avoid the premium plugins, because they are required to visit the 3rd party server for decrypting the code. And this process results in a drastic decline in the load time of the website.  

Choose & install plugins carefully. Keeping the number of plugins less than 20 is the ideal thing to do for an optimised WordPress site.

2) Enable gzip Compression

Technically, gzip compression is something that drastically reduces the amount of data that is sent from the website server.

In simpler words, it basically compresses the size of the website page and eventually increases the loading speed of the respective web-page.

In fact, Varvy claims that compression is capable of discarding 50-70% of the unnecessary HTML & CSS files of the web-page.

The implementation of compression depends on the web-server & its setting. Below, we’ve shared a couple of resources used for the commonly-used web-servers.

In case, your web-server isn’t on the below-list, contact your hosting company to guide you through the same.

For Apache Server Add below code in .htaceess file.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>  # Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml  # Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip  BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html  Header append Vary User-Agent </IfModule>

For nginx Server Create a file at /etc/nginx/conf.d/gzip.conf with the following content:

gzip on; gzip_proxied any; gzip_types text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript; gzip_vary on; gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";

3) Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN is a set of web servers distributed across various geographical locations that provide web content to end-users with regard to their location.

When you host the website on a single server, all user requests are sent to the same hardware. Due to this, the load time increases when users are physically far from the server.

With CDN, user requests are redirected to the nearest server.  As a result, the content is delivered to a user quickly and a website works faster. It is expensive but an effective way for optimisation.

4) Minimize the Number of JavaScript & CSS File

JavaScript & CSS files lead to a large number of HTTP requests on the basis of every individual visitor’s access request for any file. This reduces the speed of your WordPress site. Hence, reduce the usage of JavaScript & CSS files.  

Try and combine all the JavaScript & CSS files in one group, which will reduce the number of the HTTP request and eventually optimize the speed of the site-page.

There are multiple tools available in the market, which minimizes the HTML, CSS & JavaScript files with ease. Some of these tools are named, WillPeavy, Script Minifier, Grunt tools, et al.

5) Database Optimisation in CMS

Database optimisation is a proved-formula for increasing the performance of the website.

Especially, when you’re using one of those Content Management Systems(CMS) with complex plugins, database optimisation is highly required to reduce the excessive load brought-in by these complex plugins.

Every such CMS requires database optimisation in order to leave behind all the above-mentioned setbacks and gain an optimised CMS platform & website.

It’s a mandatory measure to optimise a CMS and for a WordPress-based platform, one can utilise the WP-Optimise Plugin for database optimisation.

6)   Less Utilisation of Web Fonts

Web Designing is one of the most appealing & result-oriented features of every website since that is what your user is going to see and get impressed by. And Web Fonts is one of the major factors in Web Designing.

But unfortunately, the usage of more web fonts adversely affects the page rendering speed.

Web fonts are prone to adding extra HTTP requests to external resources and eventually adding up to the load of the website, which reduces the speed of the website.

Below we share a measure to overcome from excessive traffic coming from web fonts and optimise your website speed:

Use modern formats WOFF2 for modern browsers;

Include only those character sets that are used on the site;

Choose only the needed styles

7) Detect 404 Errors

It occurs several times that your web-page goes under error and comes with an instruction of ‘Page Not Found’ when tried contacting.

One comes across such an instruction when the access for the requested content is not available. To avoid & fix such an issue, one uses additional plugins. But some of such additional plugins load the website while affecting the speed of the webpage.

Hence, we advise you to run the resource through external tools for fixing the error detection issue.

Below is the suggested solution for the same:

For instance, Xenu’s Link Sleuth, Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), and 404 Redirected Plugin For WordPress.

Once the detected error is fixed, see to it if the respective page is attracting traffic or not. Because, if the page brings heavy traffic, consider redirecting the external ones to the external links and fix the link addresses for the internal ones.

8) Reduces Redirects

Redirection creates additional HTTP requests, which ultimately increases the load of the website leading to a fall in the performance speed of the same.

Hence, it is highly recommended to avoid such redirection or keep it as less as possible.

Scan your site/webpage to churn out a list of such redirection links.

‘Screaming Frog’ can be used to grasp this list of redirection links.

Once you receive the list, scrutinize each of them wisely and discard the unnecessary ones.  

Concluding Words

Team AddWeb WordPress Developers, with their experience of 160+ WordPress projects, is glad to share their knowledge of optimising the speed of a WordPress site with all of you. Hope, it may prove to be helpful to you and in case of any queries or suggestions, feel free to get in touch with us. Let’s support and grow the WordPress community, together, with the contribution of all kinds.  

Also, in case you wish to check the score of how well-optimised is your website; here is our blog on it. We also have a blog that speaks about a list of plugins for WordPress Site Optimisation, which might help you.

Source: AddWeb Solution