SimplerTraffic Blogs: Speed Optimizations

We install and configure performance plugins with sane defaults, which will be good enough for most users. If your blog is starting to receive a lot more visitors, or you'd like to work on the last 10% of performance optimization, this is the guide for you.

All of these optimizations need to be done manually for each blog.

How to test changes?

The recommended option for testing your website's performance is PageSpeed by Google.

Jetpack Boost

Start with the plugin Jetpack Boost, which is installed, but you need to go to plugin settings and select the free plan to activate it.

This plugin offers several options and you can use the integrated PageSpeed report tool to quickly see if there is any difference when you toggle the options.

It's worth considering enabling the Image CDN feature to optimize your image loading, as it will deliver next-gen image formats through a CDN and thus significantly increase the speed and PageSpeed score.

Another important step that you should take is to run the Critical CSS tool every time you make updates to your blog's structure, CSS, JS, plugins, or themes.

This is important because the free version of the plugin does not support the automatic regeneration of CSS.

Leverage Browser Caching

Another plugin that we recommend is Leverage Browser Caching and it can be incredibly useful once your blog is stable and no longer undergoing big theme and plugin changes. The plugin adds appropriate expiration headers for all static assets, ensuring your website loads faster and improves overall user experience.

Convert Posts to Blocks

If you have imported posts from another blog or wrote them in the Classic editor, you may have encountered issues such as improper image sizes, no cover photo or a lack of a proper table of contents. However, there is a solution for these cases: convert the post to a block format by clicking on the corresponding option in the post edit screen.

Server-Side Cache Enabler

This is a bit more involved and requires editing the .htaccess file. One way to optimize the Time To First Byte (TTFB) is by installing the Cache Enabler plugin. This plugin helps improve website performance by caching pages and serving them to visitors more quickly.

However, simply installing the plugin is not enough. You need to configure it by adding a specific configuration to the .htaccess file.

The .htaccess file is a file used by the Apache webserver to control various aspects of website behavior. Adding the necessary configuration ensures that the Cache Enabler plugin functions optimally and delivers faster load times.

To add the configuration to the .htaccess file, you can directly copy it from the Apache config for Cache Enabler. This page provides the specific code that needs to be added to the file in order to enable the Cache Enabler plugin. Learn how to edit the Htaccess file.