Increasing website’s PageSpeed is very essential, especially for search engines. PageSpeed is a critical requirement for search engines to recognise the site and push the site forward in the search listing.
There are a couple of steps that is mandatory to follow to increase PageSpeed and here’s listing the same that will enhance/improve site’s PageSpeed drastically-
Image Optimisation
While creating pictures/images for website, make sure it is as light as possible, without losing or very little loss of image quality.
It is always better to keep image size as light as possible while creating the pictures itself, right in the initial stage, considering the fact that we upload the largest size single image that caters to the biggest screen size and WP is programmed to duplicate the image and resize/cut the same for all other screen sizes.
WP duplicates/creates 11 more images. In total, we will have 12 images. The images will be in sizes
- 75x75px
- 90x90px
- 120x120px
- 140x90px
- 150x150px
- 300x188px
- 500x500px
- 550x500px
- 600x500px
- 768x400px
- 800x500px
- Originally uploaded size
At this rate, the total space occupied by one image (for all devices), will be 5 times the originally uploaded image size.
So, better to make sure to keep the image size light in the beginning itself, which not only contributes to improve page speed but also to reduces the space occupied at the remote host. And definitely, we do save a lot of time and energy from modifying images and deleting the larger ones.
Even if you have not been able to manually take care of the same, there are many good WordPress plugins to optimise your image size.
We suggest you to first try plugin by optimizing just one image with different settings. That will give you an idea on the image quality loss. Ultimately the image quality should be lossless.
Autoptimise CSS and JS
This is a good plugin to organize CSS and JS.
You will have to play around with this plugin to get a suitable page speed for the site.
One suggestion is, don’t just check all given options in the beginning itself. First only optimise CSS, that too, by checking very few options. After selecting a couple of options, check if the site is working fine and also if google page speed has improved.
Once done with CSS, then play around with JS.
Total Cache 3
Total Cache 3 also plays a big role. Along with Autoptimise plugin, please do include ‘Total Cache 3’ as well.
CDN
When we use shared hosting, there is higher possibility of website being slower. The host provider and the number of sites sharing host space, and the traffic each site drives, plays a big role at defining page speed. So just to get that little more push, try CDN, such as CloudFlare.
Clean the header
Cleaning the header may not play any role towards Page Speed. It does play a big role towards SEO.
Leverage browser cache and gzip compression
Implementing browser cache and gzip compression makes a lot of difference, contributes in a big way to improve PageSpeed. We have written an article on this topic for WP websites hosted on AWS cloud. Please take a look at that article and add the code mentioned there in your .htaccess file. And that should do.
You have anyway done so much. Might as well clean header too.
If you notice your site header through inspect element, you will see, many of your plugins such as Revolution Slider would have added their own meta tags in the header. There are plugins and PHP code which can be included into functions.php to clean the same.
Similarly, you can remove some JS and google code from header and include the same in theme’s footer.php.
Even Font-Awesome, they too can be removed from header and placed in footer.php.
This way, take your time and play around and figure out what all can be removed from header and placed in footer.php. There are sufficient plugins and PHP code to accomplish most of your requirement.