I have recently built a website on Wordpress using hostgator for my hosting and I’m finding that it is taking a considerable amount of time to load.
it is the first website where I have used high quality images, I originally used WP Smush (free version) to do my whole media library, but then after reading several reviews I switched to Imagify, but have found that there is a limit to how many images I can optimise and it only got to 16% before it asked me to pay for a subscription. So my question is does optimising all the images really make a huge difference?
If not I will switch back to WP Smush to make sure that all my images are optimised. I appreciate that people will have a point about me paying for a service, but doing this for a friend who doesn’t have a large budget.
Page insights tells me that:
Desktop is 75/100
Mobile is 52/100
First time coming across increasing the page load time of a website, so please bare with me. One of the main things to help that Page Insights suggest is to serve images in next gen format. I tried converting some of my images to jpeg 2000 and then re upload them buy Wordpress didn’t allow me to upload these type of images.
That depends on how unoptimised your images are in the first place and how many images you have.
From the look of the below resulds, the images are not too bad.
Tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom can give you an idea where the problems and bottle-necks are in a page.
GTmetrix also gives you optimised versions of your images, though in this case there is not a significant reduction.
Lookingat the “Waterfall” a big problem seems to be the initial wait for the page load, I don’t know, that’s probably WP dragging it’s heels, doing all the things it needs to do to serve up a page.
Thanks for a quick response. I thought as much, it doesn’t look to be the images that are causing the problems. Anything you could suggest to speed up the initial wait, get rid of plugins I’m not using etc, is there anything else that would benefit the website?
WordPress is notoriously heavy on database calls. IMHO it is so it will work “out of the box”. Similar to having “if module exists” in htaccess files, once you know it exists it is a waste of resources to test for its existence every HTTP request. Once you are relatively certain that certain database values will not change, eg. blog name, you can go through the templates and replace the database calls with hard-coded values.
And yes, although plugins can be a good thing, they can slow things down and unused plugins can leave behind wasteful database bloat. So removing all “extra” plugins is a good start.
Try searching for “ampproject wordpress” because the ampproject.org was created especially to decrease mobile loading time but also applies to desktops. There are plugins available which I have not tried and curious to know results if you adopt the plugins.
Another alternative to WP Smush is the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin. If you install Riot on the desktop & compress images before publishing to WordPress, maybe it is better than server-side automation. For Google Pagespeed, consider advanced caching with CSS & JavaScript aggregation in WordPress using a third-party plugin script. Other options are upgrading to a managed WordPress platform with Nginx & Varnish Cache or using a CDN. Some web hosts also support the Google mod_pagespeed extension for Apache on WordPress plans.
Advanced Caching Plugins for WordPress: WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Minify, Autoptimize, Better WordPress Minify, Breeze, WP Fastest Cache, and Fast Velocity Minify.