How to optimize and speed up your website

Here's an article about optimizing your website and make it faster. If you experience slow issue, this article is for you:

Use the "Dynamic CSS into Static Stylesheet's" theme option.

Our theme options and individual page options are loaded every time a page is loaded. This mean there are calls to your DB whenever a page loads and this can slow your site, especially if you use PHP 5.x. (PHP 5.x is twice slower than PHP 7 by the way). So make sure to activate the option "Move Dynamic/Custom CSS Into External Stylesheet?" by going to WP-Admin > Theme Options > General Settings. See screenshot: https://d.pr/i/yIpFnj

Wait! There is one downside with this option: Since your options will become a standard CSS file, it will be saved in your browser's cache. When you will change one of your theme options or page options, you will have to clear your browser's cache to see the change.

Use a Cache plugin

This is essential! Any great and fast website use a caching system and this might speed up your website 5X faster. Caching plugins allow you to publish static HTML files instead of dynamic files. This greatly reduces the time a page takes to load as there are no PHP or MySQL commands to execute.

Additional caching features include minification, caching of feeds, Gzipping, Content Delivery Network (CDN) support, and much more, but lets keep it simple for now.

Caching your pages is one of the most effective ways of improving your page loading times, with many plugins promising an improvement of at least ten times. We recommend using WP Rocket. It's a paid plugin but so much effective! There are other free caching plugins but WP Rocket is the way to go.

Check your plugins

Before you install any plugin on your website, ask yourself “Is this plugin necessary?”.

Third Party Plugins are one of the biggest causes of  slow WordPress site. The more plugins you install without research, the more likely you will face performance issues; however the sheer number of plugins you have installed is not the reason a WordPress website can slow down.

Certain plugins are known for causing websites to be slow. There are many reasons for this including bad coding, calls to external servers and persistent calls and updating of your WordPress database. Pay close attention to how much CPU plugins use too. Many plugins can bottleneck your CPU due to persistent processes. If this happens, your whole server could go down.

One plugin I highly recommend you use is P3 Profiler. Developed by GoDaddy, the plugin will show you exactly how much load time your plugins are adding. A breakdown is given which displays exactly how much load each plugin adds. It is the most effective way of seeing what plugins are slowing down your website.

Optimize your image

Images can help break up long pieces of text and can help your articles be shared more frequently on social media services; however they also take up a lot of storage. Therefore, pages that contain many images can take a long time to load.

It is therefore in your best interests to optimise your images for the internet before you upload them to your website. Most photo editing applications, such as Photoshop, allow you to do this via the “Save for Web” option.

A good plugin to optimize images that have already been uploaded is WP Smush.it. It utitlizes the Smush.it API to optimize JPEG images, strip meta data from JPEGs and convert GIF images to PNG. You should however be aware that the plugin uses up a lot of resources when it is converting images, therefore your website may be slow whilst it is running.