Improve Site Speed

The fast loading website is becoming a norm. Internet users tend to very easily get impatient and frustrated with a slow loading or unresponsive pages.

There are a few techniques which enable a quick speed gain with a relatively low effort. WordPress provides a few tools which serve this purpose.

Caching

Caching is by far the most effective way to quickly gain impressive page loading improvements. There are multiple caching solutions:

  • Server-level tools like Redis, Memcached
  • Website-level tools (WordPress plugins)

Server-level tools are usually configured and controlled by the hosting provider. End users don't usually have much contro over them. On the other hand, WordPress caching plugins are completely under the website owner's control.

The most popular plugins are:

Script bundling

Small number of server call means faster page loading. Script bundling achieve this goal by bundling (merging) multippe script (.js or .css files) into a single file.

The most poopular plugins are:

Gzip compression

Gzip compression is a process where the server (Apache, Nginx, ...) compresses the content returned from the server. For example, this content includes:

  • HTML pages
  • Script files

Gzip is just one of the compression types. In recent years, Brotly is also gaining popularity, and it could also achieve better compression ratio than Gzip.