'5-Minute' Tricks for Speeding Up Wordpress Sites.

Many of us run WordPress either as a CMS or blog platform. With a lot of great plugins available, it’s easy to create a full-featured website with a lot of great functionality. These plugins, however, can include additional files into your code which can hurt your site’s performance and optimization scores. 

I’ve listed some plugins and written some tips for all WordPress users looking optimization help.

Before proceeding: Backup your site. Install and activate Duplicator, All In One WP Migration or any other plugin that will complete this task correctly.

It’s crucial that you backup your WordPress installation before optimization (and on a regular basis!). All these plugins provide a simple and efficient way to backup your entire WP install, including your media uploads, plugins, database, themes, and more.

Trick #1. Scale your images.

You need to Serve scaled images. In WordPress, you can include smaller sized images based on what the platform itself has generated for you. Try embedding a smaller image if you trigger the Serve scaled images warning while creating optimization reports on tools like GTmetrix.com or Pingdom.com.

Essentially, you do not want to use images that are larger in dimensions than what your user needs to display. 

Trick #2. Install and activate this plugin: WP Smush

Under the “Media” section in your CMS sidebar, you’ll have access to a new menu option, namely “WP Smush.”

Once here, ensure that the “Auto-Smush Images on upload” option is ticked. The plugin will now optimize every image you upload in your Media Library.

Next step is to "smush" all of the images in your Media Library by clicking on “Bulk Smush 50 Attachments”. You’ll need to return to this page and bulk smush the following set of 50 attachments).

Trick #3. Install and activate WP Fastest Cache.

After activating the plugin, you’ll notice a new option called “WP Fastest Cache.” located on the left side of you Wordpress CMS interface.

Make sure you have enabled the following options:

• Cache System
• Preload
• Logged-in Users
• Minify HTML*
• Minify CSS*
• Combine CSS*
• Combine JS*
• Gzip
• Browser Caching

*Important notes

Minifying and combining files can break functionality in your website. Minification goes through your scripts and removes extra data like formatting, whitespace and other things that are not necessary for computers to read. Combining takes the contents of each script and combines them all into a single file.

Because these processes change data, they sometimes break functionality due to typos, syntax errors, duplicate function names, etc.

Make sure to check if your site works appropriately after enabling the minification/combining features. If you find some things broken, disable all minification/combining elements in WP Fastest Cache, one-by-one, and re-enable them to see which option is causing the issue.

 Happy Wordpressing! :)