09 Feb

Optimising a WordPress website #1 – MotoWitch

I recently offered to optimise friends’ websites for free, in the interest of trying out a few methods of improving responsiveness and improving the Google PageSpeed score, which Google uses as one indicator in their PageRank system.

MotoWitch.com is run by Kojii Helnwein, a friend from back when we were teenagers (a long time ago now!) – it’s a website for female bikers to get together and share stories from all over the world.

Kojii asked me to go easy on her – she built the website herself and her skills lie more on the visual side than the technical guts. That’s okay – that’s what I’m here for!

So, the first thing I did was to check out what kind of score the website was getting already.

6%! To be honest, I’m very impressed that it’s this low, as the website works well on a subjective test on good broadband, but obviously it has a long way to go to be good on a phone, and the percentage of people using mobile for Internet access is always increasing.

6% score on Google’s PageSpeed tool

The “Opportunities” section of the PageSpeed results gives some hints as to what’s wrong.

Opportunities

Okay – it’s basically saying that the images are a really big problem. Clicking the first row of results will expand it to give some more details:

More Detail

The list of images actually goes on for another page, but we can already see the first issues to address.

Those images are HUGE. When multiplied by the number of images on the front page, it’s obvious that this will cause a problem to mobile users.

I see three immediate tasks:
1. apply some compression to those images – there really is no reason they should be so large if they’re on a website. As a test, I opened the first image in Gimp, and saved it as an 86% compression .jpg file. I could not see the difference visually, but the filesize was 6 times smaller. That’s a start.
2. add some “lazy loading” to the page so that images are only loaded when page scrolls bring the images into view. WordPress has built-in tools for this within its JetPack plugin.
3. add some coding to allow the page to load different versions of the images depending on what size the screen actually is – no need to load a 2000px wide image if you’re using a screen that’s 320px wide.

The JetPack plugin comes as standard with most WordPress sites. Clicking into it, the first edit is to enable WordPress’s Site Acelerator and Lazy Loading.

enable all of these

The “site accelerator” changes the site code so that some of the site’s images and static files (like JavaScript and CSS) come through WordPress’s global CDN servers (content delivery network), which reduces stress on your own server, helping speed up the websites in a number of subtle ways.

Lazy Loading means that images are only loaded when they are about to become visible on the page. JetPack’s Lazy Loading does not apply to all images, so we may need to manually edit some later.

With just this change, we increase the PageSpeed from 6 to 8, with the opportunities changing to this:

pagespeed after enabling lazy loading and site accelerator

The largest changes are that items 1 and 3 in the image above were 43.8s and 43.5s (estimated download times on mobile networks), and are now 7.05s and 3.78s. That’s 8 times faster.

The next step is to go through the list of large images, and optimise them. Here’s what PageSpeed now says are the worst offenders:

images with potential savings

The PageSpeed interface does not give an obvious link to the original image, but if you right-click the little thumbnails on the left and click “open in new tab”, that lets you then download the originals and optimise them.

The simplest method is to use an auto-optimising tool to handle it for you. I used imagecompressor.com’s tool. It does a good job by default, but sometimes you can get a much higher compression without compromising visible details by tweaking the compression slider.

After editing a lot of the images (I couldn’t find where some of them are used, so will address them later), I re-ran PageSpeed. It was still at 8%, but the opportunities list looked better again:

Item 3 there was 7.05s (originally 43.8s) and is now 1.95s.

The “Eliminate render-blocking resources” one is tricky to correct in WordPress sites. Almost every plugin you add to WordPress includes CSS in some way, and they rarely if ever include “defer” keywords to let the browser download them later.

I opened the list:


In total about 30 items are in the list. How to address this?

There are plugins that collect the CSS and JS files that WordPress emits, and combine them before they are outputed. An article I read recommended Fast Velocity Minify, however, I found that this mangled some of the CSS of the website. Autoptimize did a much better job here.

After installing, activating, and then going into the plugin and enabling all items but the CDN on the front page, I primed the front page by loading it in a browser, and then checked PageSpeed again:

getting there…

The list of opportunities still has blocking resources as the first priority, but it is reduced from 30 items to only 14, and they’re all on external domain names:

But I notice something – the c0.wp.com references are from CSS/JS files that were offloaded to CDN by the JetPack plugin. Let’s turn that off…

Then prime the website by loading the front page, and check PageSpeed. The score is increased again to 23, and the number of blocking files reduced from 14 to 8:

Now I notice that half of those are Google Fonts references.

Autoptimize has some advanced settings that let you handle Google Fonts in various ways. I chose to load the fonts asynchronously through webfont.js:

The PageSpeed score is increased yet again, this time to 28, and the number of render-blocking resources is down to just 4:

I think that’s about as much optimisation I can do easily here, without needing to manually edit the CSS files to reduce their size.

I’ll leave it at that for today and carry on tomorrow.

2 thoughts on “Optimising a WordPress website #1 – MotoWitch

  1. thank you so much for this post!!!!

    my site is so slow, can you also check it please? https://www.atriva-kandelabri.si/

    because its says that i have “speed rating” 7 out of 100.

    the biggest save would be changing few jpg to jepgs… didnt know this could be so easy!

    thank you again, and check my site in few days it will be alot faster hah 😀

  2. Looking forward to it. I checked your site and the biggest issue is definitely the huge size of those images. Your background image is 871Kb in size!

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