I’ve been working on page load speed lately, as measured by Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Two fairly simple moves have resulted in large gains for the sites I’ve worked on.

Step 1. Install WP Smush and compress all of the images on the site. This is self-explanatory.

Step 2. Install WP Fastest Cache and activate just about everything. Turn on caching itself, disable it for logged-in users, ignore the mobile settings and the idea of clearing everything when you publish something new, and turn on all the browser caching, compression, combination, and minification options.
Edit: Actually you do probably want to clear the cache when something new is published.

Here are the results for my sites.

Still far from perfect on mobile, but so much better. Incidentally that second site is image- and functionality-light but running an old theme, which is all I can think of for its poor relative improvement.

I had a fourth site go from 53/58 to 61/83 with image compression. WP Fastest Cache didn’t actually seem to help matters (though enough time had passed something else may have been done to change the site), but they already had W3 Total Cache installed, so I reactivated it, purged the cache, and re-visited the site. That took it up to 73/83, temporarily. It bounced around a lot, mobile and desktop independently.

I didn’t get much improvement with W3 Total Cache on the other sites – or at least the first two; I didn’t try it on the third one – which is why I was using WP Fastest Cache in the first place. Given W3TC’s reputation I assume that was my poor setup knowledge and/or incompatibility with the hosting situation.

Image compression and caching plugins aren’t the only things I’ve tried. On the first site listed above I’ve tried a large number of minification, compression, scripts-to-footer, and other plugins advertised for performance, optimization, and speed. I never cracked the 79/93 score with any of them, so I took them off, figuring fewer plugins is better in general and if they aren’t improving the score, there’s not much point to having them in the list. I also cleaned out the database of that site, cutting it from 55 MB to less than 10, but that didn’t make any speed difference as measured by Google. It felt good to houseclean, though.

Sleeping cheetah by dmkoch on Pixabay.

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