WordPress slow (according to Google) - any ideas?

9 replies
Hello,

I want to speed up my WordPress blog since according to Google my page speed is aprox 73 out of 100. All my competitors have this metric over 80 - that makes me concerned.

So far I have done this:

1) Deleted bunch of spam blog comments
2) Deleted useless/outdated plugins and themes
3) Installed WP super cache plugin

What else should I do? So far, no change at all. I will try another host anytime soon as well, but so far I would like to tweak my on-page.

Here's what google suggest me to do:

1) Serve resources from a consistent URL

The following resources have identical contents, but are served from different URLs. Serve these resources from a consistent URL to save 1 request(s) and 212.5KiB.
The following resources have identical contents, but are served from different URLs. Serve these resources from a consistent URL to save 1 request(s) and 84.6KiB.

I don't even know what plugins or thing is causing it. Might be digg digg floating sidebar (since it's my one and only social plugin).

2) Enable compression

etc... I'm not much tech savy, so I don't know how to compress them. Does anyone have some good resource or tutorial for doing so?


3) Minify javascript & CSS

Again, Google shows me that I have 4-5 errors. Similar to above. How to do minify CSS on WP?

4) Leverage browser caching

Not sure how can I do it. Although I installed WP super cache. Any guides/tutorials are more than welcome!

5) Defer parsing of javascript

432.9KiB of JavaScript is parsed during initial page load. Defer parsing JavaScript to reduce blocking of page rendering.


Actually there are few more errors, but first I would like to fix those (above).

If you know how to speed up wordpress or remove those errors then it would be much appreciated.

Cheers!
#google #ideas #slow #speeding #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author varrie29
    I have used a service that improved my WP site loading speed from 7-10 seconds to approx. 3 seconds and just checked with Google page peed insight and here's the result "got an overall PageSpeed Score of 91 (out of 100)". For my inner pages, since there are less graphics and more content, loading speed would take approx. 2 seconds I think.

    I have no technical knowledge in speeding up sites but just to let you know, here are the WP plugins that the guy installed in the course of improving my site speed:
    -EWWW Image Optimizer
    -Use Google Libraries
    -W3 Total Cache
    -WP Smush.it
    -WP System Health

    Well I really can't help about how he set it up and what settings were used. I think he did a lot because I seem to receive a lot of downtime messages from Pingdom while he was making the tweaks. But after the work, the usual uptime was back and the awesome site speed was there already
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  • Profile picture of the author varrie29
    And it seems like the social sharing plugin used has severely contributed in the poor loading speed.
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  • Profile picture of the author hustlinsmoke
    Make sure you have a very responsive theme first and formost then check it. SwiftRay is a very good one.

    Afterburner is another one.

    Also your plugins don't help much but I know some are needed. The content unless its scripts and so forth shouldn't slow it down too much.

    Do the change of theme first then see what happens.
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  • Profile picture of the author hustlinsmoke
    By the way, I have some plugins that make my site load faster. Don't want to go into admin's to see what they are so just google plugins that make your wordpress site load faster.

    With all that I bet you knock off quite a bit of time. whats your bounce rate, it may not even be hurting you.
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  • Profile picture of the author andreasdl
    Hi mandos,

    my website is hosted on a shared hosting (MDD), and it ranks 82 on google.
    That's almost the best I can have without changing the host and using a VPS.

    This is my recipe

    1. Choose a good host (fair enough)
    2. DISABLE USELESS PLUGINS! (this will improve response time. Also take a look at support.wpengine.com/disallowed-plugins/ for "plugins to avoid". One of it is wp smush.it, sadly, because it slows down your WP)
    3. Install WP SuperCache and WP Minify (if supported by your theme. Can break up if you use some bad programmed JS).
    WP Minify does compress your JS and WP Super Cache caches your pages.
    Be sure to use the mod_rewrite option in Wp SuperCache because that's faster than PHP.
    4. Install JetPack and activate the Wordpress CDN, that's FANTASTIC.
    5. Use Cloudflare.

    That's it. (there are lots of other tweaks, but I would start from this).
    You can ignore your google warnings for points 1,3,5 (of your list).
    The relevant ones are 2 and 4, because they impact more on the navigation.

    Hope this helps.
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    how to be happier and learn to control fear & anger (woah. I didn't even capitalize this because it's not an ad, it's my advice and personal experience)
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  • Profile picture of the author mandos123
    Thanks guys for being helpful. I will see what I can do based on your suggestions.

    I'll let you know if anything helps.
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    None

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  • Profile picture of the author Romeo90
    Cloudflare is excellent overall, i have the free account and am more than happy with it at the moment.

    My speed is 76, which i am fairly happy with, before it was averaging about 58-60, I switched to the Genesis Framework for my theme and that had an instant impact.
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  • Profile picture of the author vietnap
    Always keep your WordPress installation, including core, plugins and themes, up-to-date is a good practice. Beside, do NOT keep de-activate plugins, themes in your account. Even not activating, cracker might still take advantage of outdated scripts.

    For caching, I prefer W3 Total Cache than WP Super Cache. It has more functions and can resolve your above issues.

    Another addition is that you can use P3 plugin to find out which plugin is taking more system resources. WordPress has many plugins with the same functions, you can find out one that is better than others.
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  • Profile picture of the author WillR
    Most of your issues seem to be with something that is Facebook or Twitter related. Find that plugin or whatever it is and remove it and see if that makes a difference.
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