Hi, here's Felix with the question of the century - can WordPress be fast?
And I'll start with a test of my own website to be clear what I'm talking about.
Maybe someone will think it's not fast enough and there's no point in continuing to watch
this video.
As you see, the speed for mobile is 97 and for desktop 100.
I think for WordPress, that's very good!
And this is considering that I, like most users, have a website on shared hosting.
I think there are three main factors influencing the speed of WordPress.
The first of course is hosting, but as I said my site is on shared hosting.
The second is the WordPress theme.
The third one is plugins, and plugins I would split into three more categories.
The cache plugins.
The user experience plugins, which have nothing to do with the Google PageSpeed Insights test
results.
For example a Google speed test may show a bad result, but for the end-user the pages
may open very quickly.
Let me show you some of my pages.
They open fast, but Google ads are not keeping up, so it looks like the pages are opening
slowly.
Honestly, I wouldn't say that the user experience on my page is good, but that's because of
the google ads.
I know it because I tested my website without Google ads.
And the third category is plugins that impact the Google speed test results.
There is a belief that the fewer the plugins, the faster the website.
Of course, there is truth in there, but even with a lot of plugins, the website can be
fast.
I have 18 active plugins here.
I have also had other WordPress websites with just under 30 plugins because nowadays creating
an attractive WordPress website without plugins is almost impossible.
Since I already said that I have one of the simplest hostings available, let's skip the
hosting part and the next one is WordPress themes.
For this website, I'm using the Generate Press WordPress theme, which itself is very light
and very fast.
But of course, the theme has to be chosen according to specifics, and Generate Press
theme may not fit everyone's needs.
If you have a Woocommerce store, you probably won't find this theme suitable and you will
have to look for a theme that is specifically designed for the store.
When looking for a suitable WordPress theme I would recommend focusing on speed right
away.
Of course, all developers say that their theme is blazing fast, but nobody can stop you from
picking up their demo website and testing its speed.
And if the developer can't deliver good speed performance for their website, then you'll
probably struggle to achieve it too.
Next are plugins.
And first on the list is the cache plugin.
There are about three top cache plugins, but for this website, I use the free WP-Optimize
plugin.
I won't say much about the settings in this video, or rather, I won't say anything at
all, because it's best for everyone to test it directly on their own website.
The second is plugins that improve user experience.
There are four of them - Flying Pages, Flying Scripts, Flying Analytics, and what I don't
have here is Flying Images.
Flying Images is a very good plugin, but unfortunately, this plugin conflicts with Google Calendar
on my website.
Surely I can fix that, but I didn't have time to bother and I disabled the plugin.
Those all are free plugins.
In the search you can just type "flying," and here they are - Flying Scripts, Flying
Images - as I already said, it's a very good plugin, but don't forget that all plugins
should be tested with your existing website, because each plugin might not only improve
something but also destroy something.
Then there's Flying Pages, Flying Analytics, and there's a fifth one - Flying Fonts from
the same developer.
The settings for these plugins are simple, but they are up to you to tweak and experiment
with, and most importantly, while you setting them up, check from time to time that your
website is working as before and that these plugins don't conflict with any of your website's
features.
And last is the Asset CleanUp plugin, which improves speed in Google's eyes.
But of course, it doesn't just improve test results, it actually makes the website faster.
This plugin has both paid and free versions, and I use the free version on my website.
How it works.
There are often times when you are using a theme and a number of plugins that are enabled
and run on the same page.
However, you don’t need to use all of them, and to improve the speed of your website and
make the HTML source code cleaner, it’s better to prevent those styles and scripts
from loading.
For instance, you might use a plugin that generates contact forms and loads its assets
(CSS and JS files) on every page of your website instead of doing it only on the contact page
(if that’s the only place where you need it).
“Asset CleanUp” scans your page and detects all the assets that are loaded.
All you have to do when editing a post is select the CSS/JS that is unnecessary to load,
reducing the bloat.
With Asset CleanUp you can disable scripts that are not needed for a particular page.
It takes a bit to understand what you are doing here, but if you have already installed
plugins on your website, you should have an idea of what functions it performs and what
it is for.
If you disable something and see that something is not working on the page, you just enable
the feature back.
This plugin doesn't delete anything, it just disables it.
I didn't say anything about settings, because here I just wanted to show what makes WordPress
websites faster, and I think that those who are interested will be able to deal with the
settings themselves without any problems.
But if you have any specific questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.
That's it for today, have a fast WordPress, and see you in the next video!