Speed Optimization | Web Training Wheels

How to Serve Static Assets with an Efficient Cache Policy in WordPress

The Google PageSpeed recommendation to serve static assets with an efficient cache policy is all about browser caching. It’s usually pretty straightforward to fix on WordPress sites.

“Static assets” means the files on your site: CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts, videos (and other media files).

“Efficient cache policy” means that they have a long enough browser caching value so that they do not have to be downloaded by your site visitors frequently. Usually 4 months or longer is enough to satisfy Google and other tools.

Reduce Unused CSS in WordPress

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate

Speed Optimization

Addressing PageSpeed’s recommendation to Reduce Unused CSS improves your site’s overall score, along with the First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metrics.

Removing unused CSS is closely tied with removing render-blocking resources, and the plugins available will often let you achieve both things at once:

Load only the exact CSS needed for any given page
Make sure that CSS is not render-blocking

How to Fix “Avoid an Excessive DOM Size” in WordPress: A Practical Guide

Speed Optimization

The PageSpeed recommendation to “avoid an excessive DOM size” is a tricky one for WordPress site owners. There isn’t a plugin that can magically fix this for you. You, the site owner, will need to make some changes to your content.

Most of the articles you’ll find on this topic are going to go into the technical things to do which aren’t possible for non-developers. However, this guide is a practical one for WordPress site owners.

How to Install and Set Up WP Rocket

Speed Optimization

I’ve been working with WP Rocket‘s support team for a number of years, so I’m not only intimately familiar with the plugin, but I’ve also seen a lot of mistakes that customers make when they attempt to use it.

Even though it’s one of the easiest WordPress caching plugins to use, speed optimization is inherently technical and complex. It’s common to get confused or overwhelmed when using optimization plugins.

But here you have the “ultimate” guide, from the horse’s mouth. Even if you don’t use WP Rocket specifically, many of the guidelines apply to caching plugins in general.

Reduce unused JavaScript in WordPress

Audience: Developers, Intermediate

Speed Optimization

Most WordPress site owners will see the recommendation to “reduce unused Javascript” when they run a PageSpeed test.

The technically complete solution is out of reach for most site owners, but there is an effective shortcut solution for reducing unused JavaScript on your WordPress site that I share below.

What does “reduce unused JavaScript” mean?

JavaScript (JS) is a type of code used on website mostly for interactive elements like sliders, animations etc. Compared to CSS or images, it is much more resource intensive so it takes longer to process when your page is loading. It’s especially bad for mobile performance.

For best performance, you should aim to have as little JavaScript as possible on your site.

Loading JavaScript that isn’t even used on the page is a waste of resources and processing power, and that’s what this PageSpeed recommendation is getting at.

Improve the mobile speed of your WordPress site

Audience: Consultants, Intermediate

Speed Optimization

If you’ve ever run a PageSpeed or other speed test for the mobile version of your site, you’ve undoubtedly been horrified by the low speed and score compared to the desktop version of your site.

In this post I’ll explain:

Why mobile performance is typically worse
The primary cause of slow mobile pages
How to create mobile-specific versions of your pages
How to remove unnecessary files from your mobile pages

Optimizing for mobile does take a bit of extra effort since site owners are usually “retrofitting” their sites for mobile performance.

If you are starting a new site, it will be easier if you consider mobile performance from the start, and make it a priority.