A fast-loading website is crucial for retaining visitors, enhancing user experience, and improving search engine rankings. Improving your website's page speed score can lead to better engagement and higher conversion rates.
This article will explore effective strategies and tools to optimize your site's performance. From image optimization and caching techniques to minimizing code and leveraging browser caching, this will provide step-by-step instructions to help you achieve a faster, more efficient website.
Google PageSpeed Insights is just one of the many online tools website owners can use to analyze and improve their sites' loading time. It offers common recommendations regarding important topics that website owners should consider to achieve the fastest loading times.
Note: Some cache and optimization plugins can work better on one website and may not on others. It depends on the server configuration, the content you are using, and what other 3rd party plugins are installed on your website.
It is important to notice that Divi is often not the main determining factor of your website’s performance. It’s just a piece of the puzzle. Divi sits on top of WordPress, which sits on top of a stack of server software and hosting infrastructure.
All those things need to be tuned correctly. In addition to all that, The connection a visitor uses has a significant impact on how fast a page is rendered.
Several important factors always influence the overall Score that Google's PageSpeed Insights will display:
Server's speed - no matter how well the overall content is optimized, if the server's response time is low, the score will always be low;
Connection speed;
The number of active plugins - the more active plugins are being used, the more server resources will be consumed, affecting the overall loading time and Google's PageSpeed Insights Score;
Media content optimization - all the media content - especially images - should be properly resized, optimized for the web, and converted to WebP format before being uploaded to a WordPress website;
The report that Google's PageSpeed Insights offers important metrics such as:
Total Blocking Time
Speed Index
Among those metrics, it also offers various Opportunities that can be checked to identify issues with the website. In most cases, those opportunities are related to the server's setup, response time, and Media Content.
Examples of opportunities that Google's PageSpeed Insights might offer:
In the above report, the overall JavaScript code creates the most loading time.
Note: the Reduce unused JavaScript opportunity doesn't only refer to JavaScript files/code related to the Divi theme. It also includes all the JavaScript files used by WordPress and any other third-party plugins.
We can get more information by expanding that opportunity. In this example, the scripts at fault are from WordPress Core and YouTube:
The unused JavaScript can usually be reduced by using a good cache plugin. Our recommended cache plugin is WP Rocket (premium). However, depending on the entire server's setup, other free plugins can be used, such as Autoptimize, WP Fastest Cache, WP Super Cache, and more.
On the example website, using the PageSpeed Ninja cache and optimization plugin, the score was greatly improved:
Desktop Initial score of 43 to 93
Mobile Initial score of 31 to 84
Initial Desktop Score: 43
Desktop Score after installing and configuring the PageSpeed Ninja Cache plugin: 93
Initial Mobile score: 31
Mobile Score after installing and configuring the PageSpeed Ninja Cache plugin: 84
Note: Google's PageSpeed Insights can be used to gather insight and opportunities that can be implemented on any WordPress to deliver the best loading times.
The steps to achieve the best score vary from website to website.
Additional Resources
and many more