In our last post, we talked about some techniques for improving the performance of your WordPress website. In this post I will share our experience with speeding up the Webriti. For this experiment we used a WordPress cache plugin for improving the performence. Since we are not a image heavy website (yet), we decided to skip the optimizations related to image handling
I conducted the speed test on two pages. The homepage and the Theme detail page for Spa Salon Theme.
Page Load Speed before Optimization
Home Page takes 2.31 seconds to load and The theme page takes 3.46 seconds to load. Here are the accompanying sceenshots
Ok So now lets start with optimization. We will be using W3 Total Cache plugin for speeding up webriti. The only reason for choosing W3 Total Cache over other plugins is that I have used it before on Appointzilla website. It worked well and did not give me any problems. So I decided to stick with this plugin for Webriti.
Setting up Cache Plugin
There are dozens and dozens of settings but I decided to keep things simple. I enabled Page Level Caching, Browser caching and File Minification. I used the default settings for caching and file minification. I had to remove JS minification as it broke the Theme purchase button.
File Minification is recommended as it will minify the CSS and JS files which are served with the page. Smaller files mean less bandwidth is required to load them. Page Cache caches the Home and Posts Page and Browser cache compress the pages by gzip and caches the css and js files . All these things add up and page speed is boosted.
Page Load time after using a Cache Plugin
So here are the results after enabling the W 3 Cache plugin. Home page saw an improvement of 33.33 % in the page load speed and the Theme detail page saw an improvement of 27.4 %. Here are the screen shots.
An improvement of 25% is quite decent result for 5 minutes of work. There is a lot of scope for further optimization especially related to image handling. We will try to cover them in subsequent posts