There was a post fairly heavily promoted post making the rounds a week and a half ago by WP Beginner outlining how they optimized their List25 WordPress website and increased performance of their WordPress website up to 256%.
Here’s an excerpt:
Before we started the optimization, our homepage took 2.21 seconds to load according to Pingdom. After we were done, our page load time dropped to 1.21 seconds (~45% faster).
During this optimization, we were able to speed up our server response time, improve our page speed performance score, reduce the number of total request, and improve the overall load time.
They walk through and explain the WordPress optimization steps they followed during the project. Most are fairly straight forward and include:
- Using a good managed WordPress host (going with SiteGround)
- Using a caching plugin to optimize WordPress performance
- Using a CDN
- Combining Files to Reduce HTTP Requests
- Using Image Sprites
- Code Minification
- Image Optimization
- Javascript-free Social Sharing
Though we use WP Engine’s Enterprise here at Red Bridge Internet for our client accounts and our own sites and projects, we urge most WordPress users to look first to managed hosting for the quickest and most effective WordPress optimization wins.
Though the list Caching and CDN as action items in their WordPress optimizations, those 2 things should be part of any good WordPress managed hosting platform.
We believe that image sprites are effective for sites that can afford the time to create and implement them, but see that as a luxury optimization.
The Javascript-free Social Sharing was a good takeaway. Little things like this can be well worth the effort and can provide big wins for your WordPress optimization efforts.
So, check it out, it’s worth a read, “Speeding up WordPress: How We Optimized List25 Performance by 256%“.
