However, it can be tricky to get WordPress to run as fast as possible though, at least for us regular non-developer types. To fix this, there are various improvements that should be made to each site you build. This is especially important for China, because the Chinese Internet is throttled by something called “The Great Firewall of China”. The firewall is a factor for WordPress even if you host the website in China, because the site may still load some scripts from outside of China.
Website speed is important because faster websites have higher conversion rates and tend to get higher rankings on search engines too.
To write this post, we had Daniel D Konold help us optimize this very WordPress-based site you’re reading now. We were able to get it to load about 80% faster. We’ve also added in some tips from our experience with a bunch of other Chinese websites that are built on WordPress.
Table of Contents
The Starting Situation of Our WordPress Website
Before Starting, Backup Your WordPress Site
The Top Issues Identified by GTMetrix
Step #1 – Shrink Images
Step #2 – Check the Fonts
Step #3 – Add a Caching Plugin
Step #4: Minify JS, CSS, HTML, etc.
Step 5: Turn on Lazy Load
End Results for WordPress Optimization
Bonus Optimizations
Need More Help?
The Starting Situation of Our WordPress Website
Our website used to be based on Drupal. We moved it over to WordPress a few months ago. The work was done mostly by team members of NMG that are NOT developers, and they did a great job overall.
But the site was too slow!
We used GTMetrix to measure the speed. It’s a great tool that can help philippine number for whatsapp anybody understand how fast their website is, and it helps developers find the detailed reasons that the site is slower than it could be.
Here were the initial results for the homepage before we made any changes:
Grade E. Ouch! This shows that the website was poorly-optimized. At least it wasn’t an F.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 3.7 seconds. This shows about how long the page takes to load for a regular user, so it is perhaps the most objective and important statistic.
Performance: 46%
Structure: 80%
Total Blocking Time: 370 milliseconds. This is how much time is wasted due to scripts blocking other things from loading.
Cumulative Layout Shift: 0. There’s no problem here.
GTmetrix results for NMG site
Before Starting, Backup Your WordPress Site