Hi everyone,
Is it possible to speed up a website without installing any additional plugins?
If so, which steps should be taken in that case?
Thanks a lot in advance!
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Website speed is made up of several factors. Here they are from the highest level down to the lowest level:
– CDN: Is your website distributed via a CDN or are you loading it from a central server?
– Hosting: Is your server capable of meeting the load that is put on it, or is it overloaded and serves requests slower than it should?
– Caching: Are you caching your static content or waiting for responses to be generated on-demand? This can be done at the server level without an additional plugin
– Theme: Is your theme lean in its code output? Do you have bloat in your number of DOM elements? Do you have excessive CSS and JS included to load any particular page?
– Plugins: Do you have plugins that interrupt or delay your page loading? This could be through synchronous javascript calls, large CSS and JS loads, synchronous third-party requests, etc.
– Images: Are your images properly sized and optimized? Are they scaled to the required size on your page? Are they served in a next-gen format, or at least a compressed format? Are you using lazy loading?
None of the points above require an additional plugin to achieve. They can be met by doing the following:
– Optimize your images using a plugin like [Smush])
– Minimize your plugin usage for site functionality to only those that are truly needed, and use high quality plugins only
– Use a theme built for performance: one that doesn’t bloat the code for the elements on the frontend. Also go for a theme that will dynamically detect which CSS and JS resources are used/needed and purges unused code
– Build your design in a smart way: fewer elements with maximum reusability
– Get a web host that offers server-side caching. I recommend [WPMUDev managed web hosting])
– Get a web server that is sufficiently sized for the amount of traffic it’ll be serving
– Hook yourself up to a CDN like Cloudflare to remove the dependency on your server to serve all traffic, and enable global distribution
So if you can do all of this without a performance plugin, what is the point of using one? A good performance plugin will offer you this additional functionality not covered above:
– CSS and JS minification
– CSS and JS compression
– Caching
– Delay CSS and JS loading to increase initial page loads
– Database cleanup
I recommend [the Hummingbird plugin]) for this
Yes. Get a good webhost, preferably a VPS – better yet, a bare-metal server.