Optimize WordPress with Minification

After several conversations with my clients recently about how to optimize their sites in WordPress, I created a brief guide to help you get the edge you need to rank better in Google results. My goal is to keep this as painless as possible. You do not need any coding or design skills. I'll walk you through speeding up your WordPress site in three easy steps.

You may be familiar with the Mobilegeddon fright of last year. Google, for the first time, announced that it would use our Website's mobile rendering speed as a major ranking factor in its search algorithms. In brief, this means that if our competitor's Website loads faster than us on mobile devices, all things being equal, they will rank higher in search results.

Our Goal is to Optimize WordPress to Load In Under Four Seconds

After getting my Websites to load consistently in under four seconds (without a developer or dozens of hours of work), I want to help you do the same. In this article, I will focus on Minification. In the next article, I will concentrate on adding CloudFlare (for free) to protect and speed up our sites further. Please be sure to keep an eye out for the next article, "Optimize WordPress with CloudFlare."

Note, if you are using any caching programs, please disable them. Most cache programs do little to speed up your site in WordPress and cause many issues. Try this route and adding CloudFlare as will be covered in the next post. You may be surprised how much consistently faster your Website will be using this method.

You can always deactivate these plugins if you're not convinced.

Optimize WordPress - Test Our Website

Before we begin, let's check the Website's current loading time and get a baseline. My preferred tool is GTmetrix for page speed testing and analysis. However, Pingdom is another oft-used option. These tools work a bit differently. It's my opinion that GTmetrix is more accurate, with which some will disagree. Regardless, we're looking for a consistent load time of fewer than four seconds from at least two servers in our area.

Here's the Website for my brand named Join the Pugs. It is the result of using what's in this post and a free CloudFlare account.

GTmetrix, Dallas

Pingdom, New York

Optimize WordPress - Minify and Combine JavaScript

Our next goal is to minify our HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in addition to combining our JavaScripts to speed their loading and reduce HTTP requests to our WordPress site.

Minification is the act of taking our original HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code and removing all of the blank areas, spaces, comments, and any unnecessary information. Then, our next plugin will combine many JavaScripts, which significantly reduces requests for information. In turn, this allows our site to render faster.

Smaller WordPress pages load faster! We want to make them as small as possible without losing functionality of our sites.

Reduce and combine our JavaScripts with BWM

A developer will be able to combine almost all files into one and make the site work correctly. We can accomplish much without needing to learn JavaScript by using a plugin. In this case, it's called "Better WordPress Minify." 

Now that we know why it's important to use Minification and combination, let's use BWP to speed up our site. First, go to plugins and click "Add New" at the top and then type in, "Better WordPress Minify." You should see the plugin as in the image below. Install and activate the plugin.

Now, we have Better WordPress Minify installed and activated. Let's set it up. Don't worry as this is painless. If this plugin "breaks" anything on your site, just deactivate it in plugins. You may have another plugin or code that is interfering with how it works. Use these "rules" from the image below. The only thing that should change is the cache age.

We should always test our live site in a new "private" or "incognito" window when we make a change. It ensures that we haven't broken anything. Then, we can go to GTMetrix or Pingdom and see if the loading times have decreased.

Optimize WordPress - Remove Static requests

Static requests are places where our site returns a URL with more cached information than is needed when Google bots crawl it. A static request would look like this, https://example.com/?=12345. The following plugin should not break any of our functionality but will remove the unneeded information from most places that are a nuisance.

Go to add a new plugin again, this time for Remove query strings from static resources. It will look like this image. There is nothing to configure with this plugin. Install and activate, then test your site and speed to make sure everything works, and it's faster.

If everything is working right, our page load speed and scores should improve quite a bit. In the next article, I will walk us through CloudFlare, which will act as both a cache and Content Delivery Network or CDN for short.

If you found this post helpful, please like and share it. Consider following me for more tips to improve our overall online marketing and client interaction experience!

I'd love to hear about your experiences speeding up your WordPress site in the comments below.

I'll see you next time to "Optimize WordPress with CloudFlare!"

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?? I utilize online marketing to bridge the gap between companies and their audiences in two ways, 45-minute marketing on-demand coaching sessions, and goal-driven consulting projects. More information is available here.