New Ebook: Make WordPress Faster

Your WordPress website or online store is slow? Then you are wasting a lot of potential. Not only your visitors are annoyed by the slow loading times, you may also lose visibility in Google. Our new e-book Make WordPress faster - written by Saša Ebach - guides you step by step to more performance for WordPress and WooCommerce.

If you market your products and services via WordPress or WooCommerce , numerous analyses confirm: slow websites generate fewer sales. Especially mobile users abort the loading of site if it takes longer than three seconds. Faster websites are therefore essential for the survival of your business.

You can download our new e-book here. It not only introduces you to the most important tools for more WordPress speed, but also helps you with very concrete tips. Among other things, Saša goes into the following content:

Measure WordPress speed

If you want to make a website faster, you first have to measure how fast or slow it is before optimization. The pure loading time is important, but not necessarily decisive. In addition, there are some points to consider in order to evaluate the various values that are important for the users but also for Google. Learn more about important key figures like:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP)
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
• Time to first byte (TTFB)

Which of these values are influenced by which technical optimization of WordPress? What can be optimized by the clever structure of a site or by the correct use of HTML, CSS and JavaScript? And what role does a good WordPress hosting play?

With the tools and knowledge from the e-book you are well equipped to measure your own WordPress performance. Only then you will know if all the following measures mentioned by the author really work for your project.

Improve WordPress performance

There are many ways to get more speed out of WordPress and WooCommerce . Which of them do you have influence on, for example in development, in your WordPress theme or in the integration of media? Which plugins slow down your website? Learn in this chapter among other things:

• WordPress hosting: What factors are there that affect the delivery time and processing of requests to your website? And how can you tell if you're with the right provider, or how much faster a switch would make your project?
• WordPress Caching: Caching solutions are essential when accelerating WordPress websites. Ideally via a server-based solution. The e-book lists the most important plugins but also alternative approaches.
• Advantages and disadvantages of page builders: Page builders or site builders are now indispensable for many agencies and developers , after all, they facilitate the design of pages and posts. Nevertheless, they are controversial in the WordPress scene. What do page builders mean for the performance?
• WordPress Themes: Which themes should you rely on to streamline your website's source code? Includes tips on how to optimize page builders like Elementor.

For example, a site, which has an uncached and non-optimized 5 second load time, can ideally be delivered within milliseconds. The content from our e-book will guide you along the way.

Optimize images and other elements

By far the majority of websites use images. Larger images often look better, but also increase load times. Smaller is better, but regardless of that, there's a lot to consider. In addition, we'll tell you about practical plugins that convert your images to all common formats as soon as they are uploaded and then embed the smallest file in each case.

In addition to images, any other assets can be cached locally (on the server). This not only improves compliance with international privacy laws, it usually improves performance as well. Especially if your website's fonts are cached.

A particularly effective way to get more speed out of it is to selectively load CSS and JS files depending on site or post. There are several possibilities that lead to the goal. For example, plugins like perfmatters or the selective deactivation of plugins per subpage. The chapter lists the advantages and disadvantages of each method. Including techniques such as minification, Gzip compression or Brotli.

Especially exciting for many WordPress projects: Reloading the CSS and JS files. In fact, in the tests of the author Saša Ebach, these are often the best techniques to bring a site into the range of 90 to 100.

Conclusion - Speed Up WordPress

There are many adjusting screws when optimizing WordPress performance. Fast WordPress hosting is important and the foundation for everything. But fast hosting alone by no means guarantees top speeds. For this it is necessary:

• Make the assets on the website as small as possible, i.e. compress them.
• Select the right format (such as WebP or SVG). Only load images that are as large as necessary for the respective purpose (desktop vs. tablet vs. mobile).
• Enable caching or use server-based caching: Once a resource is "assembled," it can be loaded from cache until something changes. External resources such as Google Fonts should also be loaded from your own server.
• Optimize the loading sequence. Deferring CSS and JS by means of plugin or service or loading what is really necessary first, then the rest (keyword: Critical CSS).
• Remove unnecessary ballast: For example, do you really need emojis on every load?

Our e-book Making WordPress Faster explains the steps, techniques and tools in detail. Download it now and learn what really matters when optimizing WordPress and WooCommerce . For lasting results, satisfied visitors and better rankings.

More e-books from Raidboxes, to take your WordPress projects to the next level:

• WordPress management: Manage 5 to 100+ WordPress Projects
• Create online stores with WooCommerce
• 13 advantages of managed WordPress hosting

All our e-books, from content marketing to WordPress project management, can be found here in the overview.