New e-book: Making WordPress faster

Is your WordPress website or online store slow? Then you're wasting a lot of potential. Not only are your visitors annoyed by slow loading times, you may also be losing visibility on Google. Our new e-book Making WordPress faster - written by Saša Ebach - guides you step by step to better performance for WordPress and WooCommerce.

If you market your products and services via WordPress or WooCommerce, numerous analyses confirm that slow websites generate less sales. Mobile users in particular stop loading a page if it takes longer than three seconds. Faster websites are therefore vital 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 specific tips. Saša covers the following topics, among others:

Measure WordPress speed

If you want to make a website faster, you first need to measure how fast or slow it is before optimization. The pure loading time is important, but not necessarily decisive. There are also a few points to consider in order to evaluate the various values that are important for both users and Google. Learn more about important key figures such as

• 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 through the clever structure of a page or the correct use of HTML, CSS and JavaScript? And what role does 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 will you know whether all of the following measures mentioned by the author really work for your project.

Improve WordPress performance

There are many things you can do to improve the speed of WordPress and WooCommerce. Which of these can you influence, for example in development, in your WordPress theme or in the integration of media? Which plugins tend to slow down your website? Find out in this chapter, among other things:

• WordPress hosting: What factors 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 for speeding up WordPress websites. Ideally via a server-based solution. The e-book lists the most important plugins as well as alternative approaches.
• Advantages and disadvantages of page builders: Page builders or site builders are indispensable for many agencies and developers today, as they make it easier to design pages and posts. Nevertheless, they are controversial in the WordPress scene. What do page builders mean for performance?
• WordPress themes: Which themes should you use to streamline your website's source code? Including tips on how to optimize page builders such as Elementor.

For example, a page that has an uncached and non-optimized loading time of 5 seconds can ideally be delivered within milliseconds. The content from our e-book will help you get there.

Optimize images and other elements

The vast majority of websites use images. Larger images often look better, but also increase loading times. Smaller is better, but regardless of this, there is a lot to consider. We also provide you with practical plugins that convert your images into all common formats during upload and then integrate 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 data protection laws, it also generally improves performance. Especially if the fonts on your website are cached.

A particularly effective method to get more speed is the selective loading of CSS and JS files depending on the page or post. There are several ways to achieve this. For example, plugins such as 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.

Particularly exciting for many WordPress projects: Reloading CSS and JS files. In author Saša Ebach's tests, these are often the best techniques for bringing a page into the 90 to 100 range.

Conclusion - making WordPress faster

There are many things you can do to optimize WordPress performance. Fast WordPress hosting is important and the basis for everything. But fast hosting alone does not guarantee top speeds. It is necessary for this:

• To make the assets on the website as small as possible, i.e. to compress them.
• Select the correct format (such as WebP or SVG). Only load images as large as necessary for the respective purpose (desktop vs. tablet vs. mobile).
• activate caching or use server-based caching: Once a resource has been "assembled", it can be loaded from the 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 using a plugin or service or first loading what is really necessary, then the rest (keyword: Critical CSS).
• Remove unnecessary ballast: For example, do you really need emojis for every loading process?

Our e-book Making WordPress faster explains the individual steps, techniques and tools in detail. Download it now and find out 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

You can find an overview of all our e-books, from content marketing to WordPress project management, here.