The performance results for my website before making improvements:
And after making improvements to my website’s performance:
Were you able to improve? Why or why not? Yes, I was definitely able to improve the performance of my website.
First, I went to https://geoffgraham.me/wordpress-how-to-clean-up-the-header/ and copied the helpful script there into the functions.php of my child theme folder.
Second, I went to the Dashboard view of my website and started to deactivate and/or removed plugins that I didn’t need for now to see if that would perhaps improve performance. I deleted the following plugins:
- No Right Click Images
- Insert Headers and Footers
- Hello Dolly
and, although I’m keeping the plugin All-in-One WP Migration, I deactivate this plugin to see if that makes a difference. I will activate this plugin when I’m importing and exporting WordPress site, but other than those times, I think deactivating the plugin might make some improvement to website speed.
To assist me in web page caching, I went with the plugin W3 Total Cache by BoldGrid. It’s an SEO and Performance Optimizer plugin.
What issues did you run into along the way? What did you learn about web performance as a result?
The issue I ran into was that I’m not familiar with DevTools. But in it’s place to go along with WebPageTest and Lighthouse, I used Google’s PageSpeed Insights as recommended in this article: https://theeventscalendar.com/how-to-perform-a-backend-audit-of-your-wordpress-website/
What I learned about web performance is that there is plenty of room for improvements. From the results, I was able to improve Compress Transfer and Cache static content from two letter grade “F” to two letter grade “A” on WebPageTest.
For Lighthouse, I was able to improve the Performance of my website from a score of 73 to a score of 91.
And for Google’s PageSpeed Insights, I was able to improve from 63 to 85. There is still room for further performance improvement, but so far for me it has been a leap in the right direction. My website loads approximately 1 second faster now than before I made performance improvements, which I think is quite substantial in the internet world. A page load speed can make or break a website and could mean the difference between gaining an audience/customer and losing them to a competitor’s website if my website took too long to load.
How is your content coming along? Do you need to refine the design?
I think my website is coming along fine. It’s just a matter of spending more time to add more content. For example, in my blog feed I got “Web Development” covered since it’s the assignments we do each week, but for the “Off-Topic” section of the blog, I need to add some content. I have some ideas of what I would like to post in that section of my blog site. Any content that is workplace safe and family-friendly would be acceptable. I also plan on working on the Portfolio page to list the various web design projects I’ve worked on so far in the Web Development program (freecodecamp, Codepen.io, etc.).