Speeding Up a Musician’s Website

The website we created for Thomas Lock is a one-page WordPress website featuring his headshot, videos and press. It became clear the website speed needed to be improved as it was taking over 10 seconds to load the home page completely.

The website was hosted on WP Engine in Managed WordPress hosting. So some optimization and caching is already taken care of. However, the Page Speed numbers did not look good:

PageSpeed Insights: 19 mobile and 21 desktop

Others were better:

Pingdom Tools Score: A 90

Web Page Tools: A A A F C ( F for image compression )

Website Changes

The headshot photo was very high resolution, so I dropped that to a 10 or 11 quality measure for jpg. The plugin autoptimize has worked well with other WP Engine websites. I installed that and turned on HTML, Javascript and CSS compression in the settings.

WP Engine offers a free CDN ( content delivery network ) and this website is not changing frequently so we also turned CDN on. We also used Smush to compress all the images on the website.

We saw excellent improvements with Google:

PageSpeed Insights: 68 mobile and 76 desktop.

Pingdom: A 91, Load time 4.43 s. Much faster for above the fold render.

Web Page Test: A A A F C

The website is visibly faster loading with the changes completed.

Upcoming Work

All 3 of these speed tools are still listed “image compression” on the “to-do” list. When we return to this, we could try alternate image compression tools. Upgrading to Smush PRO is too expensive, as it requires a subscription to the entire WPMU Dev suite.

Page Speed Insights is also still listing “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content” as a task that must be done. Right now, this is not work the time involved.

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