Transcript

It doesn't matter which WordPress.com plan you're on, you can relax knowing your site is already running on fast and reliable infrastructure. Behind the scenes we use fast servers, built-in caching and a global CDN to deliver your site quickly to visitors anywhere around the world. But performance isn't only about technology, it's also about the way your site is built. Some of the most common factors that can affect your site's performance include large or high resolution images, too many plugins, heavy pages with lots of images, galleries or embeds, as well as overly feature rich themes. Custom themes or very complex themes might not be speed optimized. If you want to see how your site is doing, navigate to your sites list, select a site and click the three vertical dots. Make your way to settings and then open the performance tab. Once you open the performance tab, the performance score report will be populated automatically. If you previously received a score for your site and want to generate a fresh report, click the test again button to generate a current score. In about 30 seconds you'll get a full report. By default your site's homepage will be tested. To test other pages, click on the page option to select from other public pages on your site. Also note, reports give separate scores for mobile and desktop. Let's take a brief look at the breakdown you see on the left. At the top is First Contentful Paint or FCP. This is the time it takes for the first bit of content, like text or images, to show up on the screen after somebody visits your site. The best sites have an FCP of under 1.8 seconds. Below that is largest Contentful Paint or LCP and this measures how long it takes for the biggest piece of visible content, like a large image or heading, to fully appear on the screen. The best sites have an LCP of under 2.5 seconds. Next, Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS shows how match your website's layout moves around while it's loading, which can cause things like buttons or text to shift unexpectedly. The best sites have a CLS score of 0.1 or lower. Time to first byte or TTFB measures how quickly your website starts to respond after somebody clicks on it, showing the first sign that it's loading. The best sites have a TTFB of around 800 milliseconds or fewer. Lastly, Total Blocking Time or TBT is how long your website is unresponsive while loading, meaning people can't interact with it during this time. The best sites have a TBT of under 200 milliseconds. When you select the performance score, you will be provided with tailored recommendations you can act on immediately. Click View All Recommendations and select each recommendation one by one. These recommendations are tailored to your website so you can take action to improve your site's performance. Let's look at a few tips to speed up your website. First, if you have a plugin-enabled site, you can install and activate the Jetpack Boost plugin. When you install and activate Jetpack Boost, it can help you in many different ways. It can help improve your site's SEO and also improve how smoothly your site loads by making sure the most important CSS or design styles appear first. And it can also automatically resize your images to an appropriate size and convert images to modern, efficient formats like WebP. And lastly, it can help you discover and fix images that need optimization. The biggest contributing factor to a slow website is the size and number of images added to a single page, because large images take longer to load. The problem is the image's file size is often much larger than needed. So what can you do? You can typically safely downsize images significantly without any noticeable impact on quality. If you are looking for a quick way to reduce the image size, you can use one of the many free online tools. Let's look at a quick example of how to optimize an image using the Preview app on a Mac. Open the image in Preview and then make your way to Tools and click Adjust Size. And then for example, we can go ahead and change the width to 1600 pixels. And then we will see the image downsized from 2.5MB to 631KB. Remember Windows users also have built-in tools such as Paint or Microsoft Photos app to optimize images. If your WordPress.com plan supports plugins, you can take advantage of our built-in Jetpack Site Accelerator, also known as Jetpack CDN, to automatically speed up image load times. A CDN is a network of servers around the world that store copies of your site's images and static files. When somebody visits your site, these files are delivered from the server closest to them, and therefore making your site load faster. For many self-hosted WordPress sites, setting up a CDN requires installing and configuring additional plugins and services. With WordPress.com, this benefit is included and enabled by default, no setup needed. Visit your site's dashboard and make your way to Jetpack and then click Settings. Open the Performance tab and then scroll down to the section named Performance and Speed. You will see Enable Site Accelerator is enabled by default and will automatically speed up image and static file load times. Next, stick to the Essentials when it comes to plugins. Deactivate and delete any plugins you don't use. If you are experiencing a slow website and are unsure which plugins could be responsible, deactivate one plugin at a time to see how that improves load times on your website's most important pages. And remember on WordPress.com you don't need extra plugins for caching, security, optimization, spam protection or backups. We already take care of those things for you. If you have too many plugins or plugins that are poorly coded, it can pile on extra code and slow down your site. Before you install an activate a plugin, check its rating, version, how many active installations it has and when it was last updated. Next, choose a fast theme, but the great thing is all themes provided by WordPress.com are speed tested and would be a solid choice. If you have a higher level plan and decide to upload a third party theme, make sure to review it properly. Some great looking themes can slow down your website if they include too many extra features. That's why it's a good idea to choose a theme with only the features that you really need. But what if you have already built your site on a slow theme and now need to change it? You can test a new theme on a staging site. Once you have installed and activated the new theme on your staging site and made customizations, you can use the performance tab to monitor the impact on speed and loading times. And if you are happy with the changes, you can sync it to production. Next let's talk about embeds. Streaming videos and widgets from external services like YouTube, Vimeo, Google AdSense and Facebook can add great functionality to your site. But it can also increase load times. So therefore use them sparingly and be mindful not to overload your pages. To illustrate this, let's look at two examples. In the first example, I have added 9 video embeds to my page. And it received a 51 performance score. In the second example, I have only added one video embed. And this time it received a performance score of 85. And this can of course be improved by a Jetpack Boost and following the recommendations provided. There are many things that can slow down your site. But the good news is WordPress.com already takes care of the technical things to keep your site running quickly and smoothly. Firstly, WordPress.com servers are optimized to ensure a lightning fast experience for your website's visitors. We test and update every WordPress release, ensuring our site's always running the latest features and standards. We implement smart caching, meaning we save parts of your site to help pages load faster. Our themes are designed to be speedy and efficient. A built-in CDN stores your site's content on servers worldwide. So visitors load your site faster no matter where they are. And if your site gets a lot of traffic, we automatically scale up so it doesn't slow down or crash. Performance is not a one-time task, so I would suggest checking your performance score on a regular basis. It's important to track your metrics over time and see how performance improvements and additions affect results. And finally, do regular housekeeping, delete spam comments, unused plugins or anything else you no longer need. With WordPress.com, fast performance is part of the package. And with just a few checks in your dashboard, you can keep your site running at top speed.