Speeding up my WordPress Site

As I said, I started to work on my site. After two years of putting it online and completely abandon it, it was time to recovering it.
I started the Web Performance course offer by Udacity and I tried to implement some performances techniques that I knew for a long time that I had to implement but, well…

First, I completely change my workflow from Codekit to a Grunt System. This allow me to compress my js and css files, and reduce the http request numbers. Sadly, at this point, I did not take PageSpeed measure, but well, at least I made it at this point.

I started from a score of 78/100 for Desktop and 65/100 for mobile. It was pretty awful, I have never checked my own site and this discovery was really disappointing. Between the suggestions and fixing point I found:

  • Enable gzipping
  • Leverage browser caching
  • Eliminate render blocking JavaScript and CSS
  • Prioritize visible content

From all this topics is the render blocking problem the one which concerns me the most, but so far I am going to start with the “easiest”.

I took the Web Perfomance snippet from HTML5 boilerplate to enable gzipping in my site. I copied this code into my .htacces and the magic started, my scores changed to 86/100 for Desktop and 70/100 for mobile. I am still far away but it is a good star point.

Next step is leveraging browser caching, keep around here !