In this guide, I’ll be showing you exactly how I spent just 5 minutes setting up and installing 2 WordPress plugins that gave it a 91/100 optimized score and a load time of around 1 second per mb –
This tutorial is meant to be a super quick and fairly basic guide to optimizing WordPress for speed. It does not take into account a lot of the advanced things such as SSL, http2, server setups & advanced code modifications.
It will however give sites a very immediate boost in load time with minimal technical knowledge and time.
As of July this year, Google will be taking speed as an effect on your PPC’s quality score – From our recent speed optimization tests, it’s also been playing a lot higher role in ranking organic SERPs, especially mobile ones.
Table of Contents
Firstly, you want to install 2 main plugins:
- W3 Total Cache
- Kraken.io Image Optimizer
You can install both via going to your WordPress admin dashboard, clicking “Plugins” and “Add New” then searching in the top right corner of the page, for the above 2 names.
Setting Up W3 Total Cache
Once you’ve installed the plugin, you want to go to the main page’s settings and enable page cache and enable minify scripts:
With the above settings.
Next you want to go to “Fragment Cache”, enable it and select “Disk” from the drop down:
This is all the basic settings you need to do on this plugin to optimize the site.
Kraken.io Image Optimizer
Next you want to install Kranken and visit the main Kraken site here, create a free account, verify your email, login and get your API Key & Secret from this page.
Once you’ve done that, input your API details into the plugin and press save, making sure it shows a green tick that you’re connected:
Every time you upload a future image it’ll automatically optimize the image upon upload.
To optimize all of your current site’s images, go to the media library and click the list format button:
Then go page by page and select all images, then click the drop down and select “Krak ’em all”:
I then recommend choosing the “Intelligent Lossy” option and clicking the big blue “Kram ’em all” button:
Wait until it’s completed and so on until you’ve optimized the entire site’s images.
Conclusion
That’s my super simple, super quick guide to speed optimizing a WordPress in just 5 minutes work.
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