Speed is crucial and if your site is taking more than 2 seconds 80% of users will bounce back from your post/page.
Caching is the first step to quickly fixing speed issues but sometimes it’s not enough to find or fix the real culprit behind the slow loading WP Site. That’s how my Fav. Plugin perfmatters comes in.
To quickly sum up what settings I am using on my sites here is a shortlist of the best settings to cut the fat of your website and get under 1 second loading time.
- Disable emojis
- Disable embeds
- Disable XML-RPC
- Remove jQuery migrate
- Remove WordPress version number
- Remove wlwmanifest link
- Remove RSD link
- Remove shortlink
- Remove Dashicons
- CDN Rewrite
- Change WordPress login URL
- Host Google Analytics locally
- Host Google Fonts locally
- Lazy load images
- Databse optimization
- Preload resources
- Defer JavaScript
- Delay JavaScript
- Disable RSS feeds
- Remove RSS feed links
- Disable self pingbacks
- Disable WordPress Heartbeat API
- Change Heartbeat API frequency
- Disable and Limit Post Revisions
- Change autosave interval
- Remove REST API links
- DNS Prefetching
- Disable Password Strength Meter
- Disable WooCommerce scripts and styles
- Disable WooCommerce cart fragments (AJAX)
- Disable WordPress comments
- Add code to header or footer
- Instant Page
- Add missing image dimensions
First let’s talk about the perfmatters script manager:
Some of the WP plugins are coded for usability and their rich feature sets not for performance. Just take an example of the Contact form 7 plugin.
Questions would be why would you load a script on a specific page when it’s not even needed.
With perfmatters script manager you can one-click disable scripts in WordPress posts/pages. Even globallay accross all over the site.
This can drastically increase the page loading speed especially your website homepage.
You can disable any plugin anywhere on the page which is taking extra time to get your page loaded. Contact Form 7 plugin loads itself on every page and post.
Your social media sharing icons should only be loaded on the post so you can disable them everywhere and load them only on post types, or even custom post types.
You can see the performance boost after enabling the MU mode in perfmatters script manager.
Must-use (MU) mode requires elevated permissions and a file to be copied into the mu-plugins directory. This gives you more control and the ability to disable plugin queries, inline CSS, etc
Optimize your fonts.
It was hard for me to fix the font loading issue without changing it so, I Simply enabled the perfmatters Local google font options which helps you to load the font locally without creating ensure the text remains visible during the Webfont load.
Disabling the google fonts will drastically improve the page load time just by replacing the styled font with system fonts.
Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is easy in perfmatters just enable the feature😎. Beyond image compression, you can also optimize the delivery of your images by using lazy loading.
By default, the browser will load all 50 of those images when someone visits the site.
It cuts the 85+% image request if you enable the lazy load feature. Google actually recommends lazy loading. If you are not using lazy loading you will see an error message when testing your site” defer offscreen images”.
Instant Page
The instant page feature allows you to fetch the page/link on your site when a user hovers on the link. That way your pages will load super fast if the user clicks on the internal links.
After 65 ms it automatically starts preloading the URL in the background.
instantaneous load times and improves both the user experience and perceived performance.
Google Analytics
Hosting your google analytic scripts locally will help you to solve the error”
Reduce the impact of third-party code”.
To do so you just need to put your Tracking ID inside the perfmatters analytics section.
Optimize database
To optimize WordPress admin dashboard loading speed you have to optimize the front-end database that’s how perfmatters database optimize feature comes into the play.
You see above my 31 revisions found ! They were sitting in the database. None of these will probably ever be used so it’s better to clean and start from a fresh slate.
Defer Javascript
To solve the unused javascript error there are two ways.
- Delay Javascript
- Defer Javascript
In the defer JS section you can simply exclude your scripts from being deferred so, it wouldn’t cause any design-related issues.
Minify CSS
Minifying CSS is the best part of the speed optimization and it’s a bit complicated if you try to do it manually but I would prefer using the free auto-optimize plugin to handle the issue or you can simply use the Cloudflare free plan to handle minification without any problem.
Delay JavaScript
While deferring JavaScript pushes the script to the bottom of the page load, you can alternatively delay JavaScript based on user interaction.
Example: delaying Adsense scripts until they interact and start scrolling to the bottom of the page.
This can be a great way to speed up the paint of the page for Core Web Vitals when something isn’t needed right away.
These are the TTFB (time to first byte) results after the configuration of perfmatters and WP rocket you can see how much time it’s taking I am currently hosted on the Vultur HF plan from Cloudways.
These are some of the settings that I would like to do after creating any site using WordPress.
Cache enabler is also a good option as a caching plugin but you would not get most of the optimizations settings in.
Conclusion
Perfmatters is not a caching a plugin. It’s a simple and easy solution to optimize your website loading time for core web vitals especially for FCP and LCP.
- $24.95 for 1 site license. Includes 1 year of support and updates.
- $54.95 for 3 site license. Includes 1 year of support and updates.
- $124.95 for an unlimited site license
Developer support? No way you were left behind……….personally know Brian Jackson and his brother Brett Jackson putting a lot of hard work by adding extra features in perfmatters changelog.
Support is awesome and super fast not sure about the time difference but your ticket will be answered in few hours.
