How to Improve WordPress Site Performance

Improve FCP (First Contentful Paint)

First Contentful Paint (FCP) measures the time between the start of the page loading until the first part of the page content is visible on the screen, whether it is text, an image or anything else.

A web page is an HTML file. The structure of this file is called the DOM (Document Object Model).

The DOM allows web browsers to analyze the structure of your page before displaying it.

You can simplify a DOM by using a powerful HTML editor (web page builders added to WordPress often generate large DOMs).

To reduce the display time of the first element of your page, avoid starting it by loading an image, even an optimized one.

Also avoid loading any JavaScript or CSS file that is not immediately essential.

Improve LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

LCP indicates the rendering time of the largest block of your site. It is usually an image or a video, more rarely a sound file.

The most common mistake involving images is uploading a file that exceeds the resolution of 96 dpi.

This is the case if you have taken a high-resolution photo and directly incorporated it into your web page without first optimizing it.

If your image must be displayed at a maximum width of 800 pixels, resize the file to this dimension before uploading it.

In WordPress, dimensions (width x height) are predefined to automatically generate large, medium or small images.

Respect the dimensions chosen in the WordPress settings.

I also recommend that you install an image optimization plugin such as Imagify which can replace your JPG images with images in the more modern WEBP format.

Improve TBT (Total Blocking Time)

TBT is a measure that identifies the time it takes for the first block of a page to appear compared to the time when the page becomes reliably interactive.

I suggest you install the LightHouse extension in Chrome to display this measure.

A page is loaded in blocks. Each block can be made up of a third-party JavaScript script, for example, or CSS.

To improve TBT, you should therefore try to postpone the loading of these third-party codes when they are not essential.

For sites made with WordPress, I recommend installing the WP Rocket plugin, which is excellent for managing the loading of these parasitic scripts.

If you need help setting it up correctly, please contact me.

The accessibility of a web page is determined by the ease with which people with disabilities can still access the information on that page.

Accessibility criteria have been defined globally by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

This could be, for example, not being able to use a mouse to click on elements or to move from one form field to another.

You can test the accessibility of each of your pages for free, online, using the W3C testing tool.

Here is a screenshot made from a W3C test on the home page of my website:

Especially try to correct the scripts with the “Error” block.

In this example, it is the image optimization performed by the LazyLoad function of a plugin that generated a JavaScript error.

Unfortunately for people with disabilities, not all companies make it a priority to optimize their programs for digital accessibility.

To improve the score for this criterion, I therefore recommend that you replace the plugins on your website that do not correctly manage this aspect with other, better-built plugins.

Google has issued a set of rules considered to be good practices, to be consulted on its website called “Google Search Essentials“.

The tests carried out by PageSpeed ​​Insights explain which of these practices should be improved for the page tested.

This could be, for example, to display images in low resolution (72 or 96 dpi) at the dimensions intended for their display.

Another good practice is to avoid JavaScript errors that can harm the user experience.

If one of your plugins contains JavaScript errors, ask its publisher to correct them or change the plugin!

Last example of good practice: ensure the security and reliability of your content.

Many websites made under WordPress are real sieves in terms of security, their designers clearly not caring about this risk.

Among the most common errors, we often see that the access page to the administration of a WordPress site is of the type:

https://mysite.com/wp-admin/

Worse: the administrator identifier set by default in the database often remains “root”, sometimes without any password required to identify yourself!

To improve the security of your WordPress website, I suggest you install the WordFence Security plugin which will automatically resolve this type of defect for you.

Of course, your website already has an SSL certificate and can only be accessed from a URL starting with https://…

If this is not the case, you are in the worst security risk!

My favorite criteria 🙂

If you click on the “Passed Audits” link in the SEO block of the PageSpeed ​​Insights report, you will see which tests this tool performed to give you its SEO score.

I summarize these tests below:

The document contains a “meta description” attribute.
The page returns a successful HTTP status code.
The links contain descriptive text.
The links can be crawled.
This page is not blocked from indexing.
The robots.txt file is valid.
The image elements have [alt] attributes.
The document’s hreflang attribute is valid.
The document’s rel=canonical attribute is valid.
The document uses readable font sizes 100% of the text readable.
The document avoids plugins.
The touch elements are sized correctly 100%.
of the touch elements are sized correctly.
Of course, if you ask me to perform an SEO audit of your web pages, all these tests will be verified.

If corrections are necessary, I can offer to carry them out, so that your SEO score on PageSpeed ​​Insights is 100.