You can find many step-by-step guides on the web showing you how to do this with whichever server you may be using, including this. Each of these will require you to use different processes to enable gzip compression in them. The Majority of php servers are using either Apache or nginx for serving their web pages.
Enabling gzip compression can reduce the size of the transferred response by up to 90%, which can significantly reduce the amount of time to download the resource, reduce data usage for the client, and improve the time to first render of your pages. According to Google, enabling compression in your server will benefit your WordPress site in following way:Īll modern browsers support and automatically negotiate gzip compression for all HTTP requests. Though you should note that this one has nothing to do directly with your WordPress installation you’ll need to apply the proper setting in hosting environment accordingly. This is perhaps the most basic and essential step that you should take in optimising your WordPress website for the best speed scores. The following factors are the most important ones being considered in both sets of standards and are essential for optimising your theme for the highest possible score. It calculates the average score for both standards and assigns you an alphabetical ranking (A,B,C.) accordingly.Įven though GTmetrix is based on Google and Yahoo page scores, it has its own range of factors when assessing your web page speed and performance.
GTmetrix is another free tool that analyses page performance based on Google PageSpeed and Yahoo! Yslow score. A score of 85+ indicates good performance. Google PageSpeed Insights measures the performance of a page through a double-fetch of url once with mobile user-agent and then with a desktop user-agent and assigns a score of 0-100 based on performance. I will also provide a list of how major WordPress themes compare against it in the market now.īefore you decide to take any actions for optimizing your page for either of these two tests, it’s crucial to know the basic concepts about how they work. In this article I’m going to explain two major speed measurement standards Google Page Speed Insights and GTmetrix, the factor they both consider when assessing and benchmarking websites and the best practices to improve them in your WordPress-based website. Products need to be able to quickly load on different devices, handhelds and wearables and that’s why it’s not surprising that Google encourages the faster loading websites by giving them a higher ranking than competitors and also penalises the slow or laggy websites in search results. Though if you’re curious about which website building platform will win the battle to rule them all, look nowhere else than at the speediest one. Great websites aren’t just about aesthetics anymore! We’re living in an age of internet where a great website means it’s responsive, SEO-optimised, and most importantly fast.