So you wanna optimize your website for Google’s new changes…

Building websites and working with companies large and small has shown me a number of things, one of them being that everyone is usually in a race to be the best! Google frequently tells us what they want to see, and how they should be formatted. But most importantly they give us clues to help us get our websites ranking well in their search engine.

I work on a lot of websites, wordpress sites are generally my specialty. I became obsessed with seeing how quickly I could get a normal generic wordpress site to load. Exactly how long does it take to run a website even with a minimalist approach? How highly can I get it to show up in Page Speed Insights and other benchmarking tools.

So I set out to do some research. Between plug-ins, hacks, quirky solutions, out-right lies, and more. You can get your website to blazing fast speeds, even on a small server, with a simple(…or complicated!) website.

Plugins

W3 Total Cache

I tried out W3 Total Cache plug-in. It might be the best you will find in a free, no coding required setup. It does a very respectable job, it takes time and patience in tinkering with the settings to get it right. But I would rate this as a solid B+ for those who want a free solution, and want to take time to do some testing, and hopefully not break anything.

WP Rocket

I have heard and seen very good things about WP-Rocket. They have relatively similar features, the same relative drawbacks, only WP-Rocket is not free. So I will not go in-depth with it. Still for those willing to spend some money and keep out of the code for the most part, this might be well worth looking into.

Mod_Pagespeed

So how did I manage to get scores of 100 for mobile and desktop on Page Speed Insights? I spent weeks tearing things apart, re-factoring code, and figuring out what works, and what does not. I will be going in-depth into many of these in later posts, but for now, some research on mod_pagespeed is definitely warranted.

Mod_pagespeed is amazing! I initially set it up in parallel with W3 Total Cache. The website was very fast, but I dislike using plug-ins and try to avoid them due to having unnecessary overhead, security vulnerabilities, etc. So after being able to consistently get 100/100 on optimization rankings I set out to remove W3 Total Cache entirely.

In the next few articles I will go into small bits and pieces for everything I did to get Google Page Speed Insights into the green consistently! Get out your Linux caps…