{"id":2363,"date":"2014-10-23T05:22:49","date_gmt":"2014-10-22T19:22:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/?p=2363"},"modified":"2017-04-28T10:37:48","modified_gmt":"2017-04-28T00:37:48","slug":"plugins-and-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/plugins-and-performance\/","title":{"rendered":"Website Plugins and Performance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was one of those days.<\/p>\n

I planned to complete a project. Then I had a minor issue on a website. Then I started searching for a solution. That led me to making improvements to two of my websites. And absorbing about 4 hours of my time!<\/p>\n

I could have stopped and got back on plan<\/a>. But that curiosity got me hooked in to working out a solution.<\/p>\n

So I checked me sites on GTMetrix\u00a0<\/a>– they give a great breakdown of what’s needed to improve your site performance with details of what to do – and it’s FREE! Top service.<\/p>\n

Then I made sure I had WPSmushit <\/a>and W3TotalCache <\/a>installed. Smush It is great for reducing the size of your images – just make sure there is nothing over 1mb or it won’t do it. Just install the plugin, go to your Media in the sidebar and click Bulk Smush. Done. No configuring required.<\/p>\n

W3 I had an issue with a while back as it broke my site but it seems to have improved significantly. There is a trick to configuring it and GTMetrix have a handy tutorial <\/a>for that. \u00a0Once I got it configured per instructions, all was well.<\/p>\n

Before tweaking, these were my stats:<\/p>\n

\"site<\/a><\/p>\n

After tweaking …<\/p>\n

\"site<\/a><\/p>\n

This one site gained a 3% increase in Google Page Speed and an 8% improvement in Yahoo YSlow, both being measures of site performance.<\/p>\n

That improvement came simply by Smushing and tweaking the W3 settings as recommended.<\/p>\n

I’m happy with the improvement. There are still things to be done to do better and I might have to look for someone to do the grunt work for me so I can get those two sites into the A grade.<\/p>\n

Just makes you realise how important it is to know about the back-end, SEO and website optimisation so you can continually advance your position in the search engines and be found more – as well as create a better user experience for your reader.<\/p>\n

How do you handle these issues? Got any other tricks?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was one of those days. I planned to complete a project. Then I had a minor issue on a website. Then I started searching for a solution. That led me to making improvements to two of my websites. And absorbing about 4 hours of my time! I could have stopped and got back on… Read More »Website Plugins and Performance<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[43,3],"tags":[32,382,215,381,383],"class_list":["post-2363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tools","category-wordpress","tag-seo","tag-w3-total-cache","tag-website-performance","tag-website-statistics","tag-wpsmushit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/speedometer-153399_195.jpg?fit=625%2C195&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3M6th-C7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2363\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redhotinternetmarketing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}