Improve Site Performance by Removing/Replacing Widgets & Plugins?
-
We completed a Wordpress redesign of our website in December. The project took about 8 months. Important URLs on the new site are performing slowly according to Google Page Speed Insights. For instance, a key product page gets a score of 18 on mobile and 61 on desktop. Home page scores 37 on mobile and 80 on desktop.
My new SEO believes the website is hindered by an excessive number of plugins and widgets. That reducing the number of these may increase performance. Also, my developers were unable to get WT3 Total Cache to work with our InMotion server and have used about 3 plugins for cache.
We purchased a real estate theme (wpcasa) and heavily customized it. Any suggestions for improveing performance? If we recoded the website from scratch without a pre existing theme (using the existing design) would that speed up performance? Is there anything we can do remove complexity and improve URL download speeds? We are in a very competitive niche and we need decent performance in order to rank.
Thanks,
Alan -
There are numerous aspects that go into page speed.
When you run an analysis, whether in Pingdom, GTMetrix, or Google Page Speed, you will get insights about what is slowing down your site. These are the aspects you want to focus on. The best I find is GTMetrix. It gives you a step by step list of everything slowing down your site. Then, you can research each point and find ways to improve them. That said, here are a few areas to check:
1. Are you running the highest version of Wordpress and PHPadmin. You want at least 7.0 or higher for PHP admin, and you want to be using Wordpress 5.0.
2. Your server speed and the quality of your host will play a bigger role than anything else in the speed of your site. Check with your hosting company if your server can handle your site. With hosting, quality is a lot more important than price. You can get cheap, shared hosting from an unreliable supplier, but you will get the site speed that goes with it. You want a server that's located in the country where most of your traffic will come from, and you never want it to be "just good enough". It's like towing with a truck. If you need to tow 5,000 pounds, you'll want a truck that can tow at least 7,500 pounds with ease. Not sure if that makes sense, but the point is, make sure your server is capable of towing a lot more than your current site.
If you're not sure which hosts are best, do some online research. I won't name names here, but there are 3 or 4 hosting companies that are constantly head and shoulders above the rest.
3. Your images also play a huge role in your site speed. Make sure they are optimized. Again, Page Speed and GTMetrix will let you know how big of a role your images are playing in your slow site.
4. Research Leverage Browser Caching.
5. Research "slow wordpress site". There is a guide available that helps you go step by step to improve speed.
Site speed is a range of factors. There can be hundreds of factors hurting your site but the four above are the major ones. Don't worry too much about your theme. It plays a role, but no theme can be fast if the host is slow, the images are too big, you don't enable Leverage Browser Caching and your Wordpress and PHP versions aren't up to date.
As for your plugins, there is a plugin that checks which of your plugins are slowing down your site the most called P3, but I wouldn't recommend it. It caused a few problems on our site when we ran it. That said, the rule of thumb with plugins is delete anything you don't use, don't use two plugins that do the same thing, and make sure you use reliable plugins that have good reviews and are updated regularly.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO Class/Course/Certification
Hello, I'm located in the US and I'm looking for **good **SEO classes or courses. Something that provides certification when completed, if possible. This is something that my employer wants to do. I know MOZ offers a lot of information here and has a course as well, but I'm looking for something that is in person. I tend to learn better that way. I see some things pop up when I search, but I believe most of it is just junk. I am looking for something that would basically go from intermediate to advanced. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | slecinc0 -
Ipad Sales & Traffic Improvement for my Ecommerce site
Do you guys know any tool or software which provides follow things for my ecommerce site? Real Time/ next day data for ipad traffic Real Time/ next day data for ipad urls visited Read time/ next day data for ipad Page rendering load time for all the urls separately Real Time/ next day data for ipad network load time for all the urls separately Real Time/ next day data for ipad dom processing time for the all the urls separately Real Time/ next day data for ipad request queuing load time for all the urls separtely Real Time/ next day data for ipad web application load time for all the urls separtely Real Time/ next day data for ipad total load time for each url Real Time/ Next day data for ipad timestamp i.e Time of each url being accessed by the visitor Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor city Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor country code Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor duration on that page Real Time/ next day data for ipad visitor user agent name foreg chrome, IE, safari, firefox etc Real time/ next day data for ipad visitor user agent OS foreg. ipad only Real time/ next day data for ipad user agent version foreg. ipad 8.0, ipad 6.0, ipad air, ipad ratina, ipad mini etc Real time/ next day data for ipad visitor for each url session trace in water fall like backend time, dom processing, page load, waiting on ajax, interactions of visitors etc Real time/ next day data for ipad visitor for each url with total request for each page. Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors for each url with javascript error on the page and javascript url plus stake track of that error. Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors for each url with ajax error on the page and ajax url plus stake track of the error Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors for each and every url where each and every request time taken in waterfall layout. Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors funnel visiualization tracking Real time/ next day data for ipad visitors transcations tracking. Please note that all above data also require day wise, country wise, previous days and month, model wise sorting, pagination feature, etc. waiting for your reply Regards, Mit
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mit0 -
Domain.com/old-url to domain.com/new-url
HI, I have to change old url`s to new one, for the same domain and all landing pages will be the same: domain.com/old-url I have to change to: domain.com/new-url All together more than 70.000 url. What is best way to do that? should I use 301st redirect? is it possible to do in code or how? what could you please suggest? Thank you, Edgars
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edzjus3330 -
Why does old "Free" site ranks better than new "Optimized" site?
My client has a "free" site he set-up years ago - www.montclairbariatricsurgery.com (We'll call this the old site) that consistently outranks his current "optimized" (new) website - http://www.njbariatricsurgery.com/ The client doesn't want to get rid of his old site, which is now a competitor, because it ranks so much better. But he's invested so much in the new site with no results. A bit of background: We recently discovered the content on the new site was a direct copy of content on the old site. We had all copy on new site rewritten. This was back in April. The domain of the new site was changed on July 8th from www.Bariatrx.com to what you see now - www.njbariatricsurgery.com. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhatUpHud0 -
Help with https// redirects
Hey there
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jay328
I have a client who just moved from a self hosted CMS to Adobe Catalyst (don't ask!)
The problem: Their url indexed with google is https://domain.com, Adobe Catalyst does not support third party SSL certificates or https domains. Now when people google them https://domain.com shows up in search, HOWEVER it does not have a trusted certificate and a pop up window blocks the site. They are a mortgage company so SSL is really not needed. What can I do to get google to recognize the site at http: vs. https? Would this be something in GWMT? Thanks!0 -
If we remove all of the content for a branch office in one city from a web site, will it harm rankings for the other branches?
We have a client with a large, multi-city home services business. The service offerings vary from city to city, so each branch has it's own section on a fairly large (~6,000 pages) web site. Each branch drives a significant amount of revenue from organic searches specific to its geographic location (ex: Houston plumbers or Fort Worth landscaping). Recently, one of the larger branches has decided that it wants its own web site on a new domain because they have been convinced by an SEO firm that they can get better results with a standalone site. That branch wants us to remove all of its content (700-800 pages) on the current site and has said we can 301 all inbound links to the removed content to other pages on the existing site to mitigate any loss to domain authority. The other branch managers want to know if removing this city-specific content could negatively impact search rankings for their cities. On the surface it seems like as long as we have proper redirects in place, the other branches should be okay. Am I missing something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monkeeboy0 -
Urgent Site Migration Help: 301 redirect from legacy to new if legacy pages are NOT indexed but have links and domain/page authority of 50+?
Sorry for the long title, but that's the whole question. Notes: New site is on same domain but URLs will change because URL structure was horrible Old site has awful SEO. Like real bad. Canonical tags point to dev. subdomain (which is still accessible and has robots.txt, so the end result is old site IS NOT INDEXED by Google) Old site has links and domain/page authority north of 50. I suspect some shady links but there have to be good links as well My guess is that since that are likely incoming links that are legitimate, I should still attempt to use 301s to the versions of the pages on the new site (note: the content on the new site will be different, but in general it'll be about the same thing as the old page, just much improved and more relevant). So yeah, I guess that's it. Even thought the old site's pages are not indexed, if the new site is set up properly, the 301s won't pass along the 'non-indexed' status, correct? Thanks in advance for any quick answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
Removed Site-wide links
Hi there, I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780