Suggestion to improve slow Wordpress page

Question

So The website on the company I work on, has issues with delayed homepage loading times. Obviously I suggested to remove a few features from the first page, but I am afraid that all the included stuff makes it hard for the website to perform.

Wordpress Unero is the theme Here are some plugins included: WPBakery Page Builder Yoast SEO Unero Visual Composer Addons Woo Commerce Woo Commerce related extra plugins Some other additional plugins.

It seems that the plugins add a lot of js code in the page, making it load slower. Is there a simple way, maybe by adding some code on the header of the page to make all js code run in parallel or something?

If not (I believe things are not THAT simple) what do you suggest?

Answer 1

If it's possible, remove Visual Composer and WPBakery Page Builder that can be the reason for heavy site. As you have not shared any result or matrix here are the few things you can follow.

• Check Above Fold Content
• Check Server Response Time
• Defer JavaScript
• Minify and Merge .CSS & .JavaScript
• Try to Reduce Page Size
• Use CDN
• Use Progressive Images Instead of Baseline Images
• Lazy Load for Images
• WP Rocket Plugin

Answer 2

If your content was created using page building plugins, your website will break if you remove them, so that is not an option. Yoast SEO is essential. If nobody can find your website, it will not matter how fast it is. Without the benefit of seeing the website in question, I can only give very general advice.

As a WP freelancer, I have seen many times when jQuery or other JS libraries were loaded multiple times. You can load the page in any browser and press Ctrl+u to check for these types of problems. It is often the first thing I do when diagnosing a slow WP website.

If you are loading large, hi-res images, they need to be run through a lossless compressor, like compressor.io.

I have found the WP caching plugins to be a huge curse and I do not use them. When a WP website goes down, one third of the time it is the caching plugin. Instead, I suggest that you use cloudflare.com. One really needs to identify the problem and resolve it instead of adding problematic caching plugins.

Honestly, there may not be a single fix, only 100 smaller things that you could do. You could move the whole website to a specialized WP hosting provider like wpengine.com, however, CloudFlare can do most of what they are doing for free.

If only the home page is slow, then your server may be fine. That would indicate that you have too many plugins, huge images, or problems like I described in paragraph 2 on the main page.

To answer your question about loading JS in parallel, WP doesn't make it easy to make these changes. It is much better to combine all JS into one file but it is a very technical job to do it correctly and without breaking the site.

I am a big fan of gtmetrix.com. If you are getting a low score, it may be time to call a WP professional to help resolve the big issues.

Answer 3

There are following ways you can improve it;

• Use cloudflare and tick all the three options in Minify tab.
• Do not use Jetpack (If you're using then do not use "Photon" option if you have cloudflare running on your site.)
• Use W3 Total Cache.
• Use Autoptimize.
• Use Async Autoptimize plugin.
• Turn on Lazy load if your theme supports it.

If still your web site is slow, then it means that your Host has overloaded servers and you can't do much about it. Cheers!