The time to load a website or blog is as important as its design or content. Indeed, this has an impact on Google SEO, but also on the appreciation of visitors. So I propose 5 tools/steps to improve the speed of loading your website/blog.
The new theme being much more graphic, I suspected that the images were for something. Here are the steps and tools I used to improve things.
Analyze with PINGDOM TOOLS
Pingdom Tools is a tool to measure the performance of a Web site. To do this, simply enter the URL of your site, select a location of the test server and run the analysis.
The result is information on the page being tested, such as the loading time, the weight of the page loaded, the number of requests requested by the page to the server to load.
a detail allows to see in detail the elements of the site which are heaviest and impact the loading time. In my case, the doubt was lifted since the photos accounted for nearly 50% of the weight of the page loaded. The next step will be to optimize them.
Compress IMAGES with WPSMUSH
WpSmush is a free plugin (with a paid version) for Worpress that allows you to compress uplinked images on WordPress. It is possible to compress them at the time of their addition or thereafter via the "bulk smush" button.
The limit of the free version concerns images of more than 1MB which are not processed
If you are not using WordPress, other image optimization services exist such as Imagify.
Compress SCRIPTS and style sheets with AUTOPTIMIZE
Most themes use scripts to add features and style files to customize the graphical rendering of the site. In addition, the scripts and style sheets of the added plugins are added. Loading all these files slows down the loading of the Web page.
The Autoptimize plugin allows to compress all these files into 2 or 3 files which are certainly heavier, but load once.
It is enough to check in the management panel what you want to compress (CSS, JS, and even HTML content). Compressed files are cached to be used directly when loading the Web site.
Set up cache with WP Supercache
A cache allows you to create static files of your site that will be sent to the users who consult it. This prevents the server from sending each element of the site (text, images, files) from the database. Thus, a Web page only in HTML already ready is sent to the user.
To configure this plugin, I followed the recommendations of this complete WP Super Cache tutorial.
Test again with PAGESPEED insights from GOOGLE
Once the first changes are made, this second analysis tool allows you to identify other optimization tracks on specific files. So the Google tool tests the speed of your site on computer and on mobile. You will find the main categories that slow down the site (images/caching) with an accurate list of the files that are problematic. In each category, a link to a help page helps you deepen the problem to find a solution.