Fixing a poor Google Page Speed Score

August 26, 2015OtherEdit Post

Google Page Speed Insights gives your site a score for speed an useablilty, and while I had a great score for useability, my score for speed was a pathetic **51/100**. My site is WordPress, and because of the plugin ecosystem inserts many blocking assets into your head, WordPress often gets flack for being slow.

So - armed with an hours worth of time, I set out to fix my own website while recording my progress. I'm far from a performance specialist, but hopefully this shows you that making your sites fast is a relatively simple task that can pay off huge for your users.

I mention a few WordPress/Apache specific things in this video, but the tips should apply to any site/server config.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfKf7KCmfRY

Links:

• ZenCache
• Kraken and Kraken WordPress Plugin

.htaccess config:

# 1 Week
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public, must-revalidate"

<IfModule deflate_module>
  <IfModule filter_module>
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/xml-dtd
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rdf+xml application/rss+xml application/atom+xml image/svg+xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/javascript application/javascript application/x-javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf font/opentype application/font-otf application/x-font-otf
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf font/truetype application/font-ttf application/x-font-ttf
  </IfModule>
</IfModule>