Last month, I took action to correct the ultra-slow loading time of my blog.  I cleaned up the site and used a few plugins to improve the performance.  I went from a “D” score to a middle “B” according to Google’s PageSpeed Insights.  Most importantly, the load time according to Pingdom went from 13.6 seconds to 0.914 seconds. This is a huge improvement, and I am delighted by the results.  I covered the steps I went through in my March 25^th post.

Note:  I am not affiliated or compensated in any way by any company or service listed or linked.  This is my experience as I work to improve my website’s performance through trial and error.  If anyone has suggestions or recommendations to improve the performance of a self-hosted WordPress site, please post a comment.  Thank you for the help! –Mike

However, I noticed a few issues starting to creep up when the caching plugin was enabled. First off, the WordPress Admin page became very slow.  The login process could take 30 seconds or longer to complete.  Additionally, some of the images would show as broken links or be incorrectly sized until the page was refreshed.  I know some of this is fixable by

1. Disabling the Object Cache
2. Locating and moving some of the Java out of the minify settings. I would need to test and find the exact Java files that are causing the issue.
3. Change the .JS loading to blocking.

The last thing I ran into was build errors related to the CSS/JS cache. From doing some reading, these errors seem like they could safely be ignored.  However, it was bugging me.

I started to look for a new cache plugin that has been updated more recently.  I came across WP Fastest Cache. The configuration of WP Fastest Cache is a snap to set up.  I placed check marks in all the available options listed in their settings’ tab.  That’s it.  Done. I waited for 24-hours before completing a set of tests.

Configuration changes from the original baseline.

• Added basic SSL encryption: I used the .htaccess file to urge all sessions to connect over SSL.
• Replaced the blog theme to Nisarg from Poseidon
• Add plugin Redirection of help eliminate some old 404 errors when pages have been renamed
• Stopped using CloudFlare as a CDN until I have a chance to configure it for SSL. For now, I will use Photon that is part of Jetpack as an image CDN.
• Replaced the cache plugin

Results from Pingdom

Grade: 84
Requests: 31
Load Time: 1.08s
Page Size: 637.4kB

I would say that the plugin is working very well.  While the load time is 19% slower than my earlier results, the total size increased by 38%, and everything is now being delivered over SSL.  This adds more overhead and time for the site to load.  I have detected no performance issues, errors, or layout problems.

What more could I ask 🙂