Achieving Maximum Site Speed

While Acabado’s features are streamlined for top speed, there are additional and important steps you can take to help your site reach maximum speed potential.

Optimize Your Images

This is CRITICAL to achieving high site speed. Even if you are resizing your images in Photoshop you still need to do this! We recommend using the following two plugins to handle your image compression.

In your WordPress Dashboard go to Plugins > Add New and Search for “ShortPixel”. Install activate these plugins: ShortPixel Image Optimizer & ShortPixel Resize Image After Upload.

Follow the tutorial on Setting Up Image Optimization. 

Ads

If you have ads on your website, they can significantly slow down your site. Ads function by first loading tracking codes when a visitor comes to your site. This allows the ads company to gather data from the user immediately. Even ads services that “Lazy Load” still are loading the tracking codes first. It is simply the creative elements or visual graphics that are loaded last. Because of this ads will inevitably slow your site speed on ANY theme. Some ad networks optimize speeds better than others or allow a lazy load of tracking codes. We recommend talking with your ad broker to see if there are any services or options available from then to optimize you speed performance.

Plugins

The truth is the MAJORITY of problems on your site will be caused by plugins. In your WordPress dashboard go to Plugins > Installed Plugins and do an audit of the plugins on your site. Be very deliberate about the plugins you keep and the purpose they serve. If you have any plugins that are not ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to the site, take the time to deactivate and delete them. This includes de-activating and deleting the recommended “One Click Demo” plugin now that your site is set up. The goal is to have the minimum plugins possible. Most are simply not essential. Multiple plugins on your site it will negatively effect your speed and site performance.

Hosting

Despite, making the above changes, your site may still be deep cached on by your host. This means that the host is loading a previously cache of your site that does not reflect the recent changes. Wait 30 minutes for all changes to process and test your site again.

We have tested Acabado on many hosts and found in general hosting platforms count for just a few points overall. Most hosting services should perform fine with Acabado. The main difference will be how fast the server receives the request and then transmits data back out. You may notice a slight impact with faster more expensive hosting servers, but not likely significant differences. You can see our recommendations for hosting at incomeschool.com/hosting .