There’re a few steps to optimize the performance of your website and get a higher score of Google PageSpeed Insights.
General Recommendations
There’re a few general performance optimization recommendations, which will get you a decent result in Google PageSpeed Insights and other tools.
Enable Cache
Install and activate a caching plugin. We generally recommend WP Super Cache:
Don’t forget to enable caching on the plugin’s settings page.
Enable CSS and JS Minification
CSS and JavaScript are static files. They will be loaded faster, if they’re minified. It’s very simple to automatically minify them.
Simply install and activate the Autoptimize plugin:
Go to the plugin’s settings page and enable the three options:
- Optimize HTML Code?
- Optimize JavaScript Code?
- Optimize CSS Code?
Some of Shopfront features require the “Also aggregate inline JS?” to be enabled too.
Improve Hosting Configuration
Ask your hosting provider to do the following for you:
- Enable gzip compression.
- Leverage browser caching.
If your hosting provider refuses to do so, it’s high time to consider changing your service provider. See our recommended hosting companies here.
Enable Lazy Loading of Images
Go to the Powerkit settings page and enable the Lazy Load module. Make sure you regenerate thumbnails afterwards.
Regenerate Images
First make sure that you’ve regenerated thumbnails with the plugin:
General Notes on Google PageSpeed Insights
Google has recently changed its algorithm for evaluation of the PageSpeed Insights score.
If you check most of the sites (including best sellers among ThemeForest themes), you’ll notice that they hardly get around the 50s.
Some of our demos use the video background feature, and PageSpeed Insights considers auto-loaded videos to be a bad thing, while it’s just a YouTube embed.
Since all Shopfronts support AMP, the AMP version will be used (not the mobile one) for all posts on mobiles, so there’s even no use in evaluating the mobile version in Google PageSpeed Insights anymore.
Hardly any of well-established sites have a high PageSpeed Insights score:
- GQ – 22 for mobiles / 43 for desktops.
- Huffington Post – 22 for mobiles / 42 for desktops.
- CNN – 1 for mobiles / 23 for desktops.
- New York Times – 29 for mobiles / 53 for desktops.
Instead, you should consider the following checks.
Both of them will ensure your content is mobile ready and is loaded fast on the client’s side.
Just make sure your content is great and you will surely get your visitors.