Hi, my name is Tom. Among other things, I like to build fast-loading and modern-looking WordPress websites. I have had a personal portfolio website for many years. In 2013, I decided to switch from Drupal to WordPress as my content management system and I have never looked back. While Drupal is a fantastic and powerful CMS out of the box, maintaining a Drupal site and keeping it updated is quite cumbersome. WordPress has a reputation of being more user-friendly than Drupal. Personally, I don’t think Drupal is not user-friendly, on the contrary, right after installation I found Drupal to be very powerful and pretty user-friendly. However, with each major update, Drupal tries to re-invent itself and gets rid of the ballast the developers no longer consider required.
I have had a personal portfolio website for many years. In 2013, I decided to switch from Drupal to WordPress as my content management system and I have never looked back. While Drupal is a fantastic and powerful CMS out of the box, maintaining a Drupal site and keeping it updated is quite cumbersome. WordPress has a reputation of being more user-friendly than Drupal. Personally, I don’t think Drupal is not user-friendly, on the contrary, right after installation I found Drupal to be very powerful and pretty user-friendly. However, with each major update, Drupal tries to re-invent itself and gets rid of the ballast the developers no longer consider required.
As I gained experience with WordPress, I launched new projects and I wanted my websites to load fast. Very fast. I thought I had followed the best practices, used premium extensions with great ratings. But my sites needed 2 seconds or more to load, and some heavier pages even more. While some people may be happy with 2 second page load times, I was very unhappy with that.
In 2017, I started to read a lot about speed optimization and performed lots of experiments and tests. It took many sleepless nights, but after a few months I got to a point where I was perfectly satisfied with my page load times. And the performance scores on tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix (Web Vitals) are pretty good, too 🙂
There is a plethora of things you can do to improve your page load times. Some of them bring significant improvements, others make only a tiny difference. But all these improvements, no matter how small are accumulative. Nevertheless, some of them might not be worth the effort.
In this blog, I share my experiences with WordPress speed optimization. I hope you will find my WordPress tips and tricks helpful!
Greetings,
Tom