Two months ago, I spent a week or so learning how to build a WordPress site. As a part of my post-mortem, I identified some performance issues and things that I would have done differently. As I’m taking some time to review previous projects, I am taking the time to tackle a big issue of my site so far — performance.
A major part of the lessons I learned after creating my site was how quickly a WordPress (or any) site can become bloated and have bad performance. I’d noticed that my site took a lot longer to load than I’d like, so this weekend, I am carving out some time to tackle the issues with the site so far.
My benchmark…
I was pleased that Google rated my site 99/100 for User Experience. This was a pleasant reward considering I had user experience in mind the entire time that I was building the site. However, my Speed results were an abysmal 43/100. One of the major issues was render-blocking CSS and JavaScript, with a few images that were uncompressed and unoptimized. I was able to fix the image issues immediately, which bumped my score to 59/100 on both mobile and desktop. However, the other issues require a big of digging on my behalf.
Where to go from here…
Now that I’ve identified the issues, I feel as though I am well on my way to correcting them. Here are some tasks things that I will be doing in hopes of improving performance overall:
1) Reformatting my stylesheets: I have one gigantic stylesheet that is a mess of issues, which was identified in my post mortem. Although I usually code neatly and with a purpose, much of the piece-meal formatting of my style sheets came from me not fully understanding how Bootstrap + WordPress works together.
2) Testing my CSS: I installed CSS Lint to run tests on my CSS code and the first test revealed 3 errors and 143 warnings. I will fix these warnings and errors, but I will also take this time to re-organize my style sheets to make far more sense than it does currently.
3) Broken JavaScript files: I have a couple of errors in my JavaScript files caused by updates to some plug-ins. I will work on getting these errors corrected.
I believe this is a really good place to begin. From there I will continue to use Google Page Insights to increase my page speed. I believe there is some serious refactoring to be done on my part, and use the knowledge that I’ve gained over the past few months. Very exciting times, indeed!
CoderBug
Mira is a Senior Full Stack, specializing in Web Applications developed in the healthcare industry.