Central Coast VNA & Hospice company provides and promotes services via a WordPress website. One day they decided to optimize the website because it had become slow. The company turned to our developers for help. We’ve done some basic optimization to speed up the website. Let’s look at what state it was in before optimization, and what we did to improve its condition.

Initially, we tested and audited the website to find out the reasons for the slow performance. Test results showed the following:

The main reasons for slow web page loading were:

• unused JavaScript and CSS;
• third-party code;
• old images format.

These are the most popular reasons for a website to load slowly. Because of this, not only the performance of the website, but also Core Web Vitals decreases. Core Web Vitals play an important role in SEO. If these indicators are low, search engines are not friendly to the website, and it is very difficult to get to the top of search results. Let’s look at what we did to optimize the WordPress website of the Central Coast VNA & Hospice company.

As part of basic optimization, our developers install plugins that speed up the site. On this project we installed and configured the following:

• Perfmatters. Unused features slow down your website. This plugin allows us to disable unnecessary functionality.
• WP Rocket. Caching is important for a website to load quickly. Using this plugin, our WordPress website developers configure and activate site caching.
• Webp Express. It is recommended to use images in a modern format so that loading them takes a minimum of time. This plugin automatically converts images to webp format. The pictures weigh little, but their quality is not lost.

The basis of any web page is code. For a site to load quickly, the syntax must be clean. As part of basic optimization, our WordPress website developers minify CSS and JS. During this process we remove extra characters, spaces and comments. As a result, it is easier for the browser to index pages and open them.

In addition to installing a plugin that automatically converts images to a modern format, our developers have implemented Lazy Loading. Images are loaded gradually as the user scrolls through them. This reduces the load on the server, therefore improving website performance.

Our WordPress developers re-tested the website after optimization to evaluate its effectiveness. Performance results according to Google Pagespeed Insights:

Performance and Core Web Vitals have improved significantly on both mobile and desktop, but unfortunately they are not perfect. There are reasons for this – the site uses the WPBakery constructor. To display content, it needs to load scripts. And to receive images in the carousel of the first block, these scripts use AJAX requests. This sequence of actions reduces the page loading speed. We recommended eliminating the visual editor or changing the way content is displayed to further optimize website performance.