How to optimize and accelerate the Kadence theme+Siteground virtual host website

A few days ago, a netizen's foreign trade website was very slow. He wanted to find Weieisi's notes to help speed it up. After learning about the relevant situation in the website background and virtual host, Lao Wei raised the website evaluation score from 49, 70/80, C to 98, 99, A, etc. This article records the whole operation process. If you have similar questions, you can discuss them with Lao Wei.

1. Theme+host

This website uses Kadence Theme+ Woocommerce Plug in This theme Lao Wei has introduced a lot of content, ranking first in the opening speed of foreign themes, so there is no need to worry about the theme itself.

Used Siteground 's startup package. This package can build a website, and the efficiency of the growbig package is 30% higher than that of its PHP. Here is a foreshadowing, which will be mentioned later.

Related reading: What's the difference between Siteground's StartUp/GrowBig/GoGeek packages? How to choose?

2. Gtmetrix and page speed insights

First, use these two speed scoring websites to test the results. Through the results and explanations, we can find the reasons for the current slow speed of the website. These two tools analyze and explain from many aspects. We can get high scores as long as we solve them one by one.

The following figure is old Wei Gang when he took over the website Gtmetrix And Google page speed insights score.

Please note that the score is not important. What is important is that we find and solve the problem that leads to low scores through the score and relevant introduction, which will speed up the website.

3. View the list of website plug-ins

The website imports the default demo of Kadence theme, and then manually modifies and replaces the pictures and text.

The overall layout follows the demo demo station, which is very comfortable.

When I saw the plug-in, I found the problem. As soon as I went in, I saw many plug-ins and counted 28. OK, let's start with plug-ins to solve the problem.

The webmaster didn't know enough about WordPress, so some plug-ins didn't stop even though they were useless. First, ask which plug-ins are not used but not disabled. These plug-ins are stopped and then uninstalled. Ten plug-ins are stopped, including WordPress Starter 、 Elementor , Google statistics plug-in, etc. There are four useless plug-ins in Google alone.

The remaining nine plug-ins are excluded one by one. Some have used them but abandoned them in the middle of the process. Some have not registered an account and cannot be used. After discussion, they are all uninstalled.

Lao Wei's tip: The WordPress plug-ins that are not used must be uninstalled. Do not leave them in the plug-in list, which will take up system resources and affect the website speed.

4. Website image optimization

When Lao Wei opened the home page of the website, the browser kept circling, and his intuition was that the problem was the picture. After checking, we found that there were two problems with the home page pictures, one was too many, and the other was that the size and size were very large!

Any product image on the home page is 2000 * 1000 in size. The largest image has 1M multi capacity, and the smallest image has 138kb capacity. Do you think such a home page can be faster?

So Lao Wei started to download, compress and optimize pictures one by one. Many of the photos he took used the png format, which was directly reduced by more than 90% after changing to the jpg format!

Lao Wei suggested that vector pictures, text and simple line pictures can be in png format; The real photos/objects/people taken must be in jpg format. The wrong format will result in ten or one hundred times larger picture size.

5. Cache plug-in

Initially used by the website WP super cache Plug in, the effect is as seen at the beginning of this article, Lao Wei resolutely uninstalled.

Replace Siteground optimizer Plug ins can play a greater role with the Siteground virtual host. However, in the later stage, it was found that only the mobile terminal scored 72 points, which was still not satisfactory, and the optimization continued.

Replace WP rocket Plug in, check the function of separate cache on the mobile end, and by the way, clean up the database garbage. At this time, the evaluation score is more than 90 points and close to 99 points.

The score after optimization is shown in the following figure:

6. Other operations

During the above operation, I also tried Asset CleanUp 、 Clearfy 、 Autoptimize A lot of time was spent on setting up and operating a number of optimized and accelerated plug-ins, but the score was not ideal.

7. Summary

Not all websites can use the above ideas to achieve nearly full score. Lightweight themes are relatively easy to optimize. Some themes with large and comprehensive functions are not easy to optimize.

Lao Wei summarized the following experiences and shared them:

• Kadence Theme and Astra The lightweight theme, theme, is relatively easy to optimize. As long as you pay attention to and deal with several common key points, the score will rise at once.
• Kadence theme is based on the Gutenberg editor (WordPress native), which is easy to optimize and will not cause headaches for other themes.
• In the evaluation results of page speed insights, TFFB consumes a long time (if it exceeds 600ms, there will be a corresponding prompt). Combined with the fact that the PHP efficiency of the startup package is not as good as that of the growbig package mentioned at the beginning of this article.
• If the cost budget is sufficient or there are more websites to build, it is recommended to purchase the growbig package directly to enjoy the pleasure of improving the software and hardware efficiency by 30%. TFFB time will be greatly improved, and it is possible to get 100 points in the evaluation.
• Hostinger virtual host , using the currently recognized fastest openlite speed service in the industry, Lao Wei's personal testing is fast and cost-effective. Interested please see Hostinger virtual host purchase, discount code and installation setup tutorial 。
• The website optimization needs to start from the above and more perspectives. The optimization and speed up in many aspects will also experience the bad experience of detours, such as ineffective, effective but not good, and finally can achieve a good result of nearly 100 points for both mobile and PC terminals.