Speed Up Your Website

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Website performance plays a key role in user experience and search engine rankings. Willow is built with performance in mind, but proper configuration is essential to achieve the best results.

In this section, you’ll learn practical tips and best practices to optimize your website, reduce loading times, and improve overall performance.

We recommend reviewing these topics after completing your site setup to ensure your website runs smoothly and efficiently.

Plugins That Can Improve Performance

1. LiteSpeed Cache

LiteSpeed Cache is a powerful caching and performance optimization plugin, especially recommended if your hosting provider uses LiteSpeed servers. It helps reduce page load times by caching pages, optimizing CSS and JavaScript, and improving overall server performance.

This plugin is ideal for high-traffic websites and can significantly improve Core Web Vitals when configured correctly.

Plugin link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/litespeed-cache/

WP Meteor – Page Speed Optimization Topping

WP Meteor focuses on improving perceived performance by delaying non-critical JavaScript until user interaction. This helps pages load faster and improves metrics such as First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).

It works well alongside caching plugins and is especially useful for websites using page builders like Elementor.

Plugin link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-meteor/

1. Good Server

First and most important of all you will need a good server!!

We recommend hosting.com or Siteground

2. Use a CDN

First we will use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) you can learn more about what’s a cdn here http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/why-you-need-a-cdn-for-your-wordpress-blog-infographic/
I use cloudflare. Go here https://www.cloudflare.com/ and create your account.
Now you need to add your website and change the dns of your domain to pointing to cloudflare.

3. Change your htaccess file

Add the following lines in the top of the file. Htaccess file is on the root of your wordpress installation.

## EXPIRES CACHING ##
< IfModule mod_expires.c >
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
< / IfModule >
## EXPIRES CACHING ##

## ENABLE GZIP COMPRESSION ##
< ifModule mod_gzip.c >
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
< / ifModule >

# 1 Month for most static assets
< filesMatch ".(css|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|ico)$" >
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public"
< / filesMatch >

NOTE Remove the spaces on IfModule and filesMatch tags

Learn how to work with htaccess file https://varvy.com/pagespeed/htaccess.html

More about gzip compression https://varvy.com/pagespeed/enable-compression.html

Image Optimization

Always optimize images before or after uploading them to your website. Large, uncompressed images can significantly slow down page loading times.

We recommend using an image optimization plugin to automatically compress both existing images and future uploads.

Popular solutions include EWWW Image Optimizer, TinyPNG – Compress Images, and similar tools.

Some optimization plugins also support converting images to modern formats such as .webp, which helps reduce file size while preserving image quality. The Performance Lab plugin can assist with automatic image format conversion and additional performance improvements.

Using proper image compression and modern image formats is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your website’s performance.

Speed Up Your Website

Plugins That Can Improve Performance

1. LiteSpeed Cache

WP Meteor – Page Speed Optimization Topping

1. Good Server

2. Use a CDN

3. Change your htaccess file

Image Optimization

Speed Up Your Website

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