My Website started slowing as I added more posts and pages. At the time I did not know what was causing the slow down. People suggested it was a plugin so I deactivated all my plugins one by one to see what difference that made. The answer was none. So then I checked to see if any of them were incompatible with my version of WordPress, but that was not the problem either.
My next step was to check whether one or two of the plugins clashed with each other thus causing the slow down. But that was not it either.
I am using GeneratePress as a theme which is supposed to be very lightweight, So it’s not likely to be that.
The next culprit could be the hosting company (FastComet in my case) or the hosting company’s package I am using. So I waited a couple of days to see if it impoved and then contacted them to see if they had any glitches on my account. But no. Everything was running as it should do. But they suggest looking at the weight of my images. As a lot of images of 80kb or over are the kiss of death for website speed.
And then it hit me. Each post or page I add has an image. And each of these images was over 80kb, and I was adding posts every day, and all of them with over 80kb images.
Nothing slows down a website more than heavyweight images. However, as I added each Post the website slowed down more and more after I added each new Post, and I started getting very bad results on Pagespeedinsights.
So I went through all of my images which luckily I had kept in a folder on my desktop, and with the help of Macromedia Fireworks 8, which is an old program that can be had secondhand for around £10.00 or $13.00 on eBay, I went through all my images and got them down to around 20kb and renamed them. I then uploaded them after renaming the with the prefix Light_. Besides Macromedia Fireworks 8, some of you rich guys might have Adobe Photoshop which will perform the same tasks
Most of my images are .JPGs 1200 x 350 pixels and you can reduce the size of them down to 20kb with hardly any loss of quality.
That cured the problem. My performance results on Pagespeedinsights was 99%
I probably don’t need to mention but the .jpg format is the lightest when compared to Gifs or .PNG files. There is also a new image file format, .WebP, which claims to be 35% even smaller. I have tried it but this does not seems to be the case. And I do not need the Animation or the Transparency it offers.
I hope this helps somebody. Google likes fast loading website, so that helps with your SEO. Also, customers don’t hang around if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load
If you need to ask questions, do it through the comments section below, and I/we will answer you within 24 hours
To improve the opening speed of the website, it is very important to optimize the size of the uploaded images. I have some blog sites. I convert the uploaded images into webp format through a free WordPress plug-in to compress the images to the maximum extent and make the web page faster. Open.
In addition, you can also consider using a free CDN to accelerate and cache images, so that your visitors can open the web page faster. The free CDN I use is Cloudflare.
In addition to these, compression of CSS is also a good idea.
Hi Thanks for the advice. I shall try CDN to accelerate and cache images Cloudfare
Thanks so much for the information and tip on what could be slowing down our websites. I have found some free online tools to reduce the size of images. Do you recommend these or should I buy a program?
I have also read about Web.p being better for images on websites and started converting j.peg to web.p in some instances they were smaller but in other the same or a little larger. Do you think I should continue? Thanks
My Advice remains the same. Get an old copy of Macromedia Fireworks 8 and use the export wizard to bring the image down below 30 k. Macromedia Fireworks 8 is an old program and can be had for about $13 to $15 on eBay. Photoshop does the same thing but makes a better job of it, but is somewhat expensive.