Faster website speeds can play an important role in the success of your website. The faster your website’s speed, the higher it can rank in search engines, which can attract more visitors, reduce bounce rate and help increase visitor to customer conversions. As a website owner, the speed of your site should be right at the top of your priority list.
To increase website speed there are a few techniques you can apply, including image compression, caching and database optimization. A full setup has been described in another KB: How To Increase WordPress Site Speed Through Optimization, you can have a look and configure the settings step by step.
In this article, we only discuss the WP-Optimize plugin.
To install this plugin:
Please go to your Control Panel > WP ProDesk > run "Scan for WP sites", then select the destination site > enable Caching, this will install the "WP-Optimize - Clean, Compress, Cache" plugin to your WP site and enable it automatically.
If your WP site is under a subfolder of your primary site, you can manually install the "WP-Optimize - Clean, Compress, Cache" plugin from your WP admin panel > Plugins > Add New > Search for it. If you get any problems while installing the plugin, please feel free to contact our support.
To configure this plugin:
Please log in to your WP admin panel, go to the "WP-Optimize" menu
if you do not see this option, please check if the plugin has been installed and activated in the "Plugins" menu. Else, please repeat the above installation steps.
Remember to backup your WP site before doing updates/optimizing at any time.
In the "Database" panel, run default selected optimizations or choose specific options you need.
In the "Images" panel, turn on "Automatically compress newly-added images" and choose the "Prioritize retention of detail" compression option. After changes are saved, if there are uncompressed images, you can select the target image and click "Compress the selected images" manually.
"Unused images and sizes" and "Lazy-load" are premium features, you can upgrade to the premium version to use them.
In the "Cache" panel, turn on "Enable page caching" and check the "Generate separate files for mobile devices" options, save changes.
Enable "Gzip compression", if it shows "disabled", please enable it from your Control Panel > HTTP Compress.
This plugin cannot detect "Static file headers" from IIS, however, you can still overwrite the server default response header settings from your site root web.config file. The expiry date is customized.
to set the web content expires in 28 days, please merge the following codes to your web.config
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<staticContent>
<clientCache cacheControlMode="UseMaxAge" cacheControlMaxAge="28.00:00:00" />
</staticContent>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>
to set the web content expires on Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<staticContent>
<clientCache cacheControlMode="UseExpires" httpExpires="Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT" />
</staticContent>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>
For the other settings of the WP-Optimize plugin, you can read their descriptions and decide which to use.
Now we are done setting up the WP-Optimize settings, please check your site’s speed by testing it in a browser Lighthouse or evaluate your site’s performance on an online tool like Google Pagespeed Insights.