How to Improve your WordPress website’s PageSpeed Insights score?

4 min readJun 22, 2021

Most of the website owners wish to see their site’s Page Speed Insights score to get 90+. The Challenge occurs when we use WordPress website, it can be your Web Hosting or heavy built theme or poorly coded plugins! In this post we will show you how to improve your Google PageSpeed Insights score.

1. Use a Proper Cache Plugins

Using proper WordPress cache plugins is very important, many times its very difficult to choose which cache plugins will give good results, we suggest you to choose free plugins and get the best out of it.

W3 Total Cache has a bunch of advanced options that if not configured carefully could result into problem to your website performance.

Page Cache, Database Cache, Object Cache, Browser Cache options in W3 Total cache plugin is very important, get into these options:

Page Cache: As the name implies, this option enables caching of posts and pages on your website.
Database Cache: set to Memcached. Memcache is for database and it holds database results in the memory to reduce query stress on your server.

The Page Cache Method is the one we should pay more attention to. Disk: Basic and Disk: Enhanced are two method that works great under shared hosting plan. However, if the disk activity on your server is high and it’s not SSD, you may achieve worse result.

Object Cache: Object cache deals with expensive individual database query that could be taxing on the server. If your server supports Redis cache, this is the time to use it for Object Cache

Browser Cache:
The cache settings here deal directly with the visitor’s browser. It basically tells how the browser should behave with the data it received from your website. Toggle the follow settings on:

2. Minification Plugin

We choose Autoptimize this plugin because it has a solid track record of great compability to many different WordPress websites. However you can turn off W3 Total Cache’s Minify and use Autoptimize instead.

Autoptimize Settings > HTML Options, JavaScript Options, CSS Options.

3. Core Web Vitals

Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less.

See the below screenshot, Our website.

4. Enable GZip compression

The easiest way to speed up your WordPress site is to eliminate all its unwanted resources. The second easiest way to speed it up is to compress all its wanted resources. Enabling GZIP compression on your web server is one of the simplest and most efficient ways to achieve that.

5. Optimize images

Compress and optimize images using ShortPixel plugin. The ShortPixel plugin installs directly into your WordPress Dashboard where you can easily manage the image optimization process.

6. Reduce the Impact of Third-Party Code

Third-party scripts can negatively impact your performance, and result in failed audits from PageSpeed Insights. Ideally, it’s best to limit your reliance on these tools in order to prevent adverse effects. third-party script like Google Analytics is an excellent example. Social media sharing buttons and feeds

YouTube video embeds
iFrames for ads and other content
Libraries for JavaScript, fonts, and other elements

After considering all the above methods, CloudOnHire website acheived 90+ score on Google’s page speed insights:

Do you have questions about Google PageSpeed Insights or optimizing your site’s performance? Ask away in the comments section.