You may have used a tool such as pingdom to get a measure of your sites performance, related to the average time for websites to load. Here, we’ll outline a few points that can help with your “on-page” speed optimizations. There are other areas “off-page” that we will cover later, such as your DNS resolution, server response times, geo-distributed CDNs and more.
Tip
Use the WP Path Rewriting configuration option in the plugin to shave off even more bytes per page. ie, instead of wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen/style.css, it can automatcially convert to c/u/t/style.css. Across all links on all pages, this is a decent saving that is still fairly unique to this plugin.
Minifying your HTML/CSS/JS for faster page loads
When using WordPress as a static site generator, you get the benefit of all the plugins available on WordPress’s official plugin site. These include all sorts of things which can aid in speed and other optimizations for a static site.
HTML/CSS/JS minification in a nutshell
Each character of code in a file adds to its size, which translates to longer wait times for your users to load the page. Google will also factor in page load speed when ranking sites in its search results.
All the more reason to squeeze every ounce of performance out of your pages by reducing their size. For HTML, this is usually achieved by stripping whitespace and empty lines that don’t affect how the page appears to the user.
For CSS and JS, things can be optimized even further, by globally replacing the names used for classes, functions and variables to short symbols instead of human readable names that take up more characters and add weight to the code.
This has just been the most basic of overviews on minification – read more here, here or even here.
Plugins that can help you minimize your code
There are many plugins that do minification available for free. A sample of those known to work well when using WordPress as a static site generator are:
Depending on your active theme and other changes unique to your WordPress site, you may need to play with adjusting the settings with these plugins. If the resulting site is not rendering correctly, try turning off all minification settings and then turning them back on one by one until you have as much minification as possible, whilst keeping your site rendering perfectly.
Need help minifying your WP static site? Contact us