Optimising your Google Pagespeed with caching? Read all about it here!
Do you want to optimise your site speed with caching? If you want to optimise your Google Pagespeed, caching is very important. But what exactly is caching and how can you optimise it using WP Rocket? WP Rocket is seen as the ultimate WordPress and Woocommerce plugin. It improves the Google PageSpeed score, making your website or webshop fully compliant with the Core Web Vitals. With the Core Web Vitals Google measures the user experience of your website visitors. If you not only have your website developed but also optimised, then the user experience will also go up. This ensures that Google automatically values your website higher. In this article we tell you all about how our WordPress agency can optimise your site speed with caching. Read on for more information.
Wat is caching precies?
A cache is also the storage place where frequently used files and data are temporarily stored. For example, websites and web shops are partly stored in the cache of your browser. This turns them into temporary internet files, which makes them faster to use.
Using cache for a faster website
How does our web agency use cache to ensure a faster website? When we are done with web development, we set the cache using WP rocket. This is something that requires a lot of care. What we often see is that if too many files are stored in the cache, the functions no longer work properly. For example, a product may not be added to the shopping basket or other problems may occur. Configuring the cache is very important in the final phase of development. Optimising the speed with 0.1 seconds can already increase the conversion rate of your webshop by 8%. By configuring the cache correctly, we can make your website or webshop faster.
A faster website/webshop = more conversions.
Optimise CSS and JavaScript with WP Rocket
CSS minimisation + optimisation
The first thing to do is to make WP Rocket minimise the CSS. When minimising the CSS files, both comments and white space will be removed from the CSS. This will reduce the file size.
What our web design agency does next is to optimise the delivery of CSS. This prevents render-blocking CSS on your web shop or website. We let the CSS load asynchronously and apply critical CSS. This ensures that your website or web shop is loaded above the fold. This is ideal, because it means the browser does not have to read the entire CSS file when it loads the webshop or website.
Minimise JavaScript + Delayed Loading
If the cache is optimised for the CSS, we minimise the Javascript and ensure that it is loaded in a delayed manner. This is done in the same way as the minimisation for CSS. We also remove white space and comments from the code. It also makes for a smaller file, so that we can retrieve the browser faster.
After we minimise JavaScript, we make sure it loads deferred. To ensure optimal performance, the files in the footer or deferred should be loaded. This way, the loading of other files is not blocked when JavaScript is downloaded. In this phase, your webshop or website should be tested thoroughly. This also needs to be repeated continuously. If there are any problems, they can be solved by excluding files from the option.
Using cache for image optimisation
As soon as we have adjusted both the CSS and JavaScript in the web design, we start optimising the images. We do this as follows:
Using LazyLoad
By using LazyLoad, the images can be loaded at the moment they are needed. If you enable LazyLoad, only the images that are in the viewport at that moment will be loaded. Our webdesign agency enables this for images, but also for videos and iframes.
Dimensions of images
We reduce layout shifts by providing all images with a standard length and height. We lay this down in HTML, so that the browser knows what size the image is. Because of this, buttons, etc. do not jump.
Determine the life span of the cache
A cache lasts 12 hours by default. After 12 hours the cache is refreshed on the server. However, we recommend a lifespan of 10 to 24 hours. A normal website can run perfectly well on a life span of 24 hours, but a webshop cache has a much shorter life span.
Need help setting up your cache? Get in touch with us!
Do you need help setting up your cache? Then get in touch with us. As a web agency, we will help you integrate the caching in the right way, so that your website achieves a significant loading speed. With the specialists of our web agency, this is guaranteed!
