Slow WordPress sites have higher bounce rates and low conversion rates. To counteract this, your WordPress site should have Perfmatters installed in addition to a fast host and a lightweight theme.
You can read about how to set up Perfmatters and get the best performance out of your WordPress site here in this article.
Note
All settings you make in Perfmatters should be checked carefully. Some of the options can change the functionality and appearance of your WordPress site.
General settings
Within the "General Settings," you have many options to activate features that will reduce the load on your server and make the site faster for your visitors.
Disable Emojis
WordPress adds a separate JavaScript library just for emojis. By deactivating this library, you can achieve significant savings by excluding these JavaScript files. Best of all, your WordPress site will continue to display emojis. These will then be loaded by the operating system.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Disable Dashicons
Most people no longer use Dashicons, as almost all icons are converted to SVGs nowadays.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Disable Embeds
This option disables website preview cards, but has no effect on YouTube embeds and is safe to enable for most WordPress websites.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Disable XML-RPC
This is less about performance and more about the security of your WordPress site. Enabling this option removes a small amount of code, making it slightly more difficult for attackers to hack your website. Jetpack users should ignore this option.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Disable jQuery Migrate / Remove jQuery Migrate
jQuery is a file that allows you to use old code with new code. So if you are using a new WordPress theme and up-to-date plugins, you can activate this option without any problems. If you notice while testing your site that something is not working or looking right, it may be time to update or even replace your plugins and theme data.
Risk: High
Effect: Large
Hide WordPress version / Hide WP version
This option hides your installed WordPress version in the source code. Once activated, it keeps bots that try to exploit known security vulnerabilities at bay, which is easy on your server and your nerves.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Remove wlwmanifest link
Windows Live Writer is still referenced in WordPress, but it is rarely used anymore. It is 99% safe for you to enable this option and remove an unnecessary line of code.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Remove jRSD link / Remove RSD link
Removes a line of code and is safe to activate for most WordPress websites.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Remove short links
Removes the "plain" permalinks (e.g., ".../?p=123") that are still referenced, even if you use "post name" or a "custom structure" for your permalinks.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Deactivate RSS Feed / Disabling RSS Feeds
Disables the RSS feed functionality. If you have a blog, I recommend ignoring this option.
Note: Even if you don't use an RSS feed, users who want to subscribe to your posts can use feed readers such as Feedly.
Risk: Medium
Effect: Medium
Remove RSS feed link / Disable RSS feed links
Disables links to your RSS feed. You can enable this option without any problems if your RSS feed is located under the default page. /feed can be found.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Disable self pingbacks
Removes the pingback feature, which is generally a waste of resources.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Disable REST API
There are still plugins that use the REST API (Jetpack, Wordfence, and some contact forms). Many of the REST API functions are only available in the backend. After activating the option, you should test your WordPress website thoroughly (including the contact form).
Risk: Medium
Effect: Large
Remove REST API links
Removes all references to the REST API (see above)
Risk: Medium
Effect: Minor
Disable Google Maps
This option should always be enabled, as Google Maps tends to load slowly on WordPress websites (costing up to 20 points in the web.dev test). Try inserting a screenshot of the map or ensuring that Google Maps only loads its scripts on the page where the map is located.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Disable Password Strength Meter
This large script is often loaded on WooCommerce websites. Enable this option to improve shop performance and ensure that a clear warning about secure passwords is displayed when logging in or creating an account.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Disable comments
If you don't use WordPress comments, enable this option to remove a lot of code.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Remove comment URLs
This option prevents visitors from leaving a URL within comments (which is often done by spammers trying to obtain backlinks).
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Add Blank Favicon
You only need this setting if you are not using a favicon (but you should use one). Leave this setting disabled unless you are testing a bare-bones installation.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Remove Global Styles
WordPress 5.9 added a lot of unnecessary code (damn you, Duotone!). If you don't use these features, enable this setting to remove about 300 lines of unminified code.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Deactivate Heartbeat / Disable Heartbeat
It is strongly recommended that you enable this option. Most users will want to set this setting to "Only allow when editing posts/pages." This helps reduce server load.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Set heartbeat frequency
Change the frequency of pings from your server. 60 seconds is fine.
Risk: Low
Effect: Medium
Autosave interval
This can help reduce the load on your server. You can safely change this to 3 minutes.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Change Login URL
Bots know where the WordPress login page is located by default. By changing this URL, you can ward off some of these bots, which will not be able to find your login page as easily.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
assets
There are lots of wonderful things you can set up in Assets. In my opinion, the big highlight here is the "Script Manager."
Script Manager
Enable and disable scripts at a granular level. This can have a huge impact on performance, but requires manual testing and adjustments to ensure you don't break anything.
Learn more about the script manager in Perfmatters' detailed documentation.
Risk: High
Effect: Large
Move JavaScript / Defer JavaScript
Moves the JavaScript to the end of the waterfall. This can help with test results and rendering blocking errors. This may cause problems when loading your website.
Risk: High
Effect: Large
jQuery also move / Include jQuery
jQuery is a large file. If you can defer this script, it can have a huge impact on your performance results. However, this setting is very risky, so only use it if you know what you are doing.
Risk: High
Effect: Large
Delay JavaScript loading
This delays your JavaScript until the user interacts with the page. This could have a positive effect on your page's test results, as bots do not interact with the page, but it should ensure security for your users.
Risk: Medium
Effect: Large
Delete unused CSS code / Remove Unused CSS
This setting is not foolproof, so you will probably have to make some exceptions. However, if you can get rid of unused CSS, you could significantly improve your loading times.
Risk: High
Effect: Large
preloading
Enable Instant Page
This setting will likely not affect your results, but it can make a big difference to users as it dramatically improves the speed of your website. You can enable this setting at any time.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Preload
This allows you to preload elements (such as images or fonts). Essentially, these elements are moved to the beginning of your waterfall so that they are loaded first. This can be useful for your logo or the fonts on your website to ensure that they load immediately.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Preload Critical Images
This does something similar to the "Preload" option (see above), but automatically preloads the first image or images (the number depends on how many you select in the toggle button) on your page, which can improve your LCP.
Risk: Low
Effect: Medium
Preconnect and DNS Preload
This establishes a preliminary connection to third-party resources, which often take the longest time to retrieve.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Lazy loading
Enable lazy loading for images / Lazy Loading Images
This reduces the number of requests Google sees when loading your pages, as your website only loads the images when they enter the viewport. Although WordPress has this by default, it is not as powerful. This setting is recommended.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Disable iFrames and videos / iFrames & videos
This setting prevents your website from loading video embeds until they enter your viewport. This can have a significant impact on any page that uses video.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Create YouTube preview image / YouTube preview thumbnails
This prevents anything from YouTube from loading until the user clicks on the video. This is a recommended setting.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Threshold
This changes how aggressively lazy loading works. Brain recommends 600px, which will start loading images that come within 600px of the viewport. The default value is 0px (which is very aggressive).
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
DOM monitoring
This setting monitors the DOM to control lazy loading. This could be useful if you are using some kind of infinite scroll function.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Add missing image dimensions
This is often detected by testing tools. Enabling this setting will automatically add missing image dimensions (except for SVGs). This does not have a significant impact on actual load time, but it can help improve your results.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Fonts
Disable Google Fonts
If you do NOT use Google fonts, this setting is safe (and recommended!). However, if you use Google fonts, you should use the "Local Google fonts" setting instead.
Risk: High
Effect: Large
Download Google Fonts Locally / Local Google Fonts
With this setting, Google fonts are loaded from your server instead of Google's. This is usually much faster and could make your website more compliant (as loading Google fonts from Google's servers could violate the General Data Protection Regulation).
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
CDN
These features help rewrite URLs when you use a third-party CDN.
analytics
Enable Local Analytics from Google Analytics
Instead of loading Google Analytics from Google's servers, this setting allows you to host Google scripts locally, which can have a significant impact on your overall results and speed and reduce the total number of requests.
Risk: Low
Effect: Large
Support AMP / Enable AMP Support
AMP is being phased out, and you probably don't use it and don't need this setting. If you do use AMP, it's probably time to stop, but you can use this setting in the meantime.
Risk: Low
Effect: Minor
Perfmatters and WooCommerce
Perfmatters was developed with WooCommerce optimization in mind and has additional features that are only displayed if you have WooCommerce installed.
These features can generate a significant performance boost, but they can also break some parts of the frontend that rely on WooCommerce scripts.
For more information, we recommend reading the Perfmatters documentation.
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