Anvil Performance Tab: Speeding up your WordPress website
What to expect from the Performance Tab?
This feature provides speed improvement for sites, and
Google Page Speed scores. The aim is to remove dependence on multiple external plugins and create a standardized approach that will function for the majority of our clients, and addresses and uses some elements unique to our server network. It will also allow both Performance Foundry and our clients to have more control of several performance elements, such as the minification and deferral of CSS and JavaScript by using some of our server resources, caching those minified files directly in the server in a faster and more secure way. It will also provide lazy loading for all images that follow WordPress standard image functions.
Please note that this plugin is exclusive to Performance Foundry Hosting clients, as it is specific to our unique server environment.
Google PageSpeed Improvements
During performance tests, Google PageSpeed records many metrics focused on what a user sees and experiences. There are 6 metrics used to create the overall performance score. They are:
- First Contentful Paint(FCP)
- Speed Index
- Time to Interactive(TTI)
- First Meaningful Paint(FMP)
- First CPU Idle
- Max Potential First Input Delay
With Anvil Performance, the biggest improvements we are seeing are in the first two metrics:
First Contentful Paint and
First Meaningful Paint.
These results will vary site to site. Multiple factors can affect a page's load time and the total score is also diminished by the presence of ads because they have such an influence on the total score.
You can read more about how the Page Speed Score is calculated in details here:
https://calibreapp.com/blog/how-pagespeed-works/
With Anvil Performance activated and properly configured, your website should be able to pass on some important Google Page Speed factors, that will
improve the speed of your site on mobile and desktop and consequently improve your overall SEO ranking. It’s important to notice that since
July, the SEO ranking algorithm was updated to include page speed as a ranking factor for both mobile pages
and ads.
The Anvil Performance Tab can be found in your WordPress Dashboard on the Foundry Anvil Page, you can see it below Dashboard in the left side menu. After selecting the Foundry Anvil option, you just need to click in the Performance tab, and you’ll see the screen below:
Before doing changes in the settings, you need to click on the "Build Cache" button, after this you can start to configure the plugin.
You can see down below what impact each setting can have on Google Page Speed audits:
- Minify CSS: Activating this setting will minifies un-minified CSS assets from plugins and themes and delivers minified versions.
- Defer Plugin CSS and Defer Theme CSS will affect the“Eliminate render-blocking resources” and the“Remove unused CSS” flags. It won’t make them go away completely unless you enable Defer Theme CSS, but it can produce flashes or unstyled content during load, so this is a trade-off that you can consider doing. You have the option to exclude just some CSS from defer too. We’re looking forward to add some additional benefits here in the next Anvil Performance Updates.
- Minify Javascript: Minifies un-minified JS assets from plugins and themes and delivers minified versions.
- Defer Javascript: Enable this will also help with the same flag as defer css, eliminate render-block resources.
- Enable Image Lazy Loading: Largely this will apply to images in the content, Gutenberg blocks and the sidebar, it is even useful for regular Gutenberg builds. The Agressive Lazy Load is an option that you can activate if you want to squeeze out a bit more performance, but it's more likely that users on slower connection will see images still loading as they scroll down the page.
We recommend you to watch this video below to learn how to configure it:
Feel free to follow the steps of this video to configure it by yourself, or just contact our support and we can do it for you!
After activating the plugin, we had very good results so far! With some websites jumping from a score of 62 to 81 on mobile in some cases! As said before, the results can vary from site to site, but all of them are gaining at least some extra points on Google Page Speed!
Should you encounter any bugs, glitches, lack of functionality or other problems on your website after activating any aspects of the Performance tab, please let us know immediately by contacting support@performancefoundry.com so we can rectify these accordingly. Your help in this regard is greatly appreciated.
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