Nice article, though I see a few things that are missing such as selective plugins/assets loading. This can dramatically increase performance in some pages but to my surprise it’s often overlooked by many people. There are 2 free plugins that if used wisely can make the page load much faster:

1) To select plugins that will not load on specific page (e.g. Contact Form 7 loads its CSS and JS in all pages when you might need it only on the Contact page) you can use “Plugin Organizer” plugin.

2) Sometimes, you need to have a plugin enabled on a page but it’s loading 10 assets and you will only need 5 of them on that particular page. To filter the .CSS and .JS that is not needed you can use “WP Asset Clean Up”

Hey Megan,

Glad you found Kevin’s article useful. Removing unnecessary plugins can have real impact on your site speed. Another thing you can do is to disable unnecessary scripts that aren’t needed on homepage. It can be done wit the help of Gonzales plugin — http://tomasz-dobrzynski.com/wordpress-gonzales

Regarding the tools for performance deep analysis, I think GTMetrix is the best free option out there. You could also try LoadStrom and WP Performance Tester.

Hope this helps.

So glad to hear that, Mark. Thanks for the nice words :).

If you ever need any WordPress related help or have any questions, feel free to reach out to me via our contact form page.

You will see a huge difference once you introduce caching and integrate a CDN.

Best of luck 🙂

Kevin