Optimize your website with eco-friendly performance extensions and tools
Is your website experiencing bugs or taking a long time to load? WP Super Cash, Cloudflare, Rapid Load and many more… WS gives you tips and tools to improve your eco-friendly performance!
The performance of your website defines its added value in the web sphere, but also the resulting UX. Analyzing them allows you to know if your website is effective and if your objectives are achieved.
After evaluating the performance of your website, it is important to take action to improve or optimize the performance of your site.
The web agency presents you with some very practical tools and plugins to optimize your site in an eco-responsible way…
Let’s say things: too many extensions is bad (well, it’s heavy). But using the right tools to optimize and lighten your website is a big YES!
On the WordPress side, a few clicks will be enough to install and configure extensions to optimize the code and resources of your website.
🛠️ Autoptimize: available on WordPress, this extension helps to minify, lighten and reorder your site’s JavaScript, HTML and CSS files.
Result: the reduction of the loading time and the environmental impact of your site, thanks to the optimization of its structure and its functionalities.
🛠️ Rapid Load: also available on WordPress, this paid plugin complements Autoptimize to sort through the code of your site. Unused CSS & other files are automatically removed.
Result: optimization of the weight and speed of your site, thanks to a more efficient reading of code files!
For Drupal, on the other hand, the search for optimization tools is more technical. First of all, we advise you to identify the blockages and areas for improvement on your site, before asking your web agency for advice on how to proceed next! (That goes for WordPress as well, by the way 😉 ).
Lighten up your website
We repeat: an eco-friendly website is a lightweight website! The lightness of a site is played at 3 levels: in its design, its structure (its code, we just talked about it just above ☝️) and its content!
Compress images from your website
In the total weight of the contents of a site, the texts are anecdotal. On the other hand, it is essential to pay particular attention to the images, icons and videos of your site!
The graphic and visual elements of your site are particularly heavy and require a lot of energy to run your site. To limit their impact on the environment and the performance of your site, it is important to reduce their size, compress them or use icons whenever possible. For videos, ask yourself if they are really necessary, and compress them as much as possible before uploading them to a video platform or to your site (as a last resort).
This attention is to be paid both during the design of the site (design phase, advised by your graphic designer or your favorite web agency) and when feeding the site with new content.
What tools should you use to lighten the weight of your images?
In addition to editing tools (Adobe suite, Gimp or Inkscape, the Affinity Suite), solutions and extensions can be implemented to limit the volume of your graphic elements, in particular by compressing them and converting them to WebP format.
WebP is a format developed for the purpose of compressing JPEGs, PNGs, and GIFs, while maintaining certain image quality, transparency, and animations.
🛠️ Drupal has its own automatic WebP converter, to be installed and configured by your web agency;
🛠️ WordPress has the paid extension Short Pixel which automatically compresses a certain number of your images in WebP format, according to a credit system. The optimizations offered by this extension help improve the speed of your site and its ranking in the SERP of search engines.
Facilitate the loading of the contents of your site
Optimize the loading of your site thanks to caches
In the circular economy as in the web, reuse is a pillar! This is the very principle of the use of caches. Because why re-load what we have already loaded elsewhere?
Caches (website & browser) allow you to reuse resources previously collected during your web browsing. The principle is simple: the caches store for a certain period (to be determined) the files most used by the functionalities of your site.
By keeping these files active on your browser (or in the cache of your site), the caches limit multiple loadings, and therefore reduce the requests / energy consumption of your site. Which gives: fewer files that pass between servers, site and machine, so less demand and latency on your site!
The web agency presents 3 cache management tools for your site:
🛠️ WP Super Cache, a free and easy to use WordPress plugin: it has an option to preload the cache and serve static HTML files, while supporting several types of caching such as PHP, Legacy and Mod_Rewrite.
🛠️Fastest Cache: This WordPress plugin offers a cache timeout feature, to allow you to set how long to keep cached files. Once set, all your cached files will be deleted from a determined by you.
🛠️Drupal Cache: Drupal offers cache management natively. To go further, ask your web agency for advice!
Optimize the delivery of information thanks to DNS and CDN
The DNS (Domain Name System) is the keystone of web access! The domain name system is the service that links your site’s domain name and IP address to reach its content. It is thanks to him that you can remember understandable URL addresses instead of multi-digit numerical IPs used by our computers and browsers!
But that’s not all. Some DNS servers can also help improve connection performance and navigation fluidity on your site. The DNS is therefore not to be neglected!
And to go further, it is possible to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network), to streamline the distribution of information by geographically bringing the content closer to the location of your request. In other words: we save energy by reducing the distance between your machine and the information it wants to retrieve.
Less distance traveled = Less latency (performance) and energy consumed! The CDN can therefore be a real ally to make your site more fluid and reduce its environmental impact.
There are a multitude of offers & services to assist you in managing your DNS and setting up a CDN. Among them, the web agency uses:
🛠️Cloudflare: a free DNS provider coupled with a powerful Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, to increase the security and performance of your website. Thanks to this system, the contents of your site are distributed throughout the world without difficulty.
Disclaimer : Pay attention to the update of these tools! On some sites, bugs may occur when updating DNS & CDN tools. Do not hesitate to seek support, to limit the risk of unexpected errors!
The web agency has shared with you some tools to improve the performance of your site, in an eco-responsible approach. Be careful though: there is no miracle recipe, nor magic tool to instantly transform your site into a green site!
The performance and eco-responsible site challenges represent constant work to build, optimize and maintain good scores (Green IT / Web performance) for your website. Once your site has been eco-designed… It is therefore up to you to maintain and consolidate your eco-friendly performance, by ensuring the quality and optimization of your content!
And remember: every website is unique. Don’t compare yourself to the results of other sites: focus on your content, your needs… surround yourself with good advisers and everything will be fine 😉
To be accompanied in the eco-(re)design or the improvement of the performance of your website, contact your favorite web agency!
Because at WS, we aspire to help you build a more efficient and eco-responsible website ♻️