You can easily minify PHP, but is there any point in doing this to optimize your website’s PageSpeed performance?
Minifying PHP can’t improve the PageSpeed performance of your website, however, it can typically increase the code security. When you are minifying or uglifying the PHP code, no one can steal your idea.
Here, we will cover everything about PHP minification, including its definition, helpful tools to minify PHP and best practices. Let’s see RabbitLoader’s contribution to this.
Before diving into PHP minification, first, you need to understand what minification is and how it works.
Minification is a technical method for removing unnecessary characters, white spaces, line breaks, and comments from a code without changing its functionality. The ultimate goal of applying the minification method is to reduce the coding file size, automatically reducing the total page file size.
The coding files that can be minified:
Let’s understand with an HTML code example. In the code below, you can see that many unnecessary comments, white spaces, and line breaks are used to increase the code’s readability. However, this affects the PageSpeed performance by increasing the total page size.
Syntax
<html lang="en-US">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
<!--adding a title for minifying HTML-->
<title>My minified files </title>
</head>
<body>
<!--adding an image file in HTML file-->
<img src="minify html.png" alt="My test image" />
</body>
</html>
After minifying the HTML file, the minified HTML files will look like the below:
<html lang="en-US"><head><meta charset="utf-8"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"><title>My minified files</title></head><body><img src="minify html.png" alt="My test image"></body></html>
Let’s see how it works for CSS files with an example. without minification, The CSS code looks like the below:
Syntax:
body {
background-color: red;
}
h1 {
color: lightblue;
text-align: left;
}
p {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 10px;
}
After minification:
body{background-color:red}h1{color:#add8e6;text-align:left}p{font-family:verdana;font-size:10px}
PHP is an open-source server-side scripting language used in web development to create dynamic web pages. PHP minification involves deleting unnecessary comments, link breaks, and white space from the PHP code that are added by a developer to make the code readable. This would reduce the PHP file size.
For example: before minification, the code looks like the below.
// Function used for assigning new
// value to $string variable and
// printing it
function print_string( $string ) {
$string = "Example for PHP code"."\n";
// Print $string variable
print($string);
}
// Driver code
$string = "PHP minification"."\n";
print_string($string);
print($string);
?>
After applying the minification method the PHP code looks:
<?php function print_string($string){$string="Example for PHP code"."\\n";print($string);}$string="PHP minification"."\\n";print_string($string);print($string); ?>
Manually minifying PHP can be daunting especially when you have a large size of the website. The best practice is to use an online tool to minify your PHP code. Several minification tools are available to minify your PHP code. Let’s talk about the most popular PHP minification tools.
PHP Beautifier is an online tool designed to minify the PHP file and reduce its total size. To use it, paste your PHP code and click on Beautify. It needs some time to process and then send you the minified PHP code.
PHP minifier/ compressor is an alternative online tool for PHP minification. It will remove white spaces and comments from your PHP code and reduce the file size. To do so, paste the PHP code into the PHP minifier/ compressor and click on the Minify button.
When you are minifying the PHP file manually, there are some factors you need to keep in mind to prevent the error.
When it comes to web optimization, it requires many strategies that require technical knowledge. Total page size reduction is one of the most effective web optimization techniques for improving your website’s PageSpeed.
When manual techniques are daunting for you, RabbitLoader makes your job easier. When you use RabbitLoader on your website, it will automatically reduce the total page size by minifying your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript file size, improving the PageSpeed performance of your website.
Therefore, if you are serious about improving your PageSpeed performance, don’t waste your time installing different optimization plugins when RabbitLoader is available for WordPress, Shopify, PHP, and Laravel-based websites.
Have you ever tried to improve your conversion rate by optimizing your website’s resource loading? Although it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of conversion rate optimization, optimizing resource loading can significantly impact the conversion rate.
To improve resource loading, you must optimize your image, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. This can impact not only your conversion rate but also your SEO rankings.
Resource loading is the process of parsing and downloading resources to a user’s browser from the hosting server. A website may load resources such as scripts, stylesheets, images, and HTML files. The webpage is subsequently rendered for the user using these resources.
Let’s understand in a simple way. When a user requests your web page’s content, the browser sends an HTTP request to the hosting server, which sends back the HTML file along with the other website’s resources.
The browser loads and parses the resources. Once the resources are downloaded, the browser can display your web page to the end user.
Before diving into the direct solution, the first thing that may come to your mind that why we need to optimize your resource loading. Here we will discuss the significance of optimizing the resource loading on your website which includes:
According to the Queue.it website, “Stress levels increase by 33% when content takes more than 6 seconds to load, the equivalent of a math test or watching a horror movie”. Web optimization is the only way to mitigate this problem, enhancing your user experience.
Users would engage in your fast-loading website, increasing the average on-page time by reducing the bounce rate.
Conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action, such as making an online payment, submitting an online form, purchasing from an e-commerce platform, or taking another action, and converting to potential leads.
The conversion rate is negatively correlated with the bounce rate. That means if the bounce rate decreases, the conversion rate will automatically increase. Below we will show you 3 case studies of increasing the conversion rate by improving the loading time.
Page speed is an important factor in the Google ranking algorithm. Google always prioritizes a fast-loading website. Thus, in order to increase organic traffic, you need to improve your website’s PageSpeed performance by optimizing the resource loading.
As per the case study here, we listed 3 cases that show you the improvement of conversion rate or sales just by increasing the page loading time.
Vodafone is the most popular company, facing a problem with the slow initial loading time and it affects the user experience. Therefore, by increasing the loading time by 31%, Vodafone increases the conversion rate by 5%.
Renault is a French multinational automobile company. To improve the core web vitals performance, Renault optimized the PageSpeed performance. Consequently, this website’s conversion rate increased by 13%.
Carpe is popular for selling skincare products. Shopify collaborated with Carpe to optimize website performance. By increasing the loading time by 52%, they were able to increase the conversion rate by 5 % and revenue by 15%.
At this point, you are quite knowledgeable about the importance of optimizing the resource loading. But how to optimize the resource loading?
Before you start to panic, we will delve into the most effective optimization technique for optimizing resource loading to boost the conversion rate.
First, you need to understand the website resources that can be optimized.
Type of resources
Every website has a set of fundamental resources that the browser needs to load to render the web pages which include:
Images are the most crucial resource for a website as they make it more attractive. Adding a lot of images is beneficial especially when you have an e-commerce site . However, high-resolution images can affect your initial loading time.
To mitigate this issue, you need to optimize your image file by implementing the below strategies.
JPEG and PNG images can increase the size of your image file. Converting them into a next-gen format, such as modern WebP and AVIF, can decrease the size of the image file without reducing its original quality. This process is known as lossless compression.
RabbitLoader converts all images into WebP and AVIF format with it’s inbuilt bulk image optimization feature. So, by using RabbitLoader, you can losslessly compress your images and optimize the resource loading.
Above-the-fold images refer to the images you can see during the initial loading time. By adding lazy loading to the website, you tell the browser to load only the images that are available above the fold, and the remaining images will load later.
RabbitLoader adds a lazy load to improve the loading time especially the performance of the First Contentful Paint (FCP).
The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) image is known as the hero image. When you apply lazy loading for above-the-fold images, it loads all images available above the fold. To speed up your website, you need to add a link pre-load for the hero image.
Assume you have a total of 5 images on your webpage of which 3 are the above-the-fold images. Among these 3 images, 1 must be the hero image. By adding a link pre-load in the hero images, you can improve the LCP time.
When you are using RabbitLoader for the above two optimization techniques, you don’t need to add pre-load manually. RabbitLoader will take care of this.
HTML code creates your website’s content. The browser first parses and loads this HTML file, so HTML file optimization is essential to increase the loading time. To do so, you need to minify and compress the HTML code.
To make the HTML code more readable, many developers use line breaks, comments, and meaningful variable names. These unnecessary characters make the HTML file larger.
By minifying the HTML file, you can significantly improve the initial server response time. When you are optimizing your page speed performance with RabbitLoader, it will minify your HTML file.
Note: To improve the loading time, RabbitLoader will minify the CSS and JavaScript files as well.
By compressing the HTML file, you can optimize your website’s resource loading time. Compression of HTML files reduces code redundancy by replacing the same string with the pointer.
RabbitLoader has its own GZIP compressor, which reduces the HTML file size and improves page speed performance.
Without CSS stylesheets, your website may look messy. CSS stylesheets make your webpage more presentable. When you are optimizing your resource files, you can’t ignore CSS files. Let’s see the technique for optimizing your webpage’s resources.
RabbitLoader successfully generates a critical CSS file for your above-the-fold content and improves the initial server response time. Learn more.
If you frequently audit your website’s page speed, you are quite familiar with this warning: Remove unused CSS. Unused CSS refers to styles or rules that are not utilized on the website but are present in the CSS file and increase its size.
By removing these unused CSS styles or rules, you can reduce the CSS file size and improve the core web vitals performance especially in LCP, and FCP.
Many developers use script languages, mostly JavaScript, to make their websites interactive. These JavaScript files are often known as render-blocking resources because they block the main thread and increase the Total Blocking Time.
The only way to mitigate this issue is by deferring the JavaScript files that are not required for the initial loading, such as alert messages. When you use RabbiLoader to optimize the other resource loading, it will defer your JavaScript file as well.
Optimizing your resource loading can dramatically increase your user experience and conversion rate. If your conversion rate is low, install RabbitLoader and see how RabbitLoader can speed up your website and help[ you achieve a desirable conversion rate.
Google developed the Cumulative Layout Shift metric to measure a webpage’s visual stability. In order to optimize your website’s CLS performance, you can implement strategies such as specifying the image size and optimize the web fonts.
You can do this using your coding skills, or for an effortless and non-coding solution,you can use RabbitLoader.
Have you ever tried to click a button upon loading a website only to see the elements on the page shift around and you end up clicking the wrong button?
This is caused by a layout shift & this issue seriously harms the user experience of your website. Prioritizing user experience Google developed CLS, a metric to analyze the total layout shift occurring during loading the page and express it in terms of a numeric value.
You can gauge the importance of CLS based on its recognition as one of the 3 pillars of Core Web Vitals. Therefore to achieve a good PageSpeed score, you must optimize your CLS performance.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is one of the pillar core web vitals metrics that Google developed to measure a web page’s visual stability during the web page rendering. This CLS metric is used to calculate how the visible elements move within the visible area.
Imagine this scenario: You want to buy a dress from an online store. You visit the product page of your favorite fashion retailer, and the page begins loading. When you are going to click the buy button, an ad is loaded on the top of the page, and the buy button shifts down. Therefore, you end up clicking the wrong button. This issue is known as an unexpected layout shift, and CLS measures this unexpected layout shift.
Cumulative Layout Shift is calculated the movement of the unshifted elements based on two factors:
Impact fraction calculates how an unstable element impacts the above-the-fold area between two frames. Basically, by calculating the impact fraction you can determine how much area the content occupies above the fold before and after the shifting.
You can easily calculate the impact fraction by dividing the total viewport area by the area of the layout shift.
On the other hand, the distance fraction quantifies the distance the unstable element moved relative to the above the fold. It can be calculated by dividing the dimension of the view-port area by how an unstable element moves in the vertical or horizontal distance.
By multiplying these two factors: impact fraction and distance fraction you can easily get the Cumulative Layout Shift.
Let’s understand with an example. If the impact fraction of a web page is 0.60 and the distance fraction of the web page is 0.30, then the Cumulative Shift Layout of that web page is 0.18 (0.60 * 0.30).
Also, you can measure the CLS in any online pageSpeed analyzing tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and others.
According to Google, if the CLS score is less than 0.1, it is categorized as a good CLS score. However, if the score is between 0.1 to 0.25, it is considered a moderate CLS score and Google PageSpeed Insights suggests you improve the score for better PageSpeed.
Finally, a score of more than 0.25 indicates that your website fails the PageSpeed performance test.
CLS score | Remarks | Color |
Less than 0.1 | Good | Green |
0.1 to 0.25 | Needs to improve | Orange |
More than 0.25 | Poor | Red |
Optimizing Cumulative Layout Shift requires a lot of technical effort. If you want to avoid tiring an expert to do the optimization, the best way to optimize your website for CLS would be to install RabbitLoader.
Let’s see how you can optimize your CLS performance without using any plugins.
The best practice is to specify the size attributes for your images, like height and width, of the images so that the modern browser can reserve space before loading them. By doing this, you can prevent the image shifting during the page loading time.
You can specify the height and width attribute of the image file in the <img> tag in the HTML file. Below is an example,
Syntax:
<img src= “product.jpeg” width=”400” height=”550”>
In order to improve the visual appearance, we add customized fonts to our website, but it usually harms your website’s PageSpeed performance. You can optimize your web fonts in more than one way.
Adding ads and promotions to your website can be one of the reasons behind your poor CLS performance. Just like images, you need to specify the height and width to reserve space for the ads.
For this, you need to add the size and width in the CSS stylesheets. Here’s an example,
Syntax:
<div id="ad-slot" style="min-width: 300px; min-height: 250px;"></div>
As you can see, optimizing CLS manually requires a little bit of technical knowledge. If you are not from a coding background, it can be tough on you.
RabbitLoader is able to improve the CLS score by reducing impact fraction and distance fraction,, that too without any coding.
When you optimize your CLS with RabbitLoader, your page will be visually stable. Let’s look at an example.
An e-commerce website, thestudio.com, was struggling with a poor CLS score, which harmed the Google PageSpeed Insights score. After optimizing the website with RabbitLoader, the CLS score became 0 from 0.07 for the mobile version and 0.002 from 0.205 for the desktop version. Optimizing CLS along with other performance metrics improved the PageSpeed score for both versions. For detailed information, please check our case study on thestudio.com.
If you are also trying to optimize your CLS score to improve your PageSpeed & Core Web Vitals, you must install RabbitLoader plugin on your WordPress website. RabbitLoader will not only improve the CLS performance but it would boost other performance metrics and enhance your user PageSpeed & pass the Core Web Vitals.
First Input delay (FID) is an essential performance metric that Google uses to measure a website’s PageSpeed performance.
When it comes to a website’s success, delivering a fast-loading website is crucial. But how do you determine if your website’s PageSpeed performance is fast or not? Here’s the First Input Delay that comes into the picture along with the other performance metrics.
Let’s understand about the First Input Delay (FID) metric and explore the powerful strategies to optimize the FID in order to improve the Google PageSpeed score.
Note: Google developed and launched a new metric Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to replace the FID metric in March 2024.
Google developed the First Input Delay to measure a web page’s responsiveness. In simple words, the First Input Delay (FID) calculates the span of time from when a visitor first interacts with the web page to when the web page starts giving the response. This is also known as input latency.
Let’s understand with an example. Assume you click on a link after opening a web page. FID measures the time between clicking that link and the time when the browser starts responding to it. This First Input Delay is measured in milliseconds (ms).
To better understand PageSpeed performance, Google replaced the First input Delay with a new metric: Interaction to Next paint (INP). But how does INP differ from the FID?
Let’s explore how the First Input Delay (FID) differs from the Interaction to Next Paint (INP).
First Input Delay | Interaction to Next Paint |
FID is used to measure only the initial delay between the browser response and the user’s first interaction. | INP provides a comprehensive view of the entire website’s interaction with the user. |
FID doesn’t measure the time a browser takes to load interactive scripts after the initial page loading. | Interaction measures this time too. |
Here, we will see the most helpful tools to measure the First Input Delay (FID) of your website.
Google developed an online tool, Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze the performance of core web vitals and provide a PageSpeed score based on a few key performance metrics.
To measure the First input Delay (FID), you need to enter your website’s URL and click on the analyze button and you would see the FID along with various other important metrics.
Along with your FID score, PageSpeed insight would also suggest improvements to get your websites a good FID value & pass the Core Web Vitals.
GTmetrix is the best alternative tool to measure the performance of the core web vitals. This online tool allows you to customize your test location ,device, network connection, and browser.
Google sets threshold values for each performance metric to categorize performance. Let’s examine the threshold values of FID metrics.
At this point, you are aware of a good FID time. If your website’s FID time is more than 100 ms, you need to optimize your First Input Delay to achieve a good PageSpeed score and enhance the user experience by improving your website’s performance.
Let’s see how you can improve the FID performance using your technical skills only, it might take a little time & needs some technical skills. We will also see how you can do this within a few minutes just by installing RabbitLoader.
Breaking up the JavaScript code is one of the most effective ways to improve your website’s FID time. In such cases, you need to identify the long tasks that increase the FID time by blocking the main thread. Then you must split them into smaller tasks. It can minimize your main thread also.
By allowing multi-threading, which means that if the main thread is busy with critical tasks, some non critical tasks could be moved to the web workers. This would need a very specialized set of skills to be able to implement it on your website.
Check more: Minimize main thread work
Whereas, RabbitLoader implements multi-threading and optimizes your website for the perfect FID value without needing you to write a single line of code.
The loading speed of a website can also depend on the page size. In your CSS and JavaScript file, many characters such as line breaks, and comments are present which unnecessarily increases the page size for the browser, slowing down the loading speed.
Compression and minification are the best ways to mitigate this issue. Manually removing these unnecessary characters from your CSS and JavaScript file might need a lot of time and effort especially if the website has a lot of CSS codes.
When using RabbitLoader, you don’t need to put any extra for this. Along with the other optimization techniques, RabbitLoader also takes care of this. For more details on resource minification, please checkout our Minify Resources blog.
During the page rendering, in general, the browser loads every resource. This would increase the loading time. You can improve the loading time by deferring the JavaScript functions which are not required for the initial loading time. This can be achieved by adding a syntax like the below example,
Syntax: <script src="https://www.domain.com/file.js" defer></script>
If you are technically sound, you can easily defer your non-critical JavaScript functions, but if you are not from a technical background, the best way to optimize FID is to install RabbitLoader.
Even though Google replaced this FID with INP, Google PageSpeed still shows the FID metric on its tests. When you work on improving FID, your INP time will also be improved. So, if you are struggling with a poor FID score, you need to implement the above strategies.
Whether you do it manually or using an optimization tool like RabbitLoader it is up to you.If you want an effortless solution, optimize your FID performance with RabbitLoader.
WordPress is simply software that you use to construct your own website or blog and post it on the web. It is also called Content Management System or CMS which was created in 2003 and since then it has become one of the most popular website publishing programs in the world. WordPress powers 30% of the internet.
The magnificence of WordPress is that you’re ready to browse eleven thousand unique subjects which just format designs that decide the look and style of your site. One can tweak all of the text including font and font sizes. Also one can create buttons or you can upload images and videos and much more. One can choose from over 55,000 plugins and widgets to help optimize the functionality of your website.
Page Contents
A website’s performance can be evaluated with Google PageSpeed, a set of tools by Google Inc. PageSpeed Insights (PSI) provides information about how a page performs on various mobile and desktop devices and what can be done to improve it.
A page’s PSI includes lab and field data. Because it is collected in a controlled environment, lab data is useful for troubleshooting performance issues. Real-world bottlenecks may not be captured by lab data. Field data can be used to capture actual, real-world user experience, but it is limited in terms of metrics.
A fast WordPress site provides a much better user experience because, well, it’s more efficient. Over a quarter of users will click away and choose a different search result if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, according to a recent Kissmetrics infographic. The same is true for mobile users. The survey also found that 73% of users reported having difficulty with site speed.
The WordPress site speed also has an impact on conversion rates. Google has added Page Experience to its ranking signals to emphasize the importance of user experience. In-Page Experience signals, real users’ experiences are analyzed to judge the quality of web pages. It also measures your WordPress site’s core web vital.
Are you worried about your slow WordPress speed? Peek to this article to find out your cause and read till the end for the bonus solution.
There is a certain maximum pixel size for the images respective of your chosen WordPress theme for your website. If it exceeds then it will take more time to load and can cause your slow WordPress website and reduce site performance. Sometimes the pictures taken from mobiles are larger than the maximum size, which increases loading time.
Rabbit loader has all of the image optimization stack included.
It is one of the best methods of providing a uniform user experience to users wherever they are located around the globe using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Visiting a WordPress website means they must download all of the website data. This process does not affect the WordPress speed if the people are from the same region. But it increases concerning the distance from the source of the website despite the speed of the internet.
If you use Content Delivery Network it will store your website’s assets in different data centers around the globe. So, it doesn’t affect your WordPress speed of image loading time or WordPress site speed and all the data can be downloaded faster from whichever global data center is nearest to them.
There are several plugins available for this purpose like W3 Total Cache, WP rocket. However, with W3 Total Cache, you have to buy the CDN services separately and configure them with your account.
If you choose to use RabbitLoader, you get an integrated premium CDN with 300+ points of presence, more than any other WP plugins available in this category.
If all those ways to increase your website loading speed in WordPress websites are done but your website is still suffering from slow loading speed, then there is a major problem which is slow WordPress hosting. All the above methods are just band-aids for your problem but if the performance of the hosting provider is not up to the mark, then your wound will never heal. It can be the main reason for your slow WordPress site.
For any website, it is common that one page contains several images and videos, especially for e-commerce websites or maybe even for blogging websites. All these images cause slowing down both your website and image loading speed. Because when one tries to open your website, then all the images will load instantly even though the visitor only needs the images on the front fold, not the images below the front fold. This will increase the load time.
If you use lazy loading you can choose to only load visible images instead of loading all images all at once which will speed up your image loading speed. Then only the images in the front load will load instantly as the website loads. But the other images will load when the browser detects that the visitor will need those images. The process is called Lazy Load.
There are various ways that plugins can slow down your website. Poorly developed plugins, outdated plugins, and surplus or duplicate plugins can all pose a problem in terms of making a website load slowly. Sometimes the caching plugin is most responsible.
Usually, speed problems are not related to the number of plugins. The exception to this rule is if you have a lot of plugins that do the same thing or are not being used. In such cases, you should remove the surplus plugins. In general, plugins influence page speed due to their quality and functionality.
RabbitLoader added an opt-in feature where images are optimized without site owners putting any extra effort. This feature automatically converts your website’s images to WebP. An automatic fallback to the source happens if the encoding cannot be supported by the browser.
Rabbit Loader assists with saving your server’s data transmission or CDN costs by guaranteeing that a few assets are not downloaded until the client looks to where it is required.
Rabbit Loader provides you the largest number of CDN points. Also it is one of the fastest hosting platforms among the available plugins. In one word it will completely enhance your WordPress performance and page load time.