Here’s a concise list of simple ways to optimize performance, nicely summarized by AJ Ghergich. We have elaborated on his overview so that our clients could easily put the suggestions into action:
Lower Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) under 2.5s
- Optimize your images
The most common problem for website performance and LCP in particular are the large images that need to be loaded simultaneously and slow down the page. That is why you should consider the following optimizations:
Add lazy loading of images – that way not all images will be loaded at the same time upon opening the page. AJ Ghergich strongly recommends to implement it only for resources BELOW the fold. SiteGround clients with WordPress sites could enable that from the SG Optimizer plugin.
Use caching for static assets – at SiteGround we use NGINX direct delivery which is enabled by default on our servers, so if you are a client you get this caching effect out of the box.
Serve an alternative image format – WebP. This is a very useful way to reduce the size of the images on your site. For WordPress users hosted on SiteGround, you could enable this as an automatic service via the SG Optimizer plugin.
2. Minify your CSS and JavaScript
One of the easiest ways for big performance wins in this case is to use compression like Brotli or Gzip. Another possibility is to use plugins for WordPress sites. If you are a SiteGround customer, Brotli is enabled by default on our servers and you don’t need to do anything to use it, and the SG Optimizer plugin for WordPress will help you with the minification of CSS and JS.
