How I Got All A's on webpagetest.org

2 minute read

I heard about webpagetest.org during my most recent WordCamp. It’s a service for analyzing your website’s performance. From what I can tell, it’s completely supported by sponsors, so it’s free to use.

I ran my WordPress meetup’s site (which, obviously, runs on WordPress) through its analysis, and initially got C grades or so. Not fabulous. But with a little work, I got to all As (well, almost). So I thought I’d share what I did.

I installed and activated WP Super Cache, and activated “advanced caching.”

Then I updated the “ht access file” (the file next to wp-config.php) with

# Mike attempt to add browser caching
<FilesMatch "\.(gif|png|jpg|jpeg|css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public"
</FilesMatch>

Also, I noticed the images I was using were giant. I was using them with the Elementor page builder, which, unfortunately, didn’t give me an option to use the smaller thumbnail versions of them. I got around this by resizing them on my machine and uploading the new version to the website as a different image.

If I wanted the last A, I just needed to sign up for a CDN. This isn’t a commercial endeavour, so I don’t have any budget, so I didn’t bother with that. I think upgrading my shared hosting would also help with load time.

Anyways, that’s what I did. That’s not what everyone needs to do, and it’s not the only way to improve your webpagetest.org score, but it’s one way.