How I Boost Page Speed and Pass Core Web Vitals on CyberNaira

At CyberNaira, I boosted page speed, passed Core Web Vitals from poor to good (the highest score in GSC), and improved page experience by doing a few things right.

This website’s PageSpeed Insights report averages 99 across most URLs on both mobile and desktop, resulting in improved traffic, engagement, and conversion.

How do I achieve these scores? 

This article provides comprehensive insight and a detailed account of what I did to improve a once-slow website into a blazing-fast one, like a jet.

Any WordPress website can replicate everything I did; that’s a guarantee. There’s no huge investment involved or need to deal with code. 

This is the most beginner-friendly approach to optimizing page speed on slow websites and fixing CWV Metrics and INP. 

Here’s what you’ll achieve from reading this post and taking action on my recommendations to boost page speed and pass core web vitals.

Before proceeding, let’s understand why Page Speed matters in online business. 

Why does Page Speed matter?

According to a report by Tooltester, if a web page takes more than 5 seconds to load, 53% of mobile users will abandon the site. Likewise, if a web page takes 10 seconds or more to load, the bounce rate increases by 123%. 

You need faster web pages and a better user experience to generate more leads and increase landing page conversion, sales, and revenue. 

The faster your site users can access your content, the higher the conversion rate. 

Page speed is more demanding for mobile users due to slower network connections (Cellular data) than for desktop users, often connected to Wi-Fi. This means that website pages that load slowly on desktop might take even longer on mobile. 

Most importantly, since Google shifted to mobile-first indexing, Google considers a website’s mobile version first for indexing and ranking. 

Having a faster mobile site can help with your website’s SEO. This is because Google and its users love faster web pages. The more people click around your site, or the higher the CTR from SERP, the better search engine visibility you have. 

So, technically, a faster website should lead to more traffic, conversions and revenue. That’s how vital site loading time is for your online business. 

How I Improve Load Time

I applied the WordPress Speed Optimization tips shared in a previous post on this blog. These are the standard or basic WordPress optimization best practices. 

But this time, I took a few extra steps and bought a premium WordPress caching plugin. Change the theme and make other required changes on the blog. 

Here are some screenshots to help you understand how fast and optimized this website is after making these changes. 

Here are the Google Search Console Page Experience and Core Web Vitals reports. 

Core Web Vitals as reported by Google Search Console. 

From the image above, you can see that this website has only a green line, indicating that all indexed URLs have Good Core Web Vitals reports on both mobile and desktop. 

Per PSI reports, this is the average of most mobile website pages measured in the PSI testing tool. 

You can perform similar tests on your website before applying the tips I shared in this post. This way, you can measure or compare the before-and-after optimization strategies to see how they have worked. 

Here is what you need to do.

This exercise will help you base your decision on facts and reliable data.

Now, I want you to get more value from this post, so I break down each speed and performance optimization strategy I used into subsections so you can follow along and skip to the section that matters to you.  

Faster Web Hosting

My first step was to migrate from Namecheap shared hosting to a more robust, faster Cloudways server. Don’t get me wrong: Namecheap is a good web host and one of the best for shared hosting plans.

But at the time, I needed more from a hosting plan: a faster hosting server. So, I went to some relevant groups, looking for unbiased opinions from people who had purchased the hosting plan. 

From several reviews, SiteGround, WPX, Cloudways, and WP Engine are constantly mentioned and rated above many other web hosts. After researching, I decided to purchase the DigitalOcean server from Cloudways.

If you’re wondering why I go with Cloudways, here are some reasons:

The good news is that these benefits are available to all Cloudways customers, regardless of the hosting plan you purchase.

Whether agency hosting, multisite, blogger/publishing, developers, SMB, or e-commerce hosting, every Cloudways customer gets top-of-the-range hosting services from Cloudways. 

Cloudways offers a 3-day free trial, allowing you to test the services and experience their quality firsthand. You can sign up for an account today and decide if it is something that your business will benefit from.

Cloudflare Enterprise 

As mentioned above, the Cloudflare Enterprise solution is included with Cloudways hosting plans at a very low rate, under $5 per month. It gets even less if you host more than 25 websites with Cloudways. 

This means I will benefit from Cloudflare’s over 200 global content delivery network locations, bringing content closer to the users. Cloudflare DNS resolves host names faster at locations nearest to the site user. 

Cloudflare’s robust firewall (WAF) security protection is another reason I chose Cloudways. Rest assured, state-of-the-art web security features protect my site against DDoS attacks, ransomware, scams, hackers, bots and phishing. 

Long story short, I activated the Cloudflare enterprise add-ons after purchasing the Cloudways DigitalOcean server to improve performance, security, and speed. 

Here is a look at the Cloudflare Enterprise settings I activated in Cloudways. 

Also, the powerful Cloudflare Enterprise Analytics lets you monitor cache performance to improve site performance or reduce origin web server traffic.

You can filter the results to the last 72 hours to see Cloudflare bandwidth usage and HTTPS server requests from Cloudflare or the origin server.    

Below this chart is another one that lets you monitor Cloudflare’s cache status. 

This page contains more data; when you dig deeper, you can use it to optimize your website. 

Install Caching Plugin

Activating the WP Rocket cache plugin has the most significant impact and makes a BIG difference in the before-and-after page speed optimization. 

There are reasons I use WP Rocket, one of which is its simplicity and ease of use. The plugin does not require complex configuration. Most of its settings are in checkboxes; set them, and you’re done. 

Another reason I prefer WP Rocket is that it eliminates the need to install multiple performance optimization WordPress plugins. Instead of having three to four plugins for different optimization tasks, you can use a single plugin that handles it all and is more efficient. 

For example, WP Rocket now has WordPress database cleanup features, a standalone feature in WP-Optimize. 

This feature automates the cleanup of junk files in your site database, such as spam comments, transients, WordPress revisions and trashed posts. 

WP Rocket’s file optimization feature also lets you uninstall Autoptimize. It can be used to minify CSS and JavaScript files, optimize CSS delivery, load JavaScript files in a deferred manner, and delay JavaScript execution. 

For these reasons, I only need one plugin to handle many WordPress performance and speed optimization tasks. 

I shared a detailed firsthand experience of the plugin in my WP Rocket review post. Please read it for more helpful information on why you need the plugin if you have a WordPress blog. 

The WP Rocket Settings I Use

I have the following WP Rocket settings turned on for this very blog:

Check out my comprehensive review of the best WP Rocket settings for a more detailed guide and explanation of why each is essential.

Reduce Plugin Usage

Since I have WP Rocket installed and activated, I uninstalled other optimization plugins and looked for more ways to bring the total number to the barest minimum.

I ensure that only the plugins needed are left on the blog.

As of this writing, I have 15 plugins active on the blog. I can reduce this number to 12 if I want to, but I prefer to keep some functions for visual appeal only. 

Here is what I do to bring this number to 15 plugins. 

Initially, I was using an Ad Inserter plugin to inject custom content into specific parts or sections of the blog. At the same time, I have the WPCode Lite plugin, which is mainly for inserting scripts into the header/footer and other parts of the website. 

I removed one of these plugins, so I now have only one. I opt to uninstall Ad Inserter because, primarily, it’s more useful for blogs that run contextual advertising, which I don’t here. 

Another thing I did was uninstall the social sharing plugin and replace it with the JetPack social sharing button. 

You may argue that JetPack lacks features in other standalone WordPress Social Share plugins. I agree, but I’m more concerned about performance than bells and whistles. 

Removing the extra plugin didn’t magically boost performance, but it did help with the overall optimization efforts. 

For example, after adding the Hubbub social share plugin (Formerly Grow Social By Mediavine), the home page size increased from 351kb to 352kb, and the fully loaded time from 358ms to 371ms. 

Definitely, users won’t notice a performance decrease, but I’m after squeezing every kb and ms I could get. 

Every kilobyte and millisecond counts when boosting page speed and passing core web vitals to improve website performance.

Switching to Optimized WordPress Themes

Lastly, I switched to a more optimized WordPress theme. 

I have written about my experience with Astra and Kadence several times on this blog. It is worth discussing again in this post. 

Astra is a very lightweight (50kb), fast, and SEO-optimized theme, but the previous version I used had this particular issue I couldn’t understand. 

The theme contributes to a bad CLS score in PSI. I tried to solve this issue, but the more I tried, the clearer it became that I couldn’t. 

Then, my instinct tells me to try Kadence. 

After activating the KadenceWP theme on the blog, I tested several pages in PSI, and the CLS score was 0, which is the perfect score any website can achieve. 

So, I stick with Kadence WP; it has been a fantastic experience since then. 

Both themes are perfect and can be considered the best WordPress themes. Choosing between Astra and Kadence is challenging, so you must test which works for your site. 

One thing to note is that WordPress themes can affect a site’s performance, especially if the theme is poorly coded and adds significant bloat. 

So use a highly optimized WordPress theme like Astra, KadenceWP, or GeneratePress. 

Conclusion 

Sometimes, what you need to do to boost page speed, pass Core Web Vitals, and improve user experience isn’t complicated or technical. 

With a reliable web host, an optimized server and well-coded plugins and themes, even a beginner can have a fast-loading website. 

Of these, I advise against relying on freemium tools if you want to improve website performance quickly. 

Freemium tools are good but lack the advanced features, customization, and control you might need for performance optimization. 

Premium tools give you access to more advanced options, customization, and features that help you fix and troubleshoot WordPress websites.

Plus, paid tools are more supported, regularly updated, and maintained, and new features are added regularly.