Nobody likes a slow Divi website. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to speed up your Divi Website in 3 simple but POWERFUL steps! Speed up your Divi website like a real pro.
👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻 Start here 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻
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⇒ Software that I recommend:
✅ Divi 10% discount ⇒ https://wp.discount/divi-discount/
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I want you to succeed with your website, so lets get started.
⏱️Timestamps⏱️
0:00 Intro
1:05 Speed tools
1:56 Enable Divi Caching
3:21 Clean up Plugins
4:11 Install Caching Plugin
9:54 Final tests
11:16 Optimize images
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📖Transscript📖
In this video we’ll be speeding up your Divi website in just four easy to follow steps. I’ll show you how to enable all the performance options from Divi itself. How to check your websites on three different speed tests. How to optimize your entire website using the best Divi caching plugin. And how to optimize all your images using a free plugin. Let’s speed it up right now!
Login to your WordPress website. If you are still logging in using /wp-admin/…
that’s not a very safe way, so please watch my tutorial about securing your WordPress website. We’re going to optimize a real existing website of one of my clients, Alphabet Apartments, and they have multiple things going on here. They have big images, they have moving objects, they also have this script running in the foreground. But before we start tuning and changing things, we need to check our base score from our website. To do that we are using three different tools. We go to
PageSpeed Insights and we’re gonna fill in our URL over there, and we press on Analyze. But not only PageSpeed Insights we’re also gonna use GTMetrix. So go to this website and paste in your URL and press Test your site. Here we go. And last but not least we’re going to use the website of Pingdom. Also paste in your website choose a location near to you, we’re going to use Europe. Press Start test. We can see that on mobile this is the results right now, and on desktop these are the results. Not very good. I think we can improve this. And this is the score in GTMetrix we can see that we have a B in performance and Pingdom is giving us a D alright. So this website out of the box is well, not really bad, but we can definitely improve this. So I’m gonna walk you through the steps to improve this website. Very first thing you do: is you go to your Divi over there, and we click on Theme options. There you go to the tab ‘Performance’ over here. Now make sure that all these things are enabled. Dynamic icons, critical CSS JavaScript, WordPress Gutenberg, improve Google fonts loading, and defer jQuery, and also additional party scripts. Let’s enable all of these and press save changes.
I’m curious if this did something to our scores. Let’s see. So to do this we just press on analyze again, like this. And it’s going to analyze it again. We can press on GTMetrix the Te-Test button over here. And again we can press the start test . Well we’ve got some slight improvements on Pingdom. And we do get some slight improvements from
GTMetrix. So that is actually really great. Oh best practices is now at 100. That’s really great. It has also gotten some slight improvements. With every speed optimization you do, make sure your website still works. So we’re gonna open up our website in a new private window, over there. Just to load it all in and see if everything still works. As you can see the script is being delayed. As you can see now the loading goes smoothly and everything still works. Does my script still works? Yes all right. So it looks.
and the website still works. Alright really great. Now the next thing we should do actually is go to your plugins, installed plugins. Look very carefully at your plugins. See what plugins are you actually using, and what plugins can be left out. On this website I have installed a couple of plugins just for fun, just to show you that we’re not using them so we can easily just remove them. Delete like this. And press ok. Now as you can see on this website I only have four plugins working.
I have a Divi Carousel – I’m using it for to create this awesome guest reviews – if you want to see more about the Divi Carousel, check out this video, I’ve created a tutorial about it what you can actually do with this amazing plugin. And I’m using iThemes Security and of course Rank Math SEO. Make sure to thoroughly look at it and delete also the plugins that are installed which you are actually not using. And now we’re gonna bring in the big guns. I’ve tested out a lot of caching plugins for Divi there’s only one actual thing that works best of all. To get it you go to wp.discount/ How’s that for a URL! Now this is my personal website. There might be a discount going on right now when you’re watching this video. So go to WP Rocket over there, and you click on – now we have a 10% discount. If you now press on show code it will bring you to the WP Rocket website. With this offering. Copy the code. Go to your offer over here and oh wow now we even have a 20% off until March 22. I don’t know what date it is right now but go check it out if there’s any running code or discount right now. They have three different prices the only difference is the number of websites. If you only have one website then this license is perfect. This is for three I personally have the infinite license, because I have a lot of websites for all of my clients. If you want a single just press on buy WP Rocket. Fill in all these details you can pay with credit card or PayPal whatever you like. And then you press place order. And then you can see your license over here I can install it on unlimited websites, and my next billing date is May 11, 2029. Yes I did buy a license for years ahead. Because they were raising their prices. We go to download WP Rocket over here. Then the next thing we do is we go to plugins and we press ‘Add new’ over there. We’re going to press upload plugin, we’re going to add in WP Rocket and press ‘Install now’. Then we press on ‘Activate plugin’ over here. And now our plugin is activated. Let’s press on this one and go to ‘Settings’ over here. Now they also have a Rocket CDN. This is very useful if you have audiences from all over the world and you’re still facing some issues. This website is hosted at Siteground in the Google Cloud.
With the top-tier plan, so that’s not gonna be a problem, as they use their own CDN. We’re gonna close this one, and close this one. “Would you allow WP Rocket to collect information?” I press yes, because I want the folks at WP Rocket knows that we’re working with Divi. And then we press on ‘close’. Congratulations it’s working and it should be loading faster. Alright well close this one. Let’s set up WP Rocket, it’s very easy. Let’s go to caching. The first thing we do is we’re going to close the sidebar over there. Because I want to work as distraction free as possible. You can enable caching for logged in WordPress users if you have a website where a lot of people are logging in and then making use of your website. In our case we’re not, so I’m gonna turn this off. Go to the next step File optimization. And we’re going to turn this all on. We’re going to press on Minify, activate it, combine it, activate it, and optimize it, activate it. Scroll down we’re going to Minify JavaScript files, activate it, combine it, activate it, we’re going to load it deferred, we’re going to delay the execution. Press save changes over here. Then we go to Media over there.
Enable for lazy loading for images, and enable for iframes and videos. But also add missing image dimensions, and press save changes again. We go to pre-loading. And the pre-loading it’s already activated, so that’s really great. Then the next thing is we’re going to do database. We have 1200 revisions in our database, which is actually quite a lot. We also have two auto drafts and trashed posts. Well and you can clean this up to save some space in your database. A cleaner database equals a faster website. However, if you still need revisions of posts or pages, don’t delete them, because they all will be gone. Like forever. We can also do this with spam comments, trash comments and transients from our database. And we go can optimize tables, and that’s okay. All right save changes and optimize our website. When you have saved it you will see that what’s happened over here, and also the used CSS of your home page has been processed. That means that WP Rocket has stripped out the non-used CSS of our home page and start starting now to continue to generate it for up to 100 URLS per 60 Seconds. Amazing. We gotta close this. Close this dismiss this notice. Then we go over here and we go to
heartbeat right there. This should be enabled and all these behavior should be reduced, like this. Press save changes. This will actually save some server resources, really important. Scroll down. Then we have add-ons on Siteground they don’t use Varnish, they use NGiNX which is actually a better and stable option. But if you’re using Varnish, make sure to enable this. If you have no idea if you’re hosting company is doing this, keep this off. When you have changed this let’s check out our website how fast it really goes. What are we gonna do? We’re gonna open our website in a new private window and check out the loading speeds. First thing you do is check if your website still works. Are all the animation in place? Like this. Are the buttons still working everything? Go to your next page and then it seems to be all okay. If you now go back to your home page, you might will see that this clicking around is going extremely fast. Like this. I’m just clicking around and this loads like instantly. So that’s really amazing. From a user perspective I really like it. But what about our tools? We’re going to analyze it again. Press on analyze. We’re going to click on Re-Test over here. And on Pingdom we’re also going to press on start test again. Before activating WP Rocket we were at mobile 72, and desktop 82. Now we have a mobile 92, and desktop 95. That’s really great! But if you scroll down, there are actually things we can still improve. We have the first contentfull paint could be improved, and also the largest contenfull paint. What does this mean? Well if you scroll down this is what it means. It is empty and then we go to a gigantic image. Now this is what Google advises us to do. Serve images in next-gen formats. We are still using JPGs on our home page which causes this delay in load time. We’re gonna change this coming up. This was our GTMertrix it was a B 91%, 74% 1.6s and now we have an A 91% 96% 1.6s. Great. Also a huge Improvement. Pingdom says a C with 72. Load time 1.1 right. And now we have an 87 with a load time of 424 milliseconds! And this is even from Japan. Why is this Japan? So the next thing to improve are of course these images. The people of WP Rocket are very smart, so what did they do? They created a image optimization plugin just to do this job. So let’s press on install Imagify over here, and then it’s immediately installed on your website. That’s great, the first thing we need to do is create a account. Press on that one sign up it’s completely free. Enter your email address.
the@wpressdoctor.com and press on sign up. And now we have an API key so go to your mailbox. And then we’ll receive an email from Imagify which says “Welcome to Imagify”. You can change your password over there to set it up. Click on this link, we’re gonna create a real safe password, and press reset my password. Here we go. Sign in now. Fill in your email address and the password and then we are at the Imagify dashboard. In here you can upload manual pictures to use. But we’re not gonna do that we are going back to our WordPress website. Now we’re going to click on “I have my API key” over there. And from your email we’ll copy this API key. Copy it. And then paste it in over there and press ‘Connect me’. Now we are live with Imagify. Press okay and then we go to ‘Settings’ over here. Let’s scroll down a bit. What we need is the optimization. We’re gonna use WebP for our website. Because it is just so good. Enable this one: display images in WebP format on the site. We’re going to use picture tags which is preferred.
All these settings are actually pretty good. When it’s good, you press on ‘Save and Go to bulk Optimizer’ over here/ Oh we need to change this to 2880px. Press save and go to bulk optimizer. Alright here we are at the Imagify bulk optimization which is really important, and the thing we need to do. If we scroll down as you can see we have 100% Space Credit left. When I look at my media library I can see that we have… let me show you. We have 2660 media files. That’s a lot, and it’s gonna take a lot of time to optimize them all. But it will save us a lot of speed if we have done so. Let’s press on ‘Bulk optimization’ over here. We’re going to optimize our media library, and we’re going to use the smart system over there. And then we’re gonna press on ‘Imagify them all’. Here we go. Let’s press start the optimization, click on it. Alright here we go! The media library has been started although we only have 20 mb’s free credits so I don’t know how long this will take. As I predicted we have run pretty fast out of our credits. As you can see right now we have only optimized 11 images! That is just… that’s I’ve never seen this before… this is extreme. So it might be that your website has optimized all your images, that’s great. If not, and now you can do two things. Or you can wait until next month and start optimizing your other images. Or you can buy a plan. If you click on this one ‘See our plans’ over here you have different kind of plans. Starter, Growth and a Infinite. If you’re uploading a lot of photos and like this website in particular, I should use the infinite plan with a unlimited license for ten dollars a month. Or you can just wait another month to have 20 MBs again, it’s completely up to you. So I’m actually in doubt if these these images are already optimized on the home page. I’m not pretty sure, so I think the PageSpeed Insight will still report the same thing. If you have any questions or you just want to say “Thank you Matt!” Drop them down in the comments I’ll always reply. Hit that like button so I know I was on the right track, subscribe over there if you want to see more WordPress related videos and also check out this video, which also has an enormous speed!
Really fast
