I'm customizing a HTML template, any suggestions on plugins for good page load time?
1 Answer
To get the biggest improvements in page speed for your site you're going to want to do a few things server side first. The latest versions of PHP will give you a nice performance gain (https://ellislab.com/blog/entry/time-to-upgrade-php) as well as enabling g-zip on the server. From there you'll want to make sure your images are losslessly compressed. As far as EE goes there are caching techniques built in to help increase page performance. (https://docs.expressionengine.com/latest/optimization/caching.html)
As far as SEO, different people use different techniques. Some people use plugins to help them manage this, and some people do it a little more manually. If you take the manual route, you'll be creating more channel fields, but you have greater control over the content. You can also pass those fields through layout or embed tags.
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I compressed my images, but I still got a load time of about 5 seconds. I'm not using any channels, just templates for now. Would using more channels and template variables actually help the load time, provided I have the EE caching enabled?– GregNov 13, 2016 at 16:48
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In the admin under Settings > Debugging & Output you should see "Enable debugging?". Once enabled at the bottom of each page you'll see information on the speed/number of queries loaded on that page. It sounds like you might want to check out gtmetrix.com and tools.pingdom.com as well to get an idea on what else is causing slowdowns. The EE caching techniques above are really for data coming from channels. I can't give a clearcut answer because there are a number of factors that can cause slowdowns. Nov 13, 2016 at 18:37