Optimising my WordPress web page speed

I keep telling people that I suck at designing. I design mostly for myself, and what I think is pleasing for me. That usually means that I try to be as minimalist as possible. Apparently my clients don't like my designs as much as I do mine, LOL!

I focus more on optimising my site for speed, or at least I try to. My favourite webpage analyser are Google's PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix because it provides exact instructions and even optimised codes and images that I can immediately download and implement on my site. Chrome Dev Tools is also my favourite, especially when I need to analyze a site in local development.

It's slightly tricky to do this on my website at WebGrrrl.net. For one thing, I need to do some workaround to add asynchronous script calls on the JavaScript and CSS files, which is very important for a content-first load time. At least I was able to adjust via its functions.php file so that WordPress would force make the scripts load in the footer.

Also, my use of a content delivery network (CDN) via Incapsula also affected my site loading speed, which is frustrating. I can't make do without Incapsula, due to the history of my website being hacked at least three times, twice in which resulted with a DDoS downtime. What a painful experience.

Optimising a website requires understanding of both the front-end and back-end web structures. Luckily I like exploring both. I still have to deal with the resource caching on the server side, so I'm taking my time to explore as much option as I can in my Apache VPS before I choose to implement the recommended optimising steps.