Our firm has tested all the major wordpress site speed related plugins. We have come to the firm conclusion that WP Rocket rules the roost. And to be clear we are not affiliated with WP Rocket in any way, nor are we receiving any benefit from them. We love their product and have used it to our advantage.

There are numerous settings within the interface panel once the plugin is activated. And there is also a help section with numerous tips for best practices.
Our recommendations mirror these tips for the most part, but are based on much experimentation.

Critical options we identified to enable under file optimization:
Minify CSS files
Optimize CSS delivery
Load JavaScript deferred
Delay JavaScript execution

Under Cache options you want to enable caching for mobile devices

Within the preload section we advise enabling preload cache and preload links.

With regard to images you can optimize them manually in photoshop or enable imagify if not- of course the smaller the file size the better the load time. That said image quality has to be sharp, i.e not too minimized.

Using the database optimization tool is also recommended, but be sure you have a full back ready to restore if things go awry, which happens.

These guidelines get our target pages an average of 83 on mobile site speed and 93 on desktop site speed, these scores dwarf those of our competitors.

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