Boost your WordPress site with Gonzales plugin

Self-hosted WordPress by default comes without any caching. To improve load time you have to install cache plugin. There are many and they all improve speed of your site. Reason why website speed is important is:

• User experience – faster site, better experience
• Better ranking – faster sites rank better in Google
• Customers won’t flee if you have a fast webshop

Having said that, we can see that it’s imperative to have caching enabled. What’s also important to know is that theme can influence load time and page score (Google pagespeed). Good themes like the Genesis framework are optimized for speed and load only necessary objects that are essential for theme to function.

Great theme with good caching solution can have a great impact on website speed. For example if your current theme take 5 seconds to load, you can easily reduce load time to 2 seconds or less by using a different theme.

While it’s good to have a quality theme you can eliminate all the speed advantage by using plugins which load their own assets and in turn, increase load time and reduce website speed.

No matter the theme and plugins, it’s your job to make sure that it’s loading as fast as possible.

Gonzales speed boost

Gonzales is a WordPress plugin which works in conjunction with caching plugins. In fact you can achieve the best results only if you also use a caching plugin and Gonzales together.

Idea behind the plugin is pretty amazing and I wonder how it’s possible that it wasn’t developed before. Every plugin that is used on your website uses some kind of CSS or JS file which is used to display it’s design or a function.

A great example is a Contact form plugin. It’s only used on one page – contact page. So why would it load it’s assets on all the pages and thus increase the size of your page?

Let’s take a look at real-world example.

This is my page load time on Pingdom. Without any optimizations, only caching was enabled.

When I used Gonzales and disabled only two elements, I saved half of second, which is a lot.

When I had additional time, I set down and did further optimizations, I was able to save almost 2 seconds.

Gonzales gives you a really simple to see and understand view of assets that are being loaded on every page. Needed or not. Which is great as you don’t do this kind of thing every day.

This is how the Gonzales plugin looks like when you enable it. When you are logged in to WordPress, you will see additional menu (Gonzales) at the top.

Once you hover on top of it with your mouse, a menu will open showing JS and CSS files. When you see one that you would like to disable, click on a function that you ‘d like.

You can choose to enable asset globally, disable on current page or disable globally.

What looks like a difficult task, is a really simple process. Go throguh the list, disable and check if a webpage is loaded normally. If you think that it’s only Contact form plugin which can save you some time, then I suggest you take another look at the menu. Every page is different and every page uses different plugins but the most common assets that can be tweaked are:

• Jetpack
• Itunes apps plugin
• Lightbox
• Sharing buttons
• Fonts (if you changed fonts to Arial or other MS fonts and Google fonts are still loading)
• Review plugin
• Shortcodes plugin
• ….

Gonzales plugin Conclusion

There are many themes available for WordPress. Some are good and load fast, yet some are resource hogs. The same applies to plugins. While caching will improve load time, you may still load assets unknowingly which drag down performance of your website.

As page speed is considered a ranking factor, it’s your job to make sure that site runs as fast as possible. You can achieve this Gonzalez easily, no matter what kind of theme or plugin, you can save additional time for loading the website, improve user experience yet retain all the website functionality.

It should be noted that at the time of this writing, price was reduced to $19, from original price $29. If you need this kind of solution, now is the best time to buy.