We have dedicated 2023 to the development of the WordPress plugin IndexReloaded. The plugin optimizes the websites generated by WordPress in order to achieve faster loading times on the clients.
The beta test phase of the plugin is now largely completed – we will publish the plugin on wordpress.org in the next step.
We have already published a page about the plugin on our website – with the download link to the current beta version, with lots of information about the plugin and the possibility to get a free license key.
Why improve a website’s performance?
Faster loading time of a website on the clients means double success: On the one hand, every visitor to a website is pleased when the pages load quickly and the waiting time is kept as short as possible. On the other hand, the website receives a higher ranking in search engines and is more likely to be displayed in search results.
The performance of a website is measured with online tools, one of the best known and best online tools can be found on the PageSpeed Insight website at https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Whether a website has good or poor performance depends on a number of factors, the most important of which are probably
- Performance of the server
- Internet connection bandwidth
- Architecture of the web pages
- Optimized images and videos
How does a plugin improve performance?
IndexReloaded and similar plugins handle the architecture of websites. The HTML created by the CMS WordPress is changed, the JavaScript elements and the CSS elements are reorganized so that the web browser needs less time to display a web page on the client.
How good or bad is IndexReloaded?
We have compared IndexReloaded with 4 plugins so far, some of which only optimize CSS, others also optimize JavaScript and general aspects of HTML. Most plugins retrieve the optimized files, such as Critical CSS, from their own websites via API calls and then cache the results on the WordPress installation.
IndexReloaded creates the entire output “on the fly and on demand” – and then caches it locally.
The total amount of data transferred from the server to the clients is not reduced by most plugins, but a performance gain is achieved with delayed loading of JavaScript and CSS elements.
IndexReloaded effectively reduces the total amount of data transferred, but IndexReloaded also achieves most of the performance gain by delaying the loading of JavaScript and CSS elements.
Plugins for improving website performance have to process websites that are always different and take into account sets of rules that are enormous in scope.
It is about the syntax of CSS, JavaScript and HTML and what a modern web browser makes of it.
IndexReloaded accomplishes this task quite well. Even if the quality appears better than that of the plug-ins used for comparison, it must be honestly said that it would be presumptuous to speak of 100% target achievement in view of the complexity of the task set.
The results on PageSpeed Insights show that IndexReloaded probably results in the greatest performance gain.
I therefore believe that IndexReloaded is good rather than bad, the plugin has the maturity and the quality to be made available to the WordPress community