Performance
The settings Kalium gives you for a faster site, and the things that matter more than any of them.
A fast site keeps visitors and ranks better. Kalium has a screen of settings that help, but they're the finishing touches, not the main event.
The three things that actually make the biggest difference are your images, your hosting, and how many plugins you're running. Get those right first, then come back to this screen.
Everything below is at Appearance -> Customize -> Performance.
Fonts
These three matter most, because fonts block text from appearing until they arrive.
Load Google Fonts Locally
Off by default. Turn this on.
Downloads your Google Fonts and serves them from your own server instead of Google's. It's faster, one less server to connect to, and it means visitor data isn't sent to Google, which helps with GDPR.
There's very little reason not to enable this.
Font Preload
On by default.
Tells the browser to start downloading fonts immediately, rather than waiting until it finds the text that needs them. It reaches Self-Hosted fonts only.
Font Face Rendering
Default: Swap.
What the browser does while a font is still downloading:
Swap: show the text immediately in a fallback font, then swap when the real one arrives. Best for most sites: visitors can start reading straight away.
Block: show nothing until the font arrives. It looks cleaner, but visitors stare at a blank space.
Fallback and Optional, compromises that give up on a slow font entirely.
Auto: leaves it to the browser.
Scripts
Each of these removes something your site may not need.
WordPress Emoji Script
On by default, which means the script loads. Turn it off to drop it.
WordPress loads a script to support emoji in older browsers. Every modern browser handles emoji natively, so turning this off is safe, emoji still work.
WordPress Embed Script
On by default, which means the script loads. Turn it off to drop it.
It is the script that turns a pasted link into an embedded frame, a Twitter post for instance. If you don't embed posts from other WordPress sites, you don't need it.
Always Include jQuery
Off by default.
Kalium only loads jQuery when something needs it. Turn this on only if a plugin breaks without it, some older plugins assume it's always there.
jQuery Migrate Script
Only appears when Always Include jQuery is on. It's a compatibility layer for very old jQuery code. If nothing on your site needs it, switching it off saves a file.
Other settings
Enqueue style.css
On by default. Leave it alone unless you know you need to change it.
Preload Theme Icons
Loads Kalium's icon font earlier, so icons don't appear a moment after the rest of the page.
JPEG Image Quality
How hard WordPress compresses your JPEGs, from 50 to 100. It starts at 82%, which is WordPress's own default. If you change it, regenerate your thumbnails so existing images are recompressed.
The things that matter more
If your site is slow, these will make a far bigger difference than any setting above.
1. Your images
Usually the single biggest cause of a slow site.
Resize before uploading. 2000px on the longest edge is plenty. A photo straight from a phone is several times larger than any screen needs.
Compress them, with an image optimization plugin or before uploading.
Set sensible image sizes in each area, and regenerate thumbnails afterwards.
2. Your hosting
Cheap shared hosting is slow in a way no setting can fix. If your site is slow and your images are already optimized, this is usually why.
Bad Hosting Environment3. Your plugins
Every active plugin adds work to every page load. Deactivate and delete anything you're not using, a deactivated plugin still takes up space and still needs updating.
4. A caching plugin
One good caching plugin makes more difference than every setting on the Performance screen combined.
Be careful with the optimization features Minify, combine and delay JavaScript. They can speed a site up, and they're also the most common cause of broken menus, sliders and galleries.
Turn them on one at a time, checking your site after each. If something breaks, you know which one did it.
5. Load styles only where they're needed
If you have a long stylesheet that only applies to your shop, a CSS snippet with conditions loads it on shop pages and nowhere else.
CSS and JavaScript SnippetsMeasuring it
Test before and after you change anything, or you're guessing.
PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix are both free. Test the same page each time, and test more than once, the first load after a change is always slower because caches are empty.
Pay attention to how the page feels as well as the score. A site that scores 85 and shows text instantly is better than one scoring 95 that sits blank for two seconds.
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