JCH Optimize improves the performance of your website by performing several optimizations to the HTML page aimed at improving the Web Vitals measured by PageSpeed Insights, such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Speed Index (SI), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Time to Interactive (TTI), and Total Blocking Time (TBT). These metrics attempt to quantify the quality of the user experience. JCH Optimize can improve these metrics to provide a better experience for your users and improve your PageSpeed scores.
Optimizations Performed By JCH Optimize
JCH Optimize optimizes your pages by automatically performing some recommended strategies offered by PageSpeed, which include:
- Minify CSS and JavaScript files and the HTML. Unnecessary whitespaces and other characters are removed to reduce network payload sizes and script parse times.
- Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources. Inline critical JavaScript and CSS and defer all non-critical resources to prevent resources from blocking the first paint of your page.
- Defer offscreen images. Offscreen and hidden images are lazy-loaded after all critical resources have finished loading to lower Time To Interactive (TTI).
- Add Width and Height attributes to images. Set an explicit width and height on image elements to reduce layout shifts and improve CLS.
- Enable text compression. Boilerplate codes are placed in the .htaccess files at the site’s directory root to instruct the server to serve text-based resources with compression (deflate or brotli) to minimize total network bytes.
- Preload critical resources. Automatically analyzes each page to identify critical resources to load with a high priority by HTTP/2 enabled servers to improve LCP time.
- Reduce initial server response. A page cache feature is included in the plugin that integrates well with the other optimization features and significantly reduces time-to-first-byte.
Benefits of Using JCH Optimize
Research has confirmed that 40% of visitors will leave a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to download. Also, Google and other search engines have indicated that their ranking algorithm increasingly factors website download speed. The benefits of using JCH Optimize then include:
- Improved user experience. Your users will have a pleasant experience as they browse your site.
- Improved SEO. Your rankings in Google search pages can increase and improve organic visibility in internet searches.
- Improved conversions. Your website revenue also increases with increased traffic volume and visitor retention.
Pro Version available
There is a pro version available with more optimization features and options and premium support with assistance to configure plugin to resolve conflicts and improve performance on our website.
How to use
To use, first temporarily deactivate all page caching features and plugins, then use the ‘Automatic Settings’ (Minimum – Optimum) to configure the plugin. The ‘Automatic Settings’ are concerned with the combining of the CSS and javascript files, and the management of the combined files, and automatically sets the options in the ‘Automatic Settings Groups’. Use the Exclude options to exclude files or plugins that don’t work so well when combined with JCH Optimize. You can then try the other optimization features in turn such as Sprite Generator, Add Image Attributes, Lazy Load Images, CDN/Cookieless Domain, Optimize CSS Delivery, etc., based on the optimization needs of your site. Flush all your cache before re-enabling caching features and plugins.
Documentation
Visit our documentation on the main plugin site for more information on how the plugin works and how to configure it to improve your scores on GtMetrix and PageSpeed Insights
Advanced Features and Premium Support
If you need assistance on your website in configuring the plugin to resolve any conflicts or if you need access to more advanced features such as Http/2 support, Remove unused CSS, Lazy-load iframes, Optimize Images, using multiple domains with CDN, then there’s a Pro version available on a subscription basis. With an active subscription you get premium technical support through our ticket system, access to downloads of new versions, and access to our Optimize Image API.
