Your writers or editors might not have direct control over the ad, plugin, server, or script choices that affect your publication’s overall performance. That’s all taken care of by your admins and Newspack’s systems and support teams, who do their best to keep sites fast and performant.
But your choices as you build out articles and pages can make just as much of a difference in your site’s performance and user experience. Don’t discount the importance of observing best practices for performance each and every time you build out a post.
Here are a few tips for keeping posts quick to load and easy to read.
Edit images before uploading
We’ve compiled a detailed set of image size guidelines for Newspack sites that are worth perusing before adding images to your articles. Depending on how your site is configured, images will typically be served via WordPress’ CDN or Jetpack’s CDN, each of which optimizes standard image file types.
You can further reduce the size of files served by ensuring images you upload are as small as possible for their purpose on the site. That means small in dimensions (between 1200 px wide minimum and 2560 px wide maximum) and file size (ideally from kilobytes up to 2 MB max). Stay within these guidelines for rich display of images, while keeping the site performant and visible on social media. Extra-large images may not display well on the site or social platforms.
File type can make a difference too. We typically recommend saving images as JPGs rather than PNGs whenever possible, to best balance image quality and file size.
Keep tags slim
You may already have your own strategy for tagging posts on your site. But tweaking your tagging practices can improve your site’s performance, as well as search-engine optimization.
Some of the most successful tagging strategies we’ve seen greatly restrict the number of tags used on both individual posts and the site overall. A good basic strategy: Tag only the most important half-dozen (max) people, places, events, and ideas on each post. Keep your tags simple. Clean, organized tags help visitors and search-engine crawlers alike find articles faster and reduce bounce rate.
Your inner archivist (or managing editor) may fight you on this, but you can reduce complexity and load time on the site by consolidating and cleaning up your tags. This can take some time, especially if tagging has always been a free-for-all, but it’s worth it.
Here are some ways to consolidate and reorganize tags.
Be mindful of trade-offs with embeds
It’s great to have the ability to show, not just tell. Many popular embeds—including Flourish, Infogram, Datawrapper, and Tableau—allow publishers to include robust data sets in their reporting. This is a boon for data journalists, as well as folks doing everyday coverage.
WordPress also supports a variety of social-media and video embeds out of the box with the Embed block. Other one-off embeds can be added with the Custom HTML block. Google Maps or PDFs can also be embedded in various ways. Individual sites may also have plugins installed that support even more embeds.
But add enough of these bells and whistles, and you can greatly reduce the performance of your post. It’s especially important to consider this whenever you choose to include interactive embeds. Even on the most performant site, a single post or page can take a performance hit when a ton of embeds or scripts are in play among basic images, ads, and calls to action.
So stay mindful of what you’re adding to an article. Do all of those graphs or charts need to be on a single landing page, or could they be broken up across multiple pages? Do you need to use the interactive version of every graph or chart, or could a static image version work just as well? Does the data need to be embedded at all, or could you summarize and link to a results page?