Performance improvement of WordPress by using WebP as image

This is one of WordPress accelerating activities.

This article is for using WebP as image format to be sent to client.
– WebP: New image format which was made by Google.

Other improvements are in this article.

How to accelerate WordPress

In this article let me summarize how to accelerate WordPress.System architectureYou can find from my github.NginxTarget ...

linuxfun.org

2021.10.08

What I did

I use this as base docker-compose.

Performance improvement of WordPress using Unix Domain Socket

As mentioned by this tweet, I am interested in accelerating web service.In this article I switched to use Unix Domain So...

linuxfun.org

2021.10.08

I installed this plugin to WordPress.
This plugin is cool because,
– Converting existing image file to WebP format.
– Converting newly uploaded image file to WebP format automatically.

I installed but faced below error.
– GD or Imagick has to be installed.

I changed Dockerfile to install imagick.

RUN	apt -y install libmagickwand-dev && \
	pecl install imagick && \
	docker-php-ext-enable imagick && \
	(snip)

I faced another error.
– rewrite_not_executed means rewriting URL or something like that?

I found

If you are using a Nginx server, ...

in this error message which indicates I need to configure Nginx.

I also found this configuration.
When I changed to Pass Thru, error message was removed.

If you use some cache plugins you need to delete existing cache before production.

I found button which converts existing image files to WebP.

About 20 mins passed after I clicked Regenerate All, then error happened.
There is 504 timeout.

Timeout value has to be extended.

This is configuration of reverse-proxy which is https-portal.
Only need to add below line.
– This example shows setting 300 secs.

   environment:
+    CUSTOM_NGINX_SERVER_CONFIG_BLOCK: 'proxy_read_timeout 300;'

This is timeout configuration of Nginx <-> php-fpm.
I added these lines to nginx/conf.d/default.conf.

 server {
    location ~ \.php$ {
+       fastcgi_read_timeout 300;
    }
 }

I tried again.
After 1 hour, completed.

You can confirm by accessing some blot post.
If you find content-type WebP is returned when you access image, then well done!

Before vs after

I measured with below condition.

- Using LightHouse in Developers Tools of Chrome browser.
  Checking Performance only
- Taking median as representative(n = 5).
- Measuring on secret tab of Chrome.

Before
<—Mobile Desktop—>

After
<—Mobile Desktop—>

Desktop has decreased, but Mobile drastically improved from 21 to 42 which is 200% higher!

Conclusion

How was it?

No program modification required!

Let’s do it , why not?