Supercharge your Wordpress

Website

Hello!I am Justin Thomas I am here because I love talking about performance and speed.

12 years in the industry - 9 years with ResellerClub

You can find me at:@jsstn -

Why WordPress Site Speed Matters

Case Studies around PageSpeedWalmartSaw a 2% increase in conversion for every 1 second of improvement in load time.

They also saw 1% increase in revenue for every 100ms of improvement

AmazonSaw a 1% dip in revenue for every 100ms of increase in load time.

YoutubeYoutube launched a light version of their service which was 90% faster, they started seeing traffic from locations like Brazil, SouthEast Asia.

➜Few seconds to make impact ➜Users will leave➜Traffic, Subscribers && Revenue

If your site takes too long to load, most people are gone, lost before you even had a chance.

Why Speed Matters ?

We [Google] must deliver and render the “above the fold” content in under one second, which allows the user to begin interacting with the page as soon as

possible.

BENCHMARKING

➜Pingdom➜GTMetrix➜Succuri ➜Blitz

A good page load time is under 2 seconds.

How to Check Your WordPress Website Speed?

What Slows Down Your WordPress Website?

➜Bloated Themes➜Slow Networking➜WordPress Config➜Bad Plugins➜External Scripts➜Page Size

Speeding up Wordpress in

Easy Steps

➜ Don’t be tempted by the price

➜ Don’t do it because all your other sites are hosted on the same setup.

➜ The stress of your site going down after getting a big feature is enough to create a few early gray hairs: don’t be a victim, invest in proper hosting.

Shared Vs WordPress Hosting

Minimize HTTP Requests

➜Streamline the number of elements on your page.

➜Use CSS instead of images whenever possible.

➜Combine multiple style sheets into one.➜Reduce scripts and put them at the

bottom of the page.

Use a caching plugin

➜Quickest and easiest ways to cut your page loading speed

➜WP Total Cache or WP Super Cache

Note: If you’re using a managed WordPresshosting provider, then you don’t need acaching plugin because they take care of itfor you.

Add Expires headers for browser caching

Expires headers tells the browser whether to request a specific file from the webserver or whether to get a version of a page from the browser’s cache

➜Reduce the need for users to download the same files from your webserver twice.

➜It reduces the number of HTTP requests that need to be made

➜Reduce the size of your images without losing any visual quality

➜Works in the background every time you upload a new image

Compress your images with WP Smush.it

There are several ways to minify your files :

➜It involves squishing all of your files into one, so instead of calling ten individual javascript files, you simply place all of your javascript in one file.

➜It requires deleting white space and making your files smaller. WP Minify is a great plugin that automatically does all of this for you.

Minify Resources

Akamai, Succuri, Sitelock, Amazon CloudFront,

Cloudflare

Use a content delivery network (CDN)

It takes all your static files you’ve got on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.

Optimize your homepage to load quickly

➜Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (include them only in posts)

➜Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need

Keep it minimal! Readers come for content,not 8,000 widgets on the homepage

Update WordPress

Each update will not only offer new features, but also fix security issues and bugs. Your WordPress theme and plugins may have regular updates, too.

Use Excerpts on Homepage and Archives

By default, WordPress displays the full content of each article on your homepage and archives. This means your homepage, categories, tags, and other archive pages will all load slower.

Split Comments into Pages

WordPress comes with a built-in solution for that. Simply go to Settings » Discussion and check the box next to the “Break comments into pages” option.

Optimize your WP page to load quickly

Faster Gallery Plugin

Disable Hotlinking &

Leaching

Faster Slider Plugin

WPTouchEnviraSoliloquy

➜CSS sprites work because it’s faster to load one big image and use CSS to show the section you want than it is to load lots of smaller images. This is because the browser doesn’t need to make as many requests.

➜The fastest way to use CSS sprites is to use SpriteMe, which is a tool that enables you to easily turn all of your images into a CSS sprite.

Use CSS Sprites

Consider splitting your CSS into two parts: a short inline part that styles above-the-fold elements, and an external part that can be deferred.

Prioritize above-the-fold content

➜Default search feature in WordPress is known to be notoriously bad and slow

➜Change search to a more advance and indexed based system using elasticsearch

Fantastic ElasticSearch & ElasticPress

Elastic Search

TAKEAWAYS

Website speed optimisation is a huge area and thishas only been a taster of some of the tools andtechniques that can help make your WordPresswebsite load faster.

Hopefully this talk gives you a bit of inspiration to think about your own website’s loading speed and for you to learn more about the subject.

Thanks!You can find me at:@jsstn

justin.t@resellerclub.com

Questions