Speeding Up Your Site: An Introduction to WordPress Performance Optimization

GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675
SPEEDING UP YOUR SITE:
AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS
PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION
GEOFF MYERS PRESENTS

BEFORE WE BEGIN…
THIS PRESENTATION IS AVAILABLE ONLINE:
simdex.org/fast
Get In Touch: 
geoff@simdex.org 
simdex.org 
414.455.6675

BEFORE WE BEGIN…
ABOUT GEOFF MYERS
▸ Founded SimDex in 2004
▸ Web Solutions for Small + Medium Sized Businesses
▸ Digital Marketing Consultant + Strategist
▸ 10+ Years as Full Stack Web Designer + Developer
▸ 5+ Years of WordPress Development Experience
▸ 50+ WordPress Sites Built, Maintained + Marketed
▸ Academic Background in Computer Science
▸ Get In Touch: geoff@simdex.org or simdex.org or 414.455.6675

BEFORE WE BEGIN…
WP MAINTENANCE PLAN
How You Beneﬁt:
▸ We Do Everything For You
▸ Unlimited Minor Changes + Revisions
▸ 24 Hour Response Time Guaranteed
▸ Your Total Peace of Mind
▸ Monthly Phone Consultations
▸ No Hourly Fees or Additional Costs

BEFORE WE BEGIN…
WP MAINTENANCE PLAN
Features + Services Included:
▸ Backups
▸ Monitoring
▸ Speed
▸ Changes
▸ Reports
▸ Support
▸ Consulting
▸ Security
▸ Updates

AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION
WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT WEBSITE PERFORMANCE?
▸ Good performance = 
😊😍👍💰💵
▸ Bad performance = 
😠😩🖕💣☠
▸ Not convinced?

HOW IMPORTANT IS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION?
▸ Amazon sees a 1% decrease in revenue for every 100ms
increase in load time.
▸ Source: http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/08/radar-theme-web-
ops.html

▸ Instagram increased impressions and user proﬁle scroll
interactions by decreasing the response size of the JSON
needed for displaying comments (by 33% for the median
and 50% for the 95th percentile for the main endpoint).
▸ Source: http://engineering.instagram.com/posts/
193415561023919/performance-&-usage-at-Instagram

▸ TRAC Research found, in a survey of 300 companies, that the
average revenue loss for an hour of downtime was $21,000.
For the same set of companies, average revenue loss due to
an hour of slow performance (deﬁned as load times
exceeding 4.4 seconds) was $4,100. Website slowdowns
occurred ten times more often than outages.
▸ Source: http://www.slideshare.net/KenGodskind/alertsitetrac

▸ Walmart saw up to a 2% increase in conversions for every 1
second of improvement in load time. Every 100ms
improvment also resulted in up to a 1% increase in revenue.
▸ Source: http://www.slideshare.net/devonauerswald/walmart-
pagespeedslide

▸ When YouTube introduced a version of their pages that was
90% lighter, they saw a large increase in trafﬁc in areas with
poor connectivity such as Southeast Asia, South America,
Africa and Siberia.
▸ Source: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters

AFFECTS YOURAFFECTS YOUR
Bottom LineBottom Line
Loading TimeLoading Time
HOWHOW
EVERY SECOND COUNTSEVERY SECOND COUNTS MOBILE VS. DESKTOPMOBILE VS. DESKTOP
Loading time is a major contributing factor to page
abandonment. The average user has no patience for a
Mobile Internet users expect a web-browsing
experience on their phone that’s comparable to what

WHAT PRIMARILY AFFECTS WEBSITE PERFORMANCE?
‣ Network Infrastructure (Internet Service Provider or ISP)
‣ Web Application (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal)
‣ Web Browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari)
‣ Web Server (Software and Hardware)
‣ Software (Apache, PHP, MySQL)
‣ Hardware (CPU, RAM, HDD/SSD)

GENERAL ADVICE + BEST PRACTICES
‣ Buy a Fast Web Server (e.g. Managed WordPress Hosting)
‣ Enable Server + WordPress + Browser Caching
‣ Limit Usage of Plugins + Scripts
‣ Minify HTML + CSS + JavaScript
‣ Scale + Compress + Optimize Images
‣ Use a CDN (e.g. CloudFlare)
‣ Use Dedicated Media Hosting

WEBSITE PERFORMANCE TESTING TOOLS
▸ Google PageSpeed Tools
▸ GTmetrix
▸ New Relic
▸ Pingdom Website Speed Test
▸ Web Browser Developer Tools
▸ WebPagetest
▸ Yahoo YSlow

GTMETRIX
DEMO
WEBSITE PERFORMANCE 
TESTING TOOLS

GOOGLE PAGESPEED BEST PRACTICES: CONTENT
‣ Avoid a character set in the meta tag
‣ Avoid bad requests
‣ Minify HTML
‣ Minimize redirects
‣ Minimize request size
‣ Remove query strings from static resources
‣ Serve resources from a consistent URL
‣ Specify a character set early

GOOGLE PAGESPEED BEST PRACTICES: STYLESHEETS (CSS)
‣ Avoid CSS @import
‣ Inline small CSS
‣ Minify CSS
‣ Put CSS in the document head
‣ Optimize the order of styles
and scripts

GOOGLE PAGESPEED BEST PRACTICES: IMAGES
‣ Combine images using CSS sprites
‣ Optimize images
‣ Serve scaled images
‣ Specify image dimensions

GOOGLE PAGESPEED BEST PRACTICES: SCRIPTS (JAVASCRIPT)
‣ Defer parsing of JavaScript
‣ Inline small JavaScript
‣ Minify JavaScript
‣ Optimize the order of styles
and scripts
‣ Prefer asynchronous resources

GOOGLE PAGESPEED BEST PRACTICES: SERVER
‣ Avoid landing page redirects
‣ Enable gzip compression
‣ Enable Keep-Alive
‣ Leverage browser caching
‣ Specify a cache validator
‣ Specify a Vary: Accept-
Encoding header

WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE PLUGINS (PART 1)
▸ Performance Testing & Analysis
▸ Plugin Performance Proﬁler (P3)
▸ Query Monitor
▸ Caching
▸ W3 Total Cache
▸ WP Fastest Cache
▸ WP Super Cache

W3 TOTAL CACHE
DEMO
TESTING TOOLS

▸ Image Optimization
▸ EWWW Image Optimizer
▸ Imsanity
▸ Jetpack
▸ WP Smush

▸ Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
▸ Amazon Web Services (AWS)
▸ CacheFly
▸ CloudFlare
▸ Jetpack
▸ MaxCDN

CLOUDFLARE
DEMO
TESTING TOOLS

ADDITIONAL ARTICLES + RESOURCES
▸ WordPress Optimization
▸ High Trafﬁc Tips for WordPress
▸ 16 Quick Tips to Improve WordPress
Performance – INFOGRAPHIC
▸ 17 Ways to Optimize and Speed Up
WordPress Sites
▸ 11 Ways to Speed Up WordPress
▸ On a quest for ultimate website performance
▸ WordPress Optimization Infographic

THAT’S IT FOR NOW…
THANK YOU!
Questions?
Get In Touch: 
geoff@simdex.org 
simdex.org 
414.455.6675

THAT’S IT FOR NOW…
THIS PRESENTATION IS AVAILABLE ONLINE:
simdex.org/fast
Get In Touch: 
geoff@simdex.org 
simdex.org 
414.455.6675

Speeding Up Your Site: An Introduction to WordPress Performance Optimization

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Speeding Up Your Site: An Introduction to WordPress Performance Optimization