1. Speed Up
Your Site!
7 WAYS TO PUT YOUR WEBSITE ON THE FAST TRACK
#WCMTL 2015 – MEAGAN HANES - @MHANES

2. About Meagan
 15+ years coding websites
 Started using WordPress in 2005
 Works on sites as small as ants & as large as elephants
 Favourite Colour: Rainbow!
 Follow: @mhanes on Twitter

3. Why is speed important?
 User Satisfaction & Audience Building
 Slow site = unhappy users, won’t return
 Affects your PageRank
 Slow site = lower rank in Google, harder to be found
 Impacts Sales and Success of Website
 Slow site = higher abandonment rates, marketing
dollars wasted
 And many, many more reasons why…
 Like bragging rights!!

4. Recipe: Speed Up Pie
Serves One Website
Theme
Choice
Plugins
File
Optimization
Image Optimization
Caching
CDNs
Database
Cleanup

5. Theme Choice
Pretty, but at what cost?
 Not all themes are created equal!
 Twenty Fifteen: 328KB, 13 files, 0.6s
 Premium Themes: 850KB – 2.5MB, 40+ files, 1.5-3.0s
 More features + plugins = more bloat
 Be specific with your theme needs!
 What can be done via plugins or functions.php?
 Use a fast framework, or try a different theme
 Measure, measure, measure!
 GTMetrix, Pingdom, Webpagetest

6. Plugins
More plugins, more problems
 Each plugin you use adds overhead to your site.
 Even admin-only plugins!
 Get Data: P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
 Don’t need it? Deactivate and delete it!
 Add simple plugin functionality to functions.php
 Turning off all comments, adding custom post types, etc
 Disable plugins on unneeded pages – Plugin
Organizer by Jeff Sterup
 Advanced Coders: You can also load plugins via a
custom taxonomy + functions.php!1

7. File Optimization
File this under ‘u’ for ‘useful’
 Minify CSS and JavaScript
 Remove unneeded whitespace, padding, simplify
variable names
 Makes code not easily readable by humans
 BWP Minify Plugin
 Defer JavaScript
 Wait to load JS until page is loaded
 Achieve via BWP Minify or manually
 <script source=“myScript.js” defer>
 Google PageSpeed Insights = your best friend
 WARNING: Back up before playing with these!

8. Image Optimizing
Not all of us have high speed connections!
 Visual content is great, but MUST be optimized!
 NEVER use images for text – unreadable by SEO!
 Use only the image dimensions you need
 Full Camera image size: 3000x2400 pixels, ~2MB
 Common web size: 640x480, ~40KB
 That’s over 50 times smaller!
 Use the right file type (jpg, gif, png)
 Compress the file!
 TinyPNG and TinyJPG
 Refer to Google’s Image Optimization Guide

9. Caching
Serve it once, refer to it forever
 Serves static HTML vs dynamic database calls
 Perfect for sites where content changes rarely
 Also great when most viewers won’t be logging in
 Many premium hosts (WPEngine) do this for you!
 #1 caching plugin: WP Super Cache

10. CDNs
Deliver files from servers closer to home
 Serve files from server closest to viewer
 You wouldn’t order a pizza from another province, right?
 Saves connection time, network hops
 Distributes load when one server is overwhelmed
 Use them if you can afford them!
 CloudFare (free for basic accounts)
 MaxCDN (what the pros use)

11. Database Cleanup
 More records = more time spent combing through them
 Many are of no actual valuable content:
 Spam and unapproved comments
 Old Page + Post Revisions
 Items trashed but not actually deleted
 Solution: WP-Optimize
(https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-optimize/)
 WARNING: BACK UP FIRST!!
 Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

12. Warp Speed, Captain!
 Many factors influence site speed
 Measure, Report, Improve!
 Any step forward is a good step 
 Questions? Ideas?
 @mhanes