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Speed up your site! #wcmtl2015 by Meagan Hanes
7 ways to speed up a website are discussed: choosing a lightweight theme, disabling unnecessary plugins, optimizing files by minifying CSS/JS and image compression, implementing caching, using a content delivery network (CDN), cleaning up the database, and optimizing theme and plugin performance. The document provides details on each method, emphasizing measuring site speed before and after changes, using appropriate tools, and backing up the site when making optimizations. The overall message is that many small improvements can significantly increase site speed.
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Speed up your site! #wcmtl2015 by Meagan Hanes
- 1. Speed Up Your Site! 7WAYS 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 speedimportant? 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 UpPie Serves One Website Theme Choice Plugins File Optimization Image Optimization Caching CDNs Database Cleanup
- 5. Theme Choice Pretty, butat 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, moreproblems 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 thisunder ‘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 allof 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 fromservers 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 Morerecords = 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