WordPress Performance 101 provides tips to optimize WordPress site performance in 3 sentences: It discusses how poor performance can negatively impact users, money and SEO, and outlines steps to diagnose a site using tools to measure speed before and after installing caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and a CDN like Cloudflare. Proper server configuration, hosting, plugin usage, image optimization and caching are emphasized as ways to boost speed for a better user and search engine experience.

1. WordPress Performance 101
Bora Yalçın
twitter @borantula
wpbudapest.com

2. My name is
Bora Yalçın
Tweeting from
@borantula
Developer & Partner
Dion Works
Doing
WordPress sites, Laravel applications
and web consultancy
Who?

3. Who the Performance?!?
WordPress Performance for:
- Starters
- Site Owners
- Power Users
- Developers
(even experienced ones miss a spot sometimes)

4. Why the Performance?
Bad performance causes:
- Losing Users
40% of abandon an ecommerce website if it
take more than 3 seconds
- Losing Money
Conversion rate drops around 7% every
second.
- Hurts SEO
High bounce rates,
High abandonment,
Google measures page load times

5. People are Impatient on Web
“Instead of this slow website I’ll watch my watch”

6. Server Configuration for Performance
Server Setup
Nginx or Apache Configuration
Php Settings
Mysql fine tuning
Memcache setup
…..and some other stuff we won’t cover today

7. Hosting
Ask before you buy!
Php version: Ask for 5.4+
Php memory limit: > 256M
Tech Support
Panel access (like cPanel etc.)
Ask for WordPress supported
Ask for limited Php functionality
You only
support php
5.2! OMG that’s
so 2006!

8. Just After the Setup: The Heaven
No plugin
No users
No content
Just a theme,
you
and endless possibilities...

9. After a while from the setup
- A plugin for this, two plugins for that…
- Some 5000x4000 images right from your
camera.
- heavy frontend stuff (lots of social buttons
etc.)
- Users started visiting to your site

10. First Step: Diagnosis
Measure current situation:
Measure with:
- Pingdom tool for speed test
- Chrome developer tools for sources and
timeline
- Pagespeed for insights about page
- Blitz.io for load and stress test

11. Before Cache
Test configuration
Load: 1-100 users
Duration: 60 seconds
Average response: 2.59 sec.
61 users served
The average hit rate of 1.02/second
translates to about 87,840 hits/day.

12. Install a Cache Plugin
Popular Cache
Plugins
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Super Cache
- WP Rocket
- Zen Cache
Before caching, normal workflow

13. W3 Total Cache
Enable Page Cache:
Disk enhanced
Enable Browser Cache
Enable gzip
compression

14. Page Cache!
Page Cached
No Mysql
No PHP
No Theme&Plugin

15. Browser Cache!
Especially for
assets like
images,
javascript and
css files.

16. Measure Again!
Measure current situation:
Measure with:
- Pingdom tool for speed test
- Chrome developer tools for sources and
timeline
- Pagespeed for insights about page
- Blitz.io for load and stress test

17. After Cache - 1
Test configuration
Load: 1-100 users
Duration: 60 seconds
The average response time:
543 ms.
1921 users served
The average hit rate of
32.02/second translates to
about 2,766,240 hits/day.

18. After Cache - 2
Test configuration
Load: 1-500 users
Duration: 60 seconds
The average response time:
575 ms.
The average hit rate of
151.73/second translates to
about 13,109,760 hits/day.

19. Cloudflare
CDN, Optimizer, SSL, Security, DNS, SPDY etc.

20. Cloudflare
Makes the site even faster and
reachable.
Takes burden of assets like
images, css, javascript files
from your server.
Protect against attacks
SSL
Great free plan

21. Other Methods
Profiling
Query Monitoring
Transients
Object Caching (Memcache etc.)
...so we have a lot more to talk about for the
next meetups :)

22. Thank you everyone for listening