The document provides tips for optimizing the speed of a WordPress site. It recommends benchmarking loading times to identify performance issues, prioritizing problems by severity and fix time, reducing page size by limiting posts per page and using progressive loading. Other tips include minimizing social widgets and external fonts, optimizing images, avoiding bloated themes, minifying CSS and JS, enabling compression, leveraging browser caching, moving scripts to footers, caching content, and using object caching and CDNs. Regular optimization is important to see ongoing rewards in site speed.

1. Need for Speed
Gear up Your WordPress

2. Daniel Kanchev
@dvkanchev
Before we begin …
7+ Years of WordPress experience
5 Years with SiteGround
Love FOSS
Addicted to extreme sports

3. Why bother optimizing
Better user experience
Better rankings
Lower hosting expenses

4. Make a plan
… and follow it!
Benchmark loading times
Pinpoint performance issues
Prioritise problems
Start optimizing
Benchmark again

5. Benchmark and find issues
http://gtmetrix.com
http://tools.pingdom.com

6. Common problems
… completely unordered!
Too many posts on the homepage
Too many social widgets
Too many external fonts used
Large/unoptimized Images
Themes with too many unused features
Too much CSS/JS code
No static content compression
No caching
No CDN

7. Prioritise problems
Sort performance issues by their severity
Sort them by the time you need to fix them
Cross-reference the two lists

8. Page size
… matters!
Make a scroll map test ( crazyegg.com )
Reduce the number of posts per page
Progressive page loading (infinite scroll)

9. Social media widgets/plugins
… use them wisely!
Try not to use “Share on 100 social networks” services
Avoid using more than one social plugin

10. External fonts
… trust me, you don’t need 8 fonts on your site!
Include only fonts you use, on the pages you use them
Put fonts on your local server and include locally
Sacrifice the usage of a font for a better site performance

11. Images
… the right size and the right quality
Use images with the right size and specify their dimensions
Smush your images: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/
Use sprites in your themes

12. Avoid bloated themes
… really, cut the fat!
Avoid themes that support every possible website idea
Don’t use all theme features on the same page
Make sure that the JavaScript and CSS is loaded only when needed

13. Minify your CSS and JS
… the smaller the size, the better!
Try using WP Minify: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-minify/
If you’re already using it, enable minify options in W3 Total Cache

14. Enable gZIP compression
… for HTML, CSS and JavaScript!
Use .htaccess rules instead of plugins:
http://kb.siteground.com/enable-gzip-via-htaccess/

15. Leverage browser caching
… whatever that means!
The .htaccess rules:
http://kb.siteground.com/leverage-browser-caching/

16. Move your JS code to the
footer in WordPress
The functions.php code:
http://www.fluxbytes.com/wordpress/move-javascriptfiles-to-footer-in-wordpress/

17. Remove WordPress transient
records from the database
DELETE FROM `wp_options` WHERE `option_name` LIKE ('_transient_%');

18. Use a CDN service
… but do it wisely!
Measure if your site is working faster
Even local business can take advantage by the CDN
Bonus: “Always Online ” service

19. Cache your content
… if you don’t cache your content that’s bad and you should feel bad!
Use object caching - Memcached, Redis
Use opcode caching - АPC, xCache
Use reverse proxies - Varnish, nGinx

20. WordPress Interaction with
Your Database
First request goes
to the database
server

21. Object Caching
First request goes to the
database server
Objects are also stored in
Memcached

22. Object Caching
All consecutive requests are
forwarded to the Memcached server

23. How PHP Works
Scanning
Lexing
Parsing
Compilation
Opcode
Execution

24. PHP Opcode Caching
!
Opcode
Execution

25. Reverse Proxy Servers

26. Reverse Proxy Servers

27. Reverse Proxy Servers

28. Reverse Proxy Servers

29. Some Key Takes
Speed Optimization is a process - do it regularly and you
will be rewarded!
Always test! Don’t test on a live site, use staging copies
instead. Backup!
Choose a well optimised host!

30. Resources:
http://tools.pingdom.com
http://loadimpact.com
http://gtmetrix.com
http://crazyegg.com
http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/
http://kb.siteground.com/enable-gzip-via-htaccess/
http://checkgzipcompression.com
http://kb.siteground.com/leverage-browser-caching/

31. Thank you!
@dvkanchev / daniel.k@siteground.com