{"id":1235,"date":"2018-11-22T12:45:28","date_gmt":"2018-11-22T12:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifehackerguy.com\/?p=1235"},"modified":"2021-12-13T07:46:46","modified_gmt":"2021-12-13T07:46:46","slug":"wp-speed-fix-wordpress-performance-optimization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifehackerguy.com\/wp-speed-fix-wordpress-performance-optimization\/","title":{"rendered":"WP Speed Fix WordPress Performance Optimization"},"content":{"rendered":"

WP Speed Fix Recommendations To Improve Our WordPress Site Speed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Life Hacker Guy website is fairly new and although I have spent some time on the site from a technical perspective I wanted to check that it was performing as well as it should, any performance marketers out there will know that site speed is essential for page ranking. <\/p>\n

WordPress is reported to be used in 30% of all websites worldwide <\/strong> and 48% of technorati\u2019s top 100 blogs, so it\u2019s not a surprise that I built this using WordPress.<\/p>\n

Whilst WordPress is an amazing framework for building and managing websites it can have performance issues depending on your theme and plugins used<\/strong>. Some of the performance issues may be around the use of MySQL which is a great easy to use database, but it does have its own performance issues, I wonder if WordPress will ever natively support PostgreSQL, which is still free but doesn\u2019t come with the same performance problems that MySQL has. <\/p>\n

Anyway, I ran a few speed tests on my website using some third party tools, mainly pingdom<\/a> (Preferred option) and GTMatrix<\/a>, I was pleasantly surprised as I my load time was less than 2 seconds<\/strong> without spending too much time tweaking the setup.<\/p>\n

A while ago, I was made aware of a service that provides WordPress speed fixes<\/strong> through a Facebook group I belong too, so I reached out to Brendan Tully CEO of WP Speed Fix, and asked him what he would recommend I do to improve performance of our site. You can see WP Speed Fix here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Brendan was really helpful and made some great suggestions. Check out the video below<\/a>.<\/strong><\/div>\n

\"Speeding<\/p>\n

But First, Why is Website Speed So Important?<\/h2>\n

Quite often when people are thinking about performance and websites they forget about the most important component in the chain, the visitor!! It\u2019s important to remember, that person that has taken time out of their day to visit your website, to either read or if you have an online business, part with their hard-earned cash and buy something. <\/p>\n

You will know yourself just how frustrating it is waiting for a webpage to load… anything more than one second gets on peoples nerves<\/strong><\/div>\n

You will know just how frustrating it is waiting for a webpage to load<\/strong>. There\u2019s a lot of research on this but waiting anything more than one second gets on people's nerves. This is especially true when trying to find information on your mobile phone!<\/p>\n

Therefore, from a user experience (UX) point of view, you need a fast-loading web page<\/strong> to ensure visitors stay with you and hopefully read your engaging content or buy something if you are a shop. If your site is unresponsive, you\u2019ll see that your visitor bounce rate is high, or put another way, if you run a bricks and mortar shop ion the high street, would you stop everyone before you allowed them into your shop, if you did, you would probably find your sales dropped quite considerably!<\/p>\n

This leads nicely onto the second issue, the big G. Yes if you have a slow loading site, the Google Algorithm just don\u2019t like it<\/strong>. This goes hand in hand with a high bounce rate, in most cases.<\/p>\n

Anyone into SEO knows that Google uses many ranking factors and whilst speed alone isn\u2019t going to get you to that magical #1 spot. If your site is loading in 3-4 seconds then you will be downranked as a result<\/strong>. Why go to the effort of building and paying for a website and then scrimp on one of the most important factors at the end?<\/p>\n

Fast WordPress Hosting<\/h2>\n

\"SiteGroud<\/a>Discussions on Webhosting are aplenty online, so I won't go into too much detail here. The main point is avoid cheap budget hosting<\/strong> that's costing a few dollars per month. <\/p>\n

The reason they are cheap is that either due to poor infrastructure<\/strong> or there will be many (and we mean MANY) customers sharing the servers, or in some cases both. This means your site will be sharing resources and as a consequence will be very slow.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We currently use SiteGround<\/a> as we find their packages reasonable and importantly they have awesome support. <\/p>\n

How Fast Was The LifeHackerGuy Website?<\/h2>\n

So, how fast was the Life Hacker Guy website<\/a> before we made the recommended WordPress performance changes?<\/p>\n

I ran a blog post page through Pingdom firstly through a USA location and then using a UK location. My reasoning is that most of my traffic will be coming from these two locations.<\/p>\n

Pingdom Test Result (USA Location) \u2013 Before Any Plugin Optimization<\/h4>\n

\"Pingdom<\/p>\n

Pingdom Test Result (UK Location) \u2013 Before Any Plugin Optimization<\/h4>\n

\"Pingdom<\/p>\n

These speeds are fairly good, to be honest. <\/p>\n

Running the tests through Pingdom showed speeds under 2 seconds<\/strong>, and only went over this when checking from Australia or Japan locations.<\/p>\n

Even so, I knew we could improve the site further without too much work, so I got in touch with WP Speed Fix and asked Brendan if he could do a quick site speed audit.<\/p>\n

WP Speed Fix Service<\/h2>\n

What can WP Speed Fix do with your WordPress site?<\/p>\n

Their service is very simple, they will optimize your WordPress site loading speed to be under 2 seconds<\/strong>, and if you opt for their fast hosting service recommendations often under 1 second.<\/p>\n

They run a number of tests on your WordPress site and analyze any potential issues<\/strong>. If the changes are straightforward to fix, they will provide the suggestions directly for you to implement. Otherwise, you can choose one of two packages (Standard $179 and Business $249) for them to make the necessary changes for you.<\/p>\n

Wp Speed Fix provides an incredible amount of useable information … that importantly you can take action on yourself.<\/strong><\/div>\n

The difference between the two packages is that the Business option includes migrating your site to a super-fast VPS hosting solution. You, of course, have to sign up for the hosting account and they do all the migration of the site for you, it\u2019s a simple and pain-free process.<\/p>\n

Brendan really knows his stuff and Wp Speed Fix provides an incredible amount of useable information<\/strong> that you can take action on. He provided the video below to outline what we could do on our site.<\/p>\n

Brendan Performs WordPress Performance Audit<\/h3>\n