WP Speed Fix WordPress Performance Optimization

WP Speed Fix Recommendations To Improve Our WordPress Site Speed.

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.

WordPress is reported to be used in 30% of all websites worldwide and 48% of technorati’s top 100 blogs, so it’s not a surprise that I built this using WordPress.

Whilst WordPress is an amazing framework for building and managing websites it can have performance issues depending on your theme and plugins used. 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’t come with the same performance problems that MySQL has.

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

A while ago, I was made aware of a service that provides WordPress speed fixes 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.

But First, Why is Website Speed So Important?

Quite often when people are thinking about performance and websites they forget about the most important component in the chain, the visitor!! It’s 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.

You will know just how frustrating it is waiting for a webpage to load. There’s 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!

Therefore, from a user experience (UX) point of view, you need a fast-loading web page 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’ll 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!

This leads nicely onto the second issue, the big G. Yes if you have a slow loading site, the Google Algorithm just don’t like it. This goes hand in hand with a high bounce rate, in most cases.

Anyone into SEO knows that Google uses many ranking factors and whilst speed alone isn’t 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. 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?

Fast WordPress Hosting

Discussions on Webhosting are aplenty online, so I won't go into too much detail here. The main point is avoid cheap budget hosting that's costing a few dollars per month.

The reason they are cheap is that either due to poor infrastructure 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.

We currently use SiteGround as we find their packages reasonable and importantly they have awesome support.

How Fast Was The LifeHackerGuy Website?

So, how fast was the Life Hacker Guy website before we made the recommended WordPress performance changes?

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.

Pingdom Test Result (USA Location) – Before Any Plugin Optimization

Pingdom Test Result (UK Location) – Before Any Plugin Optimization

These speeds are fairly good, to be honest.

Running the tests through Pingdom showed speeds under 2 seconds, and only went over this when checking from Australia or Japan locations.

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.

WP Speed Fix Service

What can WP Speed Fix do with your WordPress site?

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

They run a number of tests on your WordPress site and analyze any potential issues. 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.

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’s a simple and pain-free process.

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

Brendan Performs WordPress Performance Audit

You can find out more about WP Speed Fix here.

WP Speed Fix Recommendations

It was fantastic news to hear that Brendan thought we were fairly well optimized in terms of speed.!

He did recommend some changes that we could make ourselves that could have a beneficial effect on the website's speed and as I have a technical background I could make these changes myself.

The big changes for me were looking at International speed and using webp files, a little-known image format that’s often 2-5 times smaller than JPG and PNG. You’re probably aware but it is images that can very quickly slow your page load.

Years ago when bandwidth was super expensive and we were still using modems, image optimization was a highly sought-after skill. But now because of the ease of use you get from a CMS such as WordPress and “Super Fast BroadBand” anyone can update a page quickly and easily, as a result, you will often see images that are far bigger than they should be.

Our blog doesn't use that many images, which will contribute to our faster page load, text loads really quickly! You can try it out yourself, create a page put some images in it, now open Google’s PageSpeed Insights app and put in the link to the page you have just created, do a speed test, note the result and now remove the images and run the test again.

WordPress Image Compression

There’s a great article by Brendan that takes you through WordPress Image Compression in a great article here.

Brendan recommended we use the WordPress Image Compression Plugin – ShortPixel Plugin.

Search for “ShortPixel Image Optimizer” in your WordPress “Add New” Plugin area.

You will need an API key which you get from ShortPixel, it is easy to get by simply signing up for free with them. They have a freemium business model and the first 100 images per month are free, so unless you’re a heavy user the cost is completely free.

Excessive AJAX Calls

The site uses a couple of plugins that use a lot of Ajax calls to the server that does make the site feel slow and unresponsive, especially on mobile devices. The plugins in question are Yuzo-related posts and the Author box plugin.

This brings up another very valid point, whilst many of the WordPress plugins provide increased functionality or better ease of use that can be easily added to your template. Doing this may come at an unseen performance cost to your website. Reducing plugin bloat will decrease the need for additional calls to the database, which theoretically will make your site faster.

Brendan recommends replacing these two plugins for “less Ajax heavy plugins”, which would speed the site up on mobile. A great point, but I think I will replace the Author Box plugin with a hardcoded script myself. As I am currently the only writer on the website I don’t need an additional plugin for this static information, and if this changes I will adapt the code accordingly.

Checking Plugin Speeds

Following on from Brendan’s recommendations to change a couple of plugins I wanted to check out the resources and speed of the other plugins I am using on the site.

From experience, I know that P3 – Plugin Performance Profiler is a plugin that analyses the plugin impact of your WordPress site in terms of load time (Plugin load time) and database queries (MySQL).

Installing and running the P3 plugin showed the following graph:

The P3 Plugin Performance Profiler shows the following raw data. Please note the average load time of 2.2150 seconds for the site and from the list of plugins the loading times (I have highlighted the interesting data in red):

The P3 Performance plugin highlighted some interesting results, such as those plugins that take up resources and impact on load time (marked in red).

So based on the plugin results above I decided to do the following.

These simple changes resulted in a significant performance gain when running the P3 Plugin Performance Profiler for the second time, here is the graph:

The following is the raw data from the second scan, check out the average load time of 1.1592 seconds against the initial Average Load time of 2.2150 sec that’s an improvement of 1 second!!

After just 30 minutes of work we saw an improvement of 1 second in page load speed – not too shabby eh?

I validated this using Pingdom another essential tool in your performance armory. I ran my test from two locations (USA / Washington and UK / London) and saw speeds of 754ms and 1.34 seconds respectively.

It's amazing how much of a performance tune-up is possible in such a short time – this will dramatically improve the website visitor experience.

Pingdom Test Result (USA Location) – After Plugin Optimization

Pingdom Test Result (UK Location) – After Plugin Optimization

My Tips for Improving WordPress Performance

Here are my essential best practices for ensuring your WordPress website loads fast and gives your visitors the experience they’re looking for:

1. Do not scrimp on hosting

It is tempting to use cheap hosting and Brendan discusses this issue himself. But cheap hosting will only hurt your visitors this, in turn, will hit your search engine ranking and give you spend money marketing and promoting your websites saving a couple of $ on hosting does not make any commercial sense.

You can find good hosting if you have a tight budget but you have to look around for the best deal.

2. Check image sizes

If you have an image-heavy site then all those images soon add up and will slow your site load time as well. First off, take your image optimization seriously from the start and convert your images to WebP or use a good image compression plugin.

3. Check plugin performance

Sometimes, your biggest wins can be had by checking for poor plugin performance and removing nonessential plugins or by selecting a leaner plugin that has better performance.

4. Contact WP Speed Fix

Brendan and his team are experts they know how to increase your site speed to under 1 second, sometimes just by making some simple recommendations as they did with us.

Final Words

There are always improvements to be made on a website, in terms of performance. But there is a law of diminishing returns when spending too much time is counterproductive with little to be gained.

I have made some easy WordPress performance tweaks in very little time using the observations by Brendan alongside the plugin performance tool. For the time being this is good enough, but I will be taking a further look at the site in a few months' time to see what else can be done.

Are you using any WordPress performance tricks or plugins that are worth mentioning? Please comment in the section below.