Optimizing Your WordPress SiteWhy speed matters, and how to get there

Stephen BellSteed Interactive

Stephen Bell

• Worked in web marketing at Oklahoma Christian University for 10 years

• Started design and web development company with my wife this year

steedokc.com

About Me

Why Bother Optimizing?

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/ (2011)

Keep People on Your Site

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/ (2011)

“A one-second delay in page response can

result in a 7% reduction in

conversions."

More Interactions & Purchases

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/ (2011)

“47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or

less.”

Visitor Expectations

https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-speed

“Google has indicated site speed is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages.”

Google Search Results Ranking

“A slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget.”

How Fast is My Site?

(Aim for less than 3 seconds)

tools.pingdom.com - Select a US city under “Settings”

Note: This only shows you your site speed on a very fast connection. To test different speeds on your own computer, learn about

Chrome Developer Tools.

1. Load smaller things2. Load fewer things3. Load closer things4. Cache things (save completed pieces for later)

5. Load the important things first6. Get a faster server

Ways of Improving Site Speed

• JPG - Photos, scanned drawings or art• PNG - Images with solid colors, simple

gradients• SVG - Logos saved as paths instead of pixels• GIF - Funny animated things

When in doubt, use JPG!

Load smaller thingsUse the Right Image File Type

PNG664 KB

Load smaller thingsUse the Right Image File Type

JPG (80% quality)157 KB

Don’t use PNG for photos! They take up 4X as much space!

• Get a WordPress plugin that recompresses images as they’re uploaded (40-50% off of each image, with no visible loss of quality)

• “Compress JPEG & PNG images” (TinyPNG) Free for up to 500 images/monthhttps://wordpress.org/plugins/tiny-compress-images/

• “WP Smush”• Free, with premium version available

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/

Load smaller thingsRecompress Images with WP Plugins

Load smaller things

Responsive Images

2560px wide 640px wide

• Give people the correct image size for the browser/device they’re using

Load smaller things

Responsive Images

<img src="image.jpg" width="800" height="600"srcset="image-400x300.jpg 400w, image-600x450.jpg 600w, image.jpg 1000w"sizes="(min-width:1024px) 33.3vw, (min-width:640px) 50vw, 100vw">

• srcset - These are the images that are available, and their sizes.

• sizes - These are the rules that tell the browser which image to pick.

• Code example:

Steed site (portfolio)

Load smaller things

Responsive Images• RICG Responsive Images plugin

https://wordpress.org/plugins/ricg-responsive-images/• “Bringing automatic default responsive images to

WordPress.”• Automatically adds simple “srcset” and “sizes” to

images in your posts.• Keeps images in your posts from being higher

resolution than your browser width.• You still need to add new image thumbnail sizes to

WordPress to make sure they’re available.• If you’re making templates yourself, plugin gives

you functions, lets you write your own “sizes” for better fitting images.

Load smaller things

Turn on GZIP• Similar to “zipping” a file, the server

compresses text files as they’re sent out.• Can be turned on by editing settings files, or

done with a plugin like W3 Total Cache.http://softstribe.com/wordpress/enable-gzip-compression-in-wordpress

Load fewer thingsMinify and Combine CSS & JavaScript

• Every extra file you ask the server for makes things just a little bit slower

• Whitespace (extra spaces, tabs, line breaks) and comments aren’t useful to visitor, make the page load slower

• “Minifying” removes unnecessary code and combines files

Load fewer thingsMinify and Combine CSS & JavaScript

• WordPress Plugin: “Autoptimize”https://wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/ • Minifies CSS, JS and HTML• Combines CSS files together, JS files

together• Typically, just install it, check boxes, and it

works

Load fewer things

Get Rid of Things You Don’t Need• Prioritize what you need and don’t need on

your pages• Social sharing buttons?• Big web fonts?• Video embeds? • Unnecessary tracking code?• Complex advertising network code?

Load closer things

Content Delivery Network

• If your visitor is in a different part of the world than your web hosting, it takes longer to get to them.

• A Content Delivery Network (CDN) saves your files on different computers around the world to speed things up.

Load closer things

Content Delivery Network

• Free service that sits between your domain name server and your hosting server

• Automatically saves all your images, static pages to a CDN

• Bonus: A bit of extra security

Another option: JetPack plugin - Photonhttps://developer.wordpress.com/docs/photon/

https://www.cloudflare.com

Cache things

Turn on Server-Side Caching• WordPress assembles your page each time

someone visits it. It makes your page out of database information, PHP files, and outside sources, which takes time.

• When you “cache,” you’re pre-assembling your page code to be handed off to your visitor

• Caching can happen on multiple levels:• Your web host (i.e. SiteGround Super Cacher)• As a plugin in your WordPress (i.e. W3 Total

Cache)• On another server (i.e. CloudFlare)

Cache things

Turn on Server-Side Caching

• W3 Total Cache https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/ • Be sure to enable “page

cache”

Load the Important Things FirstPrioritize “Above the Fold” Content• “Lazy load” images - Stops images from

loading until you actually get to them on the pagehttp://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/how-to-add-lazy-loading-to-wordpress

• “Critical path” CSS - Load the CSS for the top of the page inline first, separately from all the other CSS, which gets loaded at the bottomhttps://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/critical-rendering-path/• Autoptimize plugin can do this, but doesn’t

let you do different CSS for each page

Get a Faster Server

Use a Reputable Host• Sometimes your site is slow because your web

host is slow. Greedy companies try to cram too many sites, too much traffic on their servers.

• Reputable, fast hosts that people keep telling me about:

siteground.com

asmallorange.com wpengine.com

Get a Faster Server

Use a Reputable Host

• A list of web site hosts, arranged by what percentage of people say positive or negative things about them on Twitter:http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare/

Case Study: Splendry.com• Before:

• Problem: 15-30 second delay before page starts loading

• Page loads in 8.5 seconds• Page weight: 4.5 MB

• Now:• No noticeable delay• Page loads in 1.5 seconds• Page weight: 1.2 MB

Case Study: Splendry.com• What we did (in order of

loading time importance):• Moved from GoDaddy to

SiteGround• Change all PNG photos to JPGs• Smush WP plugin• SuperCacher (SiteGround) and

W3 Total Cache plugins• Autoptimize plugin• CloudFlare• Other small tweaks

You Can’t Fix Everything

It’s up to you which optimizations make a significant impact, and how much time you’re willing to spend on each site.

Quick and Easy Fixes• Always use JPG for photos.• Install Smush WP or “Compress JPEG &

PNG images” plugin - Let it compress your whole media library, and each new image when uploaded.

• Install Autoptimize plugin - Turn on HTML, JS, CSS compression. If nothing breaks, you’re good.

• Install RICG Responsive Images plugin - If nothing breaks, you’re good.

• If you don’t already have a caching plugin, install W3 Total Cache - If nothing breaks, you’re good.

Review

More Complicated Fixes• Add image thumbnail sizes for Responsive

Images plugin to use.• Write templates with custom img “sizes”

attributes to load exactly the size of responsive image you need.

• Set up a CDN - CloudFlare isn’t too hard, but requires changing name servers, records.

• Move your site to a better web host.

Review

Learn More About Website Optimization

Load your page in Google PageSpeed Insights, then dig through the recommendationshttps://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Load your page in YSlow (Chrome/Firefox plugin) then dig through the recommendationshttp://yslow.org

Where to Find Me@stephenjbell

stephen@steedokc.com

steedokc.com

Download this presentation: http://www.steedokc.com/wordpress-optimization/