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

Stephen Bell Steed 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 things 2. Load fewer things 3. Load closer things 4. Cache things (save completed pieces for later)

5. Load the important things first 6. 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 things

Use the Right Image File Type

PNG664 KB

Load smaller things

Use 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/month https://wordpress.org/plugins/tiny-compress-images/

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

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

Load smaller things

Recompress 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 things

Minify 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 things

Minify 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 - Photon https://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 First

Prioritize “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 bottom https://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 recommendations https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

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

Where to Find Me

@stephenjbell

stephen@steedokc.com

steedokc.com