WordPress Site Speed WordPress Maui Meetup - October 15, 2015 Why - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

WordPress Site Speed

WordPress Maui Meetup - October 15, 2015

Why Does Speed Matter?

• Affects Google ranking and page crawling since 2010
• Akamai survey: 75% of the 1,058 people asked would

not return to websites that took longer than 4 seconds to load

• 64% of smartphone users expect pages to load in

less than 4 seconds

Back To School Traffic: 2014 vs. 2015

• 2014: 60% desktop, 33%

smartphone

• Smartphone average load

time: 
 ~5.5 seconds

• 2015: 65% smartphone, 25%

desktop

• Smartphone average load

time: 
 ~2.5 seconds

http://www.soasta.com/blog/back-to-school-website-performance-monitoring/

Let’s Say Your Blog Goes Viral.

• $9 / month server
• 5 million people in one week
• 9000 visitors at once
• How do you keep your website fast? (And up and

running?)

The Players In The Speed Game

• You. (Your web browser)
• Your server. (Web hosting)
• How does WordPress build a page from your theme, plugins,

content, and media?

• PHP code running on web server puts it all together
• Where does WordPress store page / post content and other data?
• Self-contained SQL database

What Happens When You Visit A WordPress Website?

• Your web browser requests page
• PHP code on server starts to build the HTML for your web page
• The server requests the data it needs from the WordPress

database

• Database runs query and returns result to server
• Server inserts the database data into the HTML of your web page
• Server sends the HTML back to your browser when the page is

ready.

• Your web browser begins to receive data from the server and load the

page

This entire process determines Time To First Byte or 
 First Byte Time. Time To First Byte is the amount of time it takes your web browser to receive the very first byte of data back from your server.

Your Browser Takes Over…

• How many requests does your web browser make to load a single

page?

• Images, CSS, JavaScript, and many other files are loaded separately.
• Some files are required for the page to load in your browser. This is

called Time To First View - the amount of time it takes for the web page to load in your browser.

• Other files can be loaded after the page first loads. This is called

deferring or loading files asynchronously.

What Slows Down WordPress?

• Server has to build each page every time a browser requests it.
• Server has to read from the database every time the page

loads.

• Your server delivers images, CSS, JavaScript, and other files to

your browser every time a page loads.

• Your browser downloads images, CSS, JavaScript, and other

files every time a page loads.

What Is A Cache? And Why?

• A cache is any data that is stored in a location where it can be quickly

accessed.

• Why do we cache data?
• Stores work the server has already done, which reduces processor
• load. Your server doesn’t have to do the same job over and over again.
• Reduces the amount of information that needs to be sent over the

internet because cached data can be reused.

• Increases responsiveness of websites - and user experience!

What Is A CDN?

• CDN stands for Content Delivery Network - a super-fast

worldwide network of servers that delivers images, CSS, JavaScript, and other files to users based on their location.

• A CDN is a cache!
• CDNs reduce the load on your server. Visitors download files from

the CDN, not your server.

• CloudFlare is awesome. And free. And it protects your website

from attackers.

How Do We Speed Things Up?

• Server has to build each page every time a browser requests it.
• Server has to read from the database every time the page

loads.

• Your server delivers images, CSS, JavaScript, and other files to

your browser every time a page loads.

• Your browser downloads images, CSS, JavaScript, and other

files every time a page loads.

Page Cache Database / Object Cache CDN (Content Delivery Network) Browser Cache

WordPress Plugins

• W3 Total Cache
• Turn on Page Cache, Browser Cache, Database Cache, Object Cache.
• Turn on Minify if you’re not using CloudFlare. (CloudFlare does it

automatically.)

• If you are using CloudFlare, Go to Extensions -> Activate CloudFlare

and configure in General Settings.

• Good configuration guide: http://www.inspire2rise.com/w3-total-

cache-settings.html

Other Plugins For Speed

• WP Smush - Good image compressor
• Regenerate Thumbnails - Resizes images to theme

sizes

• Imsanity - Automatically scales down huge images
• P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) - Measures which

plugins are dragging down performance

Great Sites

• webpagetest.org - My fave. Multiple tests at once.

Check out the waterfall.

• showslow.com - Great automatic monitoring and

compilation of stats.

• uptimerobot.com - Get notified if your site goes

down - and track response time.

David Payette @payetteforward www.payetteforward.com