Any good Wordpress speed optimization services out there?

Andrey

Andrey

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Hello guys!

Many might remember me from WFire.

I am in process of building an authority site using Wordpress. Right now running into issues with page speed. I know that this forum has lots of information covering this topic already, but are there any good quality services that can do Wordpress speed optimization??

Maybe one of you Wordpress wizards could start a service like that. I am sure there is a market for wordpress speed optimization and many would pay $XXX for a quality service like that.

Or should I just roll up my sleeves and stop being a lazy ass and learn how to do it myself?

<3 you CCarter, thank you for making this forum. This is the most legit replacement for the dead forum outthere.
 
Definitely learn to do it yourself. A lot of this stuff isn't difficult at all. One thing I've found is, the last 10-20% in speed improvement may or may not affect your ROI, depending on your niche and competition. What I mean by that is, more often than not, I've found that good is "good enough", and a lot of effort is best spent on more effective ROI-influencing efforts.

Nowadays, you can usually just add a caching plugin or concatenation/minification plugin (W3 Total Cache, WP Supercache, Autoptomize), and that'll usually get you to ~60-80% of your speed potential. Other than the obvious stuff like compressing images, reducing excessive usage of fonts and third party scripts, etc. that last 10-20% can be very time consuming and sometimes tricky. If it's a high traffic ecommerce site, could literally make the difference in barely scraping by or buying a new Ferrari. For the average site, that effort is probably better spent on content development, off-site efforts, CRO, or any other number of things.
 
turbin3 said:
Definitely learn to do it yourself. A lot of this stuff isn't difficult at all. One thing I've found is, the last 10-20% in speed improvement may or may not affect your ROI, depending on your niche and competition. What I mean by that is, more often than not, I've found that good is "good enough", and a lot of effort is best spent on more effective ROI-influencing efforts.

Nowadays, you can usually just add a caching plugin or concatenation/minification plugin (W3 Total Cache, WP Supercache, Autoptomize), and that'll usually get you to ~60-80% of your speed potential. Other than the obvious stuff like compressing images, reducing excessive usage of fonts and third party scripts, etc. that last 10-20% can be very time consuming and sometimes tricky. If it's a high traffic ecommerce site, could literally make the difference in barely scraping by or buying a new Ferrari. For the average site, that effort is probably better spent on content development, off-site efforts, CRO, or any other number of things.
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Thank you turbin3! So 20% of efforts brings 80% of results in WP speed optimization too.

I already did the plugins and it is still very slow. Gonna move the site to a different server tmrw, see how much that improves my speed.
 
If you can, set to use PHP 7...this has helped me improve loading speed...let us know how it goes.
 
I can't post links because I don't have enough points (this is my first post!) but hopefully if I work around that rule to share a link to another thread on this board it will be okay... otherwise RIP me. Anyways this thread is an absolute must-read thread on the topic (just append it to the buildersociety domain name): /threads/helpful-functions-php-for-wordpress-copy-paste.1068/

Like the title says, the code can be copy/pasted into your functions.php file to improve both your speed and your security. You need to setup a child theme before you edit your functions.php file otherwise you'll lose your changes when WordPress updates (you better be updating your WordPress).

My theme had a child theme I could download from the knowledge base and install just like a normal theme. If yours doesn't have this convenience there are tons of guides on how to do it.
 
You didn't mention your current avg page load times, how many requests currently, and what hosting?

With that it (and your waterfall) should be pretty easy to get some gains without wasting a bunch of time tweaking.
 
Go for a hosting that provides HTTP/2 support, PHP 7 and object caching. Then set your Wordpress with a caching plugin that uses the object caching, use a minify plugin too and make sure your images are compressed and resized accordingly.
Use as fewer plugins as possible and make sure your theme is not bloated with all that crap. This is enough!
 
I recently messed with some wordpress speed optimization plugins . Make sure your backing up your WP before starting to play with them. I messed my site up twice.
Cache plugins, image optimization & css, scripts minifiers ( the last ones messed my site)

Use this tools.pingdom.com and see what you need to improve + the google page speed posts they are linking for each thing
 
Agree that caching is generally the biggest win with WP. WP Rocket works pretty well out of the box for most sites. A host that has caching on the server level like Varnish is great, but are usually a little more per month. Object caching helps too. Defiintely use php7+ and mariadb. Most people seem to use nginx - I've had good luck with Litespeed and LScache. If the caching plugin you choose doesn't minify, use autoptimize. Then put the whole thing behind cloudflare.

If the site is image heavy, make sure they are optimized too. Use somthing like shortpixel, kraken, etc. Using lazy load will increase the initial load time and user perception of speed by quite a bit.

Run it through the usual testers - pingom, gtmetrix, webpagetest and chrome dev tools. They all read a little differently and will point out what is loading slowly. If it's the php, use the P3 plugin to find out which are slowing the site down. Remove or replace if you can. Depending on how far you want to get into it there are tools to analyze slow queries too that may be worth checking out.

Good luck!
 
cgpx said:
A host that has caching on the server level like Varnish is great
Click to expand...

The bane of my existence when I'm in developer mode on other people's sites where it's safe and faster to make changes live.

I made the switch to PHP 7 recently for my main project. I didn't see much change on the front end (it already loads around ~300ms), but the backend of my CMS is very noticeably faster. Neither is being cached for me. I can def recommend making that jump, it's been long enough that Wordpress works with it flawlessly and all of the main plugins as well.
 
One thing to keep in mind, in the vein of avoiding indiscriminate application of "optimization recommendations", is too much caching can have a few downsides too. For example, if you regularly make tweaks to your CSS, other resource files, and/or certain HTML, those edits or improvements may be difficult to force an update with. Your users may be seeing the old stuff for hours, days, or weeks on end. This is particularly terrible for some affiliate/marketing purposes, if it means old, outdated, and or expired offers seeing regular display.

Moral of the story is, have your caching game on point, and have a consistent manner of being able to invalidate cache for the things you need to update regularly. In many cases, this is as simple as using query version strings in your resource file URLs, contrary to what many speed optimization tools will tell you (hence the avoiding indiscriminate application).

Recently upgraded another WP site to PHP7. Man, I'll say this much, don't expect any miracles, and don't expect Ferrari-level performance. It's an improvement, but certainly not enough to make you totally write off the possibility of static site generators at some point in your future. I have one at 300ms, and one at 500ms right now, and not that impressed... WP is like using a WWII British Spitfire supercharged V24 (without the speed mind you) to tow...a motorcycle. You could do it with a couple hundred horsepower...or you could do it in the most complex manner possible, with the most overhead. Ugh.

One other thing to keep in mind about HTTP/2, especially considering it's growing adoption in the industry. HTTP/2 is much more efficient at loading resources/requests in parallel. Accordingly, it's probably not quite as necessary to go the traditional route of concatenating-all-the-things, sprite-all-the-images, etc. As with most things, there is likely a threshold, and you'll have to experiment to find it with your site. The reason I mention this is, there are a great many ways the traditional method of heavy file concatenation can cause significant UX issues. Things like FOUT (flash of unstyled text), loading/rendering hiccups, etc. You see, when you concatenate everything, it may not necessarily be ordered in the manner optimal for rendering/updating. With at least some of your most critical resource files either inlined (if highly critical) or loaded separately, if you order them properly in the code, it can provide a more progressively rendered and improved UX much of the time. Generally speaking, I'd say start with every resource separated, and then maybe experiment with concatenating a few (if possible), and measure the performance difference. If there's no appreciable difference, save yourself the trouble and let HTTP/2 do the work.
 
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