Speeding Up Your Site: An Introduction to WordPress Performance Optimization

From http://www.meetup.com/Milwaukee-WordPress-MeetUp/events/227987243/

Geoff Myers, digital marketing consultant/strategist and president of SimDex LLC, will be presenting an introduction to WordPress performance optimization (that is, speeding up your site).

This presentation will cover a variety of performance optimization strategies, plugins, best practices, and tutorials for:

• Caching static resources
• Minifying code
• Shrinking images
• Determining slow plugins
• Reducing server load
• Saving bandwidth
• Decreasing page loading times
• Creating a better overall user experience
• Improving SEO (search engine optimization)

Some of the specific tools and resources we'll talk about:

• W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache (caching plugins)
• WP Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer (image optimization plugins)
• CloudFlare and other CDNs (content delivery networks)
• GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed, and Yahoo YSlow (performance benchmarking)
• And more!

Transcript

1. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 SPEEDING UP YOUR SITE: AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION GEOFF MYERS PRESENTS
2. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 BEFORE WE BEGIN… THIS PRESENTATION IS AVAILABLE ONLINE: simdex.org/fast Get In Touch:
 geoff@simdex.org
 simdex.org
 414.455.6675
3. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 BEFORE WE BEGIN… ABOUT GEOFF MYERS ▸ Founded SimDex in 2004 ▸ Web Solutions for Small + Medium Sized Businesses ▸ Digital Marketing Consultant + Strategist ▸ 10+ Years as Full Stack Web Designer + Developer ▸ 5+ Years of WordPress Development Experience ▸ 50+ WordPress Sites Built, Maintained + Marketed ▸ Academic Background in Computer Science ▸ Get In Touch: geoff@simdex.org or simdex.org or 414.455.6675
4. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 BEFORE WE BEGIN… WP MAINTENANCE PLAN How You Benefit: ▸ We Do Everything For You ▸ Unlimited Minor Changes + Revisions ▸ 24 Hour Response Time Guaranteed ▸ Your Total Peace of Mind ▸ Monthly Phone Consultations ▸ No Hourly Fees or Additional Costs
5. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 BEFORE WE BEGIN… WP MAINTENANCE PLAN Features + Services Included: ▸ Backups ▸ Monitoring ▸ Speed ▸ Changes ▸ Reports ▸ Support ▸ Consulting ▸ Security ▸ Updates
6. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT WEBSITE PERFORMANCE? ▸ Good performance =
 ▸ Bad performance =
 ☠ ▸ Not convinced?
7. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION HOW IMPORTANT IS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION? ▸ Amazon sees a 1% decrease in revenue for every 100ms increase in load time. ▸ Source: http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/08/radar-theme-web- ops.html
8. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION HOW IMPORTANT IS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION? ▸ Instagram increased impressions and user profile scroll interactions by decreasing the response size of the JSON needed for displaying comments (by 33% for the median and 50% for the 95th percentile for the main endpoint). ▸ Source: http://engineering.instagram.com/posts/ 193415561023919/performance-&-usage-at-Instagram
9. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION HOW IMPORTANT IS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION? ▸ TRAC Research found, in a survey of 300 companies, that the average revenue loss for an hour of downtime was $21,000. For the same set of companies, average revenue loss due to an hour of slow performance (defined as load times exceeding 4.4 seconds) was $4,100. Website slowdowns occurred ten times more often than outages. ▸ Source: http://www.slideshare.net/KenGodskind/alertsitetrac
10. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION HOW IMPORTANT IS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION? ▸ Walmart saw up to a 2% increase in conversions for every 1 second of improvement in load time. Every 100ms improvment also resulted in up to a 1% increase in revenue. ▸ Source: http://www.slideshare.net/devonauerswald/walmart- pagespeedslide
11. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION HOW IMPORTANT IS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION? ▸ When YouTube introduced a version of their pages that was 90% lighter, they saw a large increase in traffic in areas with poor connectivity such as Southeast Asia, South America, Africa and Siberia. ▸ Source: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
12. AFFECTS YOUR AFFECTS YOUR Bottom Line Bottom Line Loading Time Loading Time HOW HOW EVERY SECOND COUNTS EVERY SECOND COUNTS MOBILE VS. DESKTOP MOBILE VS. DESKTOP Loading time is a major contributing factor to page abandonment. The average user has no patience for a Mobile Internet users expect a web-browsing experience on their phone that’s comparable to what
13. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION WHAT PRIMARILY AFFECTS WEBSITE PERFORMANCE? ‣ Network Infrastructure (Internet Service Provider or ISP) ‣ Web Application (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) ̣ ‣ Web Browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) ‣ Web Server (Software and Hardware) ‣ Software (Apache, PHP, MySQL) ‣ Hardware (CPU, RAM, HDD/SSD)
14. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION GENERAL ADVICE + BEST PRACTICES ‣ Buy a Fast Web Server (e.g. Managed WordPress Hosting) ‣ Enable Server + WordPress + Browser Caching ‣ Limit Usage of Plugins + Scripts ‣ Minify HTML + CSS + JavaScript ‣ Scale + Compress + Optimize Images ‣ Use a CDN (e.g. CloudFlare) ‣ Use Dedicated Media Hosting
15. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION WEBSITE PERFORMANCE TESTING TOOLS ▸ Google PageSpeed Tools ▸ GTmetrix ̣ ▸ New Relic ▸ Pingdom Website Speed Test ̣ ▸ Web Browser Developer Tools ▸ WebPagetest ▸ Yahoo YSlow
16. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 GTMETRIX DEMO WEBSITE PERFORMANCE
 TESTING TOOLS
17. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION GOOGLE PAGESPEED BEST PRACTICES: CONTENT ‣ Avoid a character set in the meta tag ‣ Avoid bad requests ‣ Minify HTML ‣ Minimize redirects ‣ Minimize request size ‣ Remove query strings from static resources ‣ Serve resources from a consistent URL ‣ Specify a character set early
18. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION GOOGLE PAGESPEED BEST PRACTICES: STYLESHEETS (CSS) ‣ Avoid CSS @import ‣ Inline small CSS ‣ Minify CSS ‣ Put CSS in the document head ‣ Optimize the order of styles and scripts
19. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION GOOGLE PAGESPEED BEST PRACTICES: IMAGES ‣ Combine images using CSS sprites ‣ Optimize images ‣ Serve scaled images ‣ Specify image dimensions
20. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION GOOGLE PAGESPEED BEST PRACTICES: SCRIPTS (JAVASCRIPT) ‣ Defer parsing of JavaScript ‣ Inline small JavaScript ‣ Minify JavaScript ‣ Optimize the order of styles and scripts ‣ Prefer asynchronous resources
21. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION GOOGLE PAGESPEED BEST PRACTICES: SERVER ‣ Avoid landing page redirects ‣ Enable gzip compression ‣ Enable Keep-Alive ‣ Leverage browser caching ‣ Specify a cache validator ‣ Specify a Vary: Accept- Encoding header
22. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE PLUGINS (PART 1) ▸ Performance Testing & Analysis ▸ Plugin Performance Profiler (P3) ̣ ▸ Query Monitor ̣ ▸ Caching ▸ W3 Total Cache ̣ ▸ WP Fastest Cache ▸ WP Super Cache
23. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 W3 TOTAL CACHE DEMO WEBSITE PERFORMANCE
 TESTING TOOLS
24. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE PLUGINS (PART 2) ▸ Image Optimization ▸ EWWW Image Optimizer ▸ Imsanity ̣ ▸ Jetpack ▸ WP Smush ̣
25. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE PLUGINS (PART 3) ▸ Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) ▸ Amazon Web Services (AWS) ̣ ▸ CacheFly ▸ CloudFlare ̣ ▸ Jetpack ▸ MaxCDN
26. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 CLOUDFLARE DEMO WEBSITE PERFORMANCE
 TESTING TOOLS
27. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 AN INTRODUCTION TO WORDPRESS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION ADDITIONAL ARTICLES + RESOURCES ▸ WordPress Optimization ▸ High Traffic Tips for WordPress ▸ 16 Quick Tips to Improve WordPress Performance – INFOGRAPHIC ▸ 17 Ways to Optimize and Speed Up WordPress Sites ▸ 11 Ways to Speed Up WordPress ▸ On a quest for ultimate website performance ▸ WordPress Optimization Infographic
28. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 THAT’S IT FOR NOW… THANK YOU! Questions? Get In Touch:
 geoff@simdex.org
 simdex.org
 414.455.6675
29. GEOFF@SIMDEX.ORG | WWW.SIMDEX.ORG | 414.455.6675 THAT’S IT FOR NOW… THIS PRESENTATION IS AVAILABLE ONLINE: simdex.org/fast Get In Touch:
 geoff@simdex.org
 simdex.org
 414.455.6675