Why is my WordPress site slow?

How to figure out why your site is slow, so you can make smart decisions on what to improve.

Transcript

1. Why is my WordPress
   site slow?
   Vid Luther
   ZippyKid
   vid@zippykid.com (e-mail, gtalk)
   @vidluther (the tweeter)
   vidluther (skype)
   Sunday, August 26, 12
   

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2. Why is it important?
   • Crappy user experience
   • People are impatient
   • 40% of people leave a site that takes
   longer than 3 seconds to load.
   • SEO Voodoo (1% factor in SERP)
   Sunday, August 26, 12
   

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3. Sunday, August 26, 12
   

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4. Fat Pipes - Fat Pages?
   • # of requests per page is now 98
   • increase in “social buttons”, analytics js,
   and ads.
   • Images account for > 50% of a page load.
   Sunday, August 26, 12
   

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5. PageSpeed is not the Bible
   • Average page speed score dropped in 2011.
   • 2010 - 83% versus 2011 - 75%
   • A score of 85% can take 60 seconds to
   load
   “While Page Speed score is
   a useful measurement, it
   should not be considered
   the only indicator of a
   page’s performance health.”
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6. CDN! CDN! CDN!
   • Number of sites using CDN up by 17%
   • Average load time for a site that uses
   CDN?
   • 10.05 seconds
   • 9.72 without
   • CDN is not a catch-all
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7. Sources
   • Customers Are Won or Lost in One Second, Aberdeen Group (2008); Consumer Reaction to a Poor Online Shopping
   Experience, Jupiter Research (2006); The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP
   Chunking in Web Search, Amazon and Google (2009); When Seconds Count, Gomez (2010)
   • Website Response Times, Jakob Nielsen (2010); Response Time in Man-Computer Conversational Transactions, Robert R. Miller
   (1968)
   • State of the Union for Page Speed and Website Performance, Strangeloop (2011)
   • Consumer Response to Travel Site Performance, PhocusWright and Akamai (2010)
   • HTTP Archive: Nine Months, Steve Souders
   • Front-End Web Performance Optimization: It isn’t over till it’s over, Web Performance Today (2011) viii See results for Target.com
   on line 9 of the appendix in this report.
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8. What can a WordPress Developer Do?
   • Be more educated
   • Educate your clients
   • Stop being lazy - There is no magic bullet
   • What worked for one site will not always work
   on another.
   • How to get educated?
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9. Introspection
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10. Free Analysis is Free
    • Pingdom
    • http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
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11. WPT - Even Better
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12. Don’t act blindly
    • A new host won’t fix the problem
    • Understand what a CDN is.. (CDN not
    Detected? WAT???)
    • One test does not mean you need to act
    NOW!!
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13. Look at history (Torbit)
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14. Browser Analysis
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15. Page Load Breakdown
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16. What was the point of
    all of this?
    • Combine output of monitoring tools
    • Understand if you really need to do
    anything
    • Do it - make pages load faster
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17. Tools
    • Pingdom.com/fpt/
    • webpagetest.org
    • torbit.com
    • newrelic.com
    • Smushkid (ZippyKid)
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18. SmushKid
    • github.com/zippykid/smushkid
    • Made page size go from 8MB to 5MB
    • reduces overall footprint on disk
    • smaller images == more connections
    • Run in background
    Sunday, August 26, 12
    

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