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EP49 – How to speed up your WordPress website – WPwatercooler – August 26 2013

Show Notes

On this weeks episode we will be discussing ways to speed up your WordPress website. This includes plugins that speed it up, explain caching and CDNs, and talk hosting providers that help.

Caching – A way of taking the content and storing it into something more static to that gets pushed out to the internet.

CDN – Content Delivery Network, the way you distribute all of the content be it Java, CSS or images out to a 3rd party that has fast servers.

What are possible causes for a site running slow?

It’s possible that the issue is with your code and no matter where your site is hosted it will be slow.
Themes can also be an issue.
Often problems happen on the front end with a lot of or inefficient JavaScript, large image sizes. Image optimization is key.
Media in general takes up a lot of bandwidth.

What are some possible solutions to slow running sites?

Hosting with a company that provides SSD (solid state drive) technology. SSD currently serves data at the fastest speed available. Compare hosts and find one that uses SSD rather than spindle based drives.
Use P3 Profiler (Plugin Performance Profiler) Use P3 to see which plugins are slowing your sites down. The plugin creates a performance report for the site.

CDN Solutions:

Caching

Use a plugin
- W3 Total Cache (not recommended not for the casual users, difficult to use, not set it and forget it)
- WP Super Cache – Recommended
- Hyper Cache – Recommended
Hosting company
- WP Engine
- Page.ly
- Dreamhost
- HostGator
- Site Ground
Cloud Flare

Once you’ve run optimizations, how do you check to see if your site is actually faster?

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Aaron Dickinson

8 years ago

I’m sure you will talk about it but one of the biggest wins for my site was installing a PHP cache on my VPS. I went with Zend OPcache even though I am still on PHP 5.4 and it made about a 200ms decrease on my execution times and a large decrease on server load. My site has 30,000+ property listing pages that are updated fairly regularly so most page caches are impractical so this was a quick and easy way to get a good boost.