Tips On How To Improve The Performance of Your Website In 2025
Quality Hosting, Modern Website Builder Plugin, KadenceWP, GeneratePress, Cashing Plugin, WP Rocket, Cloudflare Edge, CDN,
Boost your clients’ website performance with our expert tips and insights. Learn how to optimize speed, UX, and conversions.
Are you ready to take your clients’ websites to the next level? This informative show shares expert tips and insights on improving website performance. Learn how to identify bottlenecks, implement best practices, and utilize tools that can make a significant impact. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or a marketing professional, these strategies will help you deliver outstanding results. Watch the video today to enhance your skills.
With Special Guest Brian Jackson, Joint Founder of Perfmatters
@brianleejackson
#1 – Brian, can you give the tribe more detailed info on how you got involved in WordPress and commercial plugins?
#2 – With your Perfmatters plugin and consultation services, you are seen as a leading expert in improving WordPress performance. How did you get into this particular WordPress niche?
#3 – What do you regularly see that affects WordPress website performance?
#4 – What are some of the most significant changes in 2024 that have affected WordPress website performance?
#5— What AI tools do you personally use to help you run your business?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of your career, what advice would you give?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
Products and Services
#1 – Hosting Recommendation
Kinsta
Single $35 | Multiple $70 | Agency Starting $340
CloudWays (Breeze caching plugin nightmare)
What the difference between Standard or Premium?
DigitalOcean
Prices $14 | $28 | $58
Rocket.net – Ben Gabler CEO
Prices Starter $30 | Pro $60 | Business $100 month to month
BigScoots
Prices Starter $34.95 | Professional $98.95 | Business $248.95
WP-Engine
Prices Startup Starting $30
20I
Prices Small $21.99 | Medium $43.99 | Large $87.99
CLOSTE
#2 – Page Builders Recommendations
KadenceWP
Prices Express $69 | Essentials $169 | Full $299 per year
GeneratePress
Prices $149 per year
Bricks
Prices Starter $79 | Business $149 | Agency $249 per year
Breakdance
Prices Free | Pro $99 | Pro 199.99 per year
#3 – Caching and the confusion of CDNs and Cloudflare
WP Rocket
$59 | Plus $119 | Multi $299
WP Fastest Cache Pro
https://www.wpfastestcache.com
Prices Bronze $49 | Silver $125 | Gold $175 | Platinum $300
FlyingPress
Prices $49 | Pro $99 | Business $199
#4 – Object caching, Object Cache Pro, Redis Caching, and Cloudflare Edge caching
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/how-to/edge-browser-cache-ttl/
#5 – Delaying and preloading (LPC)
#6 – Fonts (CLS)
#7 – Removing plugins the right way
#8 – APO?
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This week, we’re going to be talking about WordPress website performance. We’ve got a friend of the show and one of the leading experts in this area. He’s helped me out. I think he’s an expert. We got Brian Jackson on the show, and he’s co-founder; his brother has a plugin that helps you, Permmatters. It’s a leading plugin that enables you to speed up your WordPress website. Plus, he helps a lot of clients improve their speed. So, Brian, can you give us a quick intro, 10, 20-second intro about yourself? Then, in the central part of the show, we go into a bit more detail about your background.
[00:01:06.480] – Brian Jackson
Sure. I’m the co-founder, along with my brother, at Forge Media. That’s our agency name. We have two plugins. Our Perf Matters plugin is the performance optimization one. Then we have our Novo Share plugin, which is a social sharing plugin, but it’s focused on performance. Everything we do is finetuned around core web vitals so that you can still get the sharing stuff without any slowdown. Those are the two plugins, and that’s what we do full-time.
[00:01:35.810] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers? Yeah, Jonathan. My name is Kurt, Kurt von Annen. I own a company called Magnana No Mas. We focus largely on membership and learning-type websites, and I work directly with folks like WP-Tonic and Lifter LMS. That’s fantastic. Before we go into the central part of the show, I’ve got a message from one of our leading sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. Coming back, folks. I also want to point out that we’ve got some great special offers from the sponsors. Plus we got a list of the best WordPress plugins and services that will save you a ton of time, you WordPress professional. You can get all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals. I think Brian’s plugin is on that. If it is, I will put it on that list. Brian, how did you initially get involved in the world of WordPress?
[00:02:57.830] – Brian Jackson
Well, it was initially. I mean, I’ve been blogging. I started my first WordPress site in 2008. That was back when it was still like a blog, pretty much just blogging. And I just fell in love with just typing out tutorials. I was in IT then, so it was always just SharePoint, all this Microsoft IT stuff. And that’s the world I lived in. And I just fell in love with WordPress at that point. And over the years, in the evenings, I got more into the affiliate marketing stuff, sharing what I was using. Like, oh, I love this tool. I love this service. And so I was always writing about that. And then, over time, I just wanted a better way to display on the sidebar, like, hey, this is what I’m using. And then maybe here’s a discount code or something to share. My brother was a WordPress at the time, and we just said, What if we put together a plugin to share coupons and services we’re using? We made our WP coupons plugin then, and It wasn’t public. We were using it on our blog for a while.
[00:04:21.560] – Brian Jackson
Eventually, so many people asked for it that we ultimately packaged it up and started selling it as a plugin. That’s how we got into the plugin space. You could say it grew out of something we used on our site and then turned into our first plugin.
[00:04:37.890] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Would you say your most intense period with WordPress was when… I don’t know precisely what your official title is. I presume it was the manager of SEO and content at Kinster Hosting. I think you would agree that when you were in that role, it was the most intense period of your involvement in WordPress when it comes to the intensity. Would that be correct?
[00:05:04.300] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I went through a couple of different roles. When I left, I was the Chief Marketing Officer. I wasn’t doing as much day-to-day work as I, did when they first hired me because they grew fast. But yeah, that was the most intense period I’ve had in WordPress. But that’s because I joined them when they were like six to seven people. And when I left, there was over 100 people. So it was very different from when I joined them.
[00:05:34.460] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s when you got a good view of the belly of the beast, wasn’t it?
[00:05:39.160] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, that was my first really glance at doing a startup from the very bare bones to building out departments and stuff like that. And I don’t think I like that. It was a journey, and I learned way more. But I don’t think I’d ever want to start another startup. I would rather join another company that’s already past that point because there’s so much work that goes into that.
[00:06:07.420] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Over to you, Kurt. I want to drive back to the PerfMatters product. So when we think about PerfMatters as a plugin and a product, you also have consultation services, right? So you’re seen as a leader in this area. How did you center on performance? What drove you to that? Was it a passion or was it like you saw an opportunity and seized it?
[00:06:38.610] – Brian Jackson
Kind of both because when I was back doing IT, my first real, I guess you could say WordPress job was at KeyCDN, which is a content delivery network. It wasn’t all the way into WordPress, but it was like WordPress and all these other, Laravel and all these other platforms. And so I was getting closer in my real job. And then I to Kinsta and got even closer because they were just WordPress at the time, like nothing else. And so once I knew that… I knew at that point, I wanted to do just WordPress. Then having worked at KeyCDN, I already had this how to make things faster type of thing, because CDN people are just… That’s all they’re thinking about. And then Kinsta was very, obviously, how do we do managed hosting with performance in mind? That was their goal. So there was always this drive to go faster type of thing. I always just found it super fascinating. I don’t know why. How to make scripts smaller, how to get rid of more code to do the same thing. I don’t know. I always just found it like a puzzle type of thing. I always found it fun.
[00:07:47.790] – Brian Jackson
While I was at Kinsta, the way PerfMatters was born was that I kept seeing clients just needing to… You have all this WP the WordPress core crap that it’s adding still. A host isn’t going to fix that part of it for you. Sure, Kinsta is doing all this great stuff on the server side, but you have a 30 kilabyte dash icons library you’re loading that you’re not even using at all. Why don’t you just disable that? So stuff like that, I really just love doing that type of thing. My brother, who is the developer at that time, was we had our coupons plugin, so we knew how to do a plugin. We were like, let’s build the perfmatters plugin here and just start adding disables to it. That’s how that was created. It just morphed over time. But then we don’t We don’t necessarily advertise optimization services, but we do it anyways. We’re thinking about publicly launching an audit service down the road here. But again, with We’re using our plugins, we’ve invoiced people for work and stuff, so we do that type of stuff all the time. And I think Jonathan will tell you, we’ll go above and beyond, usually, when it comes to if you’re using our plugin, I’ll tell you everything that’s wrong with your site if you’re using our plugin.
[00:09:16.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, you might be crying, actually crying. But no, I do. We’re going to redevelop it. My WP tonic site is enormous. It’s an enormous It’s a website. It’s got hundreds and hundreds of pages. And it was built over eight years ago, and it’s a Frankenstein. And it needs… But I just can’t face it. I don’t want to I haven’t got the money in it and I can’t face it. I haven’t got the bandwidth. So we’re trying to keep it going, probably, but I’ll have it redone sometime at the end of this year.
[00:09:58.900] – Brian Jackson
Mostly clients we work with have what you call the Frankenstein type of sites. They’ve been going for 6, 8, 10 years, and it’s just a mess of everything that they’ve done over those eight years, basically.
[00:10:12.290] – Jonathan Denwood
I wouldn’t say the WTonic is a mess, but I would say it’s a consequence of anything that’s been around a long time.
[00:10:19.720] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. And even our own sites, the database, I’m sure there’s some old stuff in there that shouldn’t be there still just because you install plugins, you remove them, and sometimes you don’t get rid of everything. So it’s just one of those things that grows over time.
[00:10:33.590] – Jonathan Denwood
I had a follow-up question, if it’s all right. I was thinking the listener and the viewer to this show, they hear the topic, but they might not understand the benefit or why. So everybody wants a site that’s faster. But if you’re developing a site for a business, what are the main advantages for the site to perform more quickly and better? And you had mentioned speeding things up for Kinsta. So what’s the interest in a host for wanting to have higher performance? And maybe that will help the listener and viewer understand why certain things like dynamic websites and stuff don’t do so well with some performance things. You got to use them, right?
[00:11:14.450] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. Well, anybody that knows me knows that I prefer managed WordPress hosting just because I feel like it’s a couple more coffees a month and you’re going to have so much more extra work done for you just automatically that you I don’t have to worry about.
[00:11:31.380] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you, I think it’s the most abused term in the WordPress. In your mind, what is managed hosting? Because at WP Tonic, I think I’m bound to say this, but I say it. Kirk is quite up to putting me down. I think we go well beyond the average of what is seen as managed hosting hosting at WP Tonic. Would you agree with that, Kirk? Well, adding plugins, taking out plugins, setting up SMTPs for people. I mean, yeah, above and beyond. There’s more services given at WP tonic than any other host I’ve used or tried. What in your own mind is when you say manage hosting, what is manage hosting?
[00:12:21.850] – Brian Jackson
I would put you guys at a third layer, almost type of thing. You have your… I’m just going to call them out here. You have your Bluehost That’s the thing or your name cheap hosting, like these shared WordPress hosts. Then you have your managed hosts, which are like, kinsta, rocket. Net, big scouts, these type of folks. Then you have probably what you’re doing, where you’re going above and beyond and actually going into the sites and doing all this stuff. But the reason I just say managed hosting is just to get away from those cheap shared. If the sign up for your hosting provider is 99 cents a month, that is not a good hosting provider. I can just tell you that right off the map is not well.
[00:13:04.530] – Jonathan Denwood
Certainly, I’ve watched all your interviews that you’ve done about this subject, and you’re on a certain podcast with a Belgian guy, but he He put to you, he’s a Belgian-French, I think. Oh, yeah. Okay. But he put the concept, Well, it doesn’t matter what hosting you use. Just use the cheapest and then just use Cloudflare and Cachein. Bob’s your uncle. In your very polite way, you semi-pushed back on that, but he was adding it, wasn’t he?
[00:13:38.880] – Brian Jackson
The reason I put back on it goes to what Kurt mentioned earlier was the dynamic site. Because Because Cloudflare is great, and we use it. Lots of hosts use it now, which is great. And that’s great for when you’re caching the entire site, like a different location. But the moment you’re bypassing cache, or like with these, we will commerce sites, you always people can’t cache the checkout page, the cart page, like all these places. And when you’re not hitting cache, that’s when the server is getting hit directly. So if your server is slow, your commerce site is going to suffer. The shared hosts, they’re using less resources. It’s directly related to performance. I did push back with that guy because sure, if you catch the entire thing- Well, it’s the worst, the Belgium They’re the worst.
[00:14:33.400] – Jonathan Denwood
They’re the French. I got a hate love affair with the French. I’ve lived in France, but the worst of the worst I’ve found of Belgian French, Flemish Belgium speakers. They are the pics when it comes to… They know it all.
[00:14:50.390] – Brian Jackson
It depends on your technical expertise, too. If you don’t know what caching is, you should go with a managed hosting provider who’s Why are you going to handle it better. Because the guy I was talking with, he’s a little more technical and sure, maybe he can optimize his site to hit cash as- No, in a way, he was correct, but he was correct in a certain It’s a certain type of website.
[00:15:18.180] – Jonathan Denwood
I interrupted again. Shall we go on? I’m losing track. I knew I would with this conversation because we could really delve. But would Would you agree, though, that the term manage hosting, in your own mind, you’ve got a good grasp of what you think that really means? And me and Kirk, we think we got a good grasp, or I have. I regularly mystify Kirk, but there we go. But I think in general, would you agree that in the beginning of 2025, it’s really abused term?
[00:16:01.900] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, I would agree. I just think of it as the host that provide the extra services that should be day to day. I have people reaching out all the time that I ask for, Can you make us… You need to troubleshoot this on a staging site. And they’re like, how do I make a staging site? And with the managed host, it’s a one click thing to make a staging site these days. That’s just deliver. And on these cheaper hosts, you got to run a plugin just to make a staging site, and then you got to figure out the DNS. There’s so much… Just these little things having them, it’s worth the extra $20 a month or something to just get those extra things. That’s where I put the managed hosting providers. And sure, there’s like, Kinsta, maybe in some like, Rocket. Net, they go more performance heavy. They care about how is Cloudflare optimizing the site and all that stuff. But yeah, I agree. It’s a very broad term.
[00:16:58.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think it’s Well, I’m so abused. I didn’t know if we should delve in, but I think we leave our hosting recommendation to the bonus content. We can have a good slagging session then. Well, I will. So let’s go on. What are a couple of things that you regularly see that really affects WordPress performance in general? What’s the couple of things that you really think that people should understand from this podcast, really?
[00:17:35.670] – Brian Jackson
The first one I see a lot is you should be using Cloudster these days and using what they call their EdgeCash.
[00:17:45.950] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to butt in a little bit here. I call it the dark triad of this, where is the cache? I call it that. Where is the cache? Where is the ring, as I call it? Because you can have caching plugins installed. We have regular clients that come to us. They’ve got free caching plugins installed on various different developers. Then you can have caching from Flare. Then you can have caching from whatever hosting provider they’re with who keeps saying, We’ve switched it off, but at best, they switch it off until the next update of their servers, or it’s never really switched off. Then you got… Then Running into the witches brew is a CDN. That’s caching in a way, isn’t it? You could end up with, like I say, where is the caching? Is this making sense, right?
[00:19:02.220] – Brian Jackson
No, I see it literally every single day, on almost every client I work with. They’ve got different cache setups.
[00:19:09.970] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it’s got worse, though, don’t you?
[00:19:11.970] – Brian Jackson
Oh, no. You’ve got object cache, varnish cache, cloudflare cache, hosting cache, page cache, plugin cache. And so, yes, I know what all those layers are, but for this person just trying to build a website for somebody, I can’t even imagine what it must be like because there’s just so many layers these days. However, I’m going to throw this out there again. I know you don’t like it. It’s another reason to go with a managed sourcing provider because you don’t need a cache plugin necessarily. There’s just one less thing. You got to like, I don’t need to worry about this. They’re going to do it for me. But I agree, it’s confusing. But the reason I say EdgeCash is so important is if you’re serving global visitors, which you’re probably with WP tonic, you’re probably serving different countries, I’m assuming. You want it to load fast in Germany, just as fast as you do in Las Vegas or something. And so EdgeCash is the only way to really get rid of that server response time due to the distance. It’s the only way to do it. It was a great invention. And ever since EdgeCash became popular, I’ve been trying to push it on people as much as I can because it is really a powerful feature.
[00:20:30.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Obviously, this whole term of what is a hosting provider is another term that’s abused because we don’t provide the bare metal. We buy the bare metal from a partner, and they have their normal setup. Then every time they provide a server setup, we have to ask them, remove everything, remove all the caching, and they’ve agreed to do that, but we still have to sometimes say, Well, there seems to be caching here, and then they remove it, and we’re okay. They got the security set connect can affect a performance because you’ve got these security plug-ins that are a nightmare. But the way we deal with it is we use Cloudflare, and we ask the customer to set up. But we use WP Rocket because we just want one ring. We want just one overall arching caching because we’re dealing with membership and community websites, and if anybody’s dealt with Buddy Boss, that’s the worst of the worst. But it’s pretty grim with a membership site. We got to have caching, but we can’t have caching on the backends, we just can’t have it because it’s the road to madness. How do you advise somebody that’s got WI With your other interviews, you recommended a couple of other caching plugins.
[00:22:21.860] – Jonathan Denwood
There’s a lot of rubbish in that particular area. I think you recommended WP Fast Cash Pro, and you recommended Flying Press, which I was surprised because I’ve had some bloody nightmares with those people. But I still think WP Rocket, it’s pretty expensive, but it’s solid as far as I’m concerned. But how does that work with what you’re saying with Cloudflare? How do you recommend if you’re using-On Rocket’s good, too.
[00:23:01.870] – Brian Jackson
I actually literally have Rocket mentioned on PerfMatter site in multiple places. So that’s great. You do? I do. Even though they’re a competitor, it’s a great product. But I have them split out as in, here’s some free ones, and here’s Rocket, because obviously people have different budgets. And so WP Fastest Cash is a great-Is that a polite way to say that the people that are tight? I guess you could say, yeah. I mean, we’re dealing with WordPress folks here, so there’s a big need of budgets. Yeah, tight.
[00:23:36.200] – Jonathan Denwood
They don’t want to spend any money. They don’t want to spend any money on it.
[00:23:42.070] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. Fastest Cash is a great one. Superpagecash. Those are the two I really like that are free. And then Rocket is a great premium one. And they’ve been around forever. But yeah, I mean, Cloudflare, like Rocket has an add-on in their tool. You can control the Cloudflare, whether it’s purging the cache or not in Rocket there. But they don’t do Edge cache necessarily. So like Cloudflare APO. So you have to turn that on from your Cloudflare account, technically. But yeah, it works great with It goes. But like you said, the different cache layers can be confusing sometimes. If anyone does have questions about there and they’re using PerfMatters, feel free to reach out. I’m happy to answer any cache questions you have.
[00:24:27.670] – Jonathan Denwood
But can you explain, because I’ve been disrupted a little bit, which I normally do, what does Cloudflare Edge do? What is it and what does it do? And then it’s become all these discussions, it’s brought in all the time, is it? It used Cloudflare Edge. It seems to become the leader. So what is it and why is it technically better than some of the other solutions?
[00:24:54.270] – Brian Jackson
It’s pretty much becoming the norm these days. And The reason it’s better is… The easiest example is, let’s say you have your server hosted in Nevada. Someone from Germany is going to go to your site. There’s going to be probably a 5 to 600 millisecond delay on the server response time because of the distance across the ocean trying to get to your site. That delay there is already going to hurt you. In the past, five, six years ago, there was no way to fix that. You have to reach the website, it has to go across that distance. And while your site is cached locally, it’s not cached all the way across. So when EdgeCash came out, basically that said, we’re going to cache your entire site, including the HTML, in a Cloudflare location in Germany. So when that person in Germany goes to visit your site, that’s technically hosted in Nevada, they actually hit it in Germany in the Cloudflare cache bucket. So they don’t even have that distance anymore. And the server response time goes from 600 milliseconds down to 30 milliseconds. So it’s a huge improvement on the server response time. Now, it doesn’t impact like, JS images.
[00:26:14.050] – Brian Jackson
These are all just normal CDN things that have been sped up for years and years and years. It’s just that server response time. That’s what the EdgeCash is fixing. Now, if you’re just serving local clients, too, you might not need it. If you’re just doing, say you’re in Nevada there and you’re just serving local clients in Nevada, I wouldn’t bother with EdgeCash because you don’t even care about anyone in Germany at that point. But if you’re serving global clients, then I would say you want EdgeCash.
[00:26:41.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but it’s Dynamite when it comes to WooCommerce or membership or Buddy Boss, isn’t it? That’s why you need to know because caching is great. But what’s the difference? You do get Edge with the cloud a free account. But if you really do, would you recommend to go with the Pro Cloudflare account? Because I think they offer some slight differences in the control of Edge, don’t they?
[00:27:12.340] – Brian Jackson
I want to make this clear. You You can get Edge caching in the free version of Cloudflare or the Pro version of Cloudflare. The only way you get it from Cloudflare directly is to go in there and turn on what’s called Cloudflare automatic optimization, and that costs $5 a month. Or maybe you were referring to, you can add it in the free version. You can flip it on in the free version of Cloudflare. So yeah, either plan, you can go in there, turn on this Edge Cache, Cloudflare automatic optimization. Now, for those out there that have managed hosts, I would check with them first because a lot of them just bundled it. Like, kinsta, Rocket. Net, they have these already bundled in their pricing. So you can just turn it on in your dashboard. You don’t got to go pay separately for this stuff. So check with your host first, too.
[00:27:58.570] – Jonathan Denwood
But when it comes to Bluecomers, and like I say, you got to be… Can you set up? Yeah, that’s what I mean, because you got to be a bit cagey with this because it can end up with a real on it. It can end up with a real pull your hair out.
[00:28:23.010] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. No, I agree. And again, I know I’m always mentioning manage jobs, but this is my bias of working there. But This is sometimes where like, kinsta and Rocket. Net, they have these rules in the background to make sure things don’t cache where they shouldn’t, on the cart page, the checkout page. And if you’re just doing Woocommerce straight on a shared hosting provider, many of these don’t have these tools. So you’re going to end up caching the wrong thing and end up seeing why is the shopping cart showing for this other person that is completely on a different computer? That’s what you problems you start running into. And so You do want to be careful with cache because you don’t want to cache the wrong thing. And so, yeah, that’s definitely a problem. But you can go into Cloudflare and create rules. Say, I want to exclude, I don’t want this thing to ever happen.
[00:29:12.880] – Jonathan Denwood
We tend to do it with WP Rocket We tend to do the heavy lifting with WP Rocket with working with Cloudflare. We just want one, and it gives us the micro control that we need. But we’re a bit The coasting providers, we got different requirements. I think with a… What you’re saying, a national US, if somebody that’s got customers nationally or internationally, you really got to go with Cloudflare and Edge, really, because…
[00:29:47.630] – Brian Jackson
Pretty much, yeah. Yeah.
[00:29:49.340] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve interrupted a bit. I think we got some knowledge there. It’s time for our halftime break. We’re going to be delving in the world of performance with WordPress, and we got a lot more to discuss with a true expert, Brian Jackson. We will be back in a few moments. We’re coming back, folks. I’ve inserted the whole of Belgium. I don’t care. They’re nice people. It’s only me and folks. We’ve had a fantastic discussion about performance. Just want to point out, if you’re looking for a real great WordPress hosting partner, and you’re looking for somebody that really specializes in performance and the setting up with membership and community-focused websites. Why don’t you look at becoming a partner with WP Tonic? You can find more by going over to wp-tonic. Com/partners. Wp-tonic/partners, and we got some fabulous partnership plans that you will be blown away. Right, over to you, Kurt. Well, I feel like my question is going to walk us backwards in the conversation a little, Brian, but personal experience. I do a needs assessment with a customer. It’s an e-learning website. They have a ton of videos. I say, Where’s your video posting account, they tell me they have Vimeo.
[00:31:32.340] – Jonathan Denwood
And then I go into their website and they loaded 16 gigs of video to the media bin, and we’re wondering why things were getting slowed down. You’re right? It’s just like, so in your experience, what do you see regularly as common things that people do that affect their WordPress performance in a negative way? Yeah.
[00:31:59.670] – Brian Jackson
I don’t disagree with that.
[00:32:02.940] – Jonathan Denwood
The big daddy. They’re never going to sponsor me on my show, but there we go. I don’t care. I wouldn’t take their money anyway. And that’s saying something because I would literally take money from my knee body. Sorry.
[00:32:20.520] – Brian Jackson
I put a few notes together on this topic. Maybe I’ll just go through a few bullet points. Yeah. The biggest things that I see. I would say the first one is JavaScript. I always say JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript. That’s always the problem on these sites most of the time. I know, Jonathan, this was an example on your site was the Drift chat thing.
[00:32:50.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, we got it back on, but we have done what your recommendations were about it. It’s made a big difference. But people I like using those chat things. I like to get rid of it completely because they always want to talk to me at the wrong moment, but they love it, so we put it back on, but we did what your recommendations were.
[00:33:14.030] – Brian Jackson
In that example, a lot of these chat boxes or third-party scripts, like Google Analytics these days, it’s 140 gigabytes.
[00:33:24.030] – Jonathan Denwood
There’s scripts everywhere, isn’t there? It’s script sitting, isn’t it? It’s gone bonkers, isn’t it?
[00:33:29.610] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, it’s nuts. They don’t care about your performance. It’s obvious. At this point, they don’t care. The only way to fix that really is to figure out ways around it, workarounds. One way with his example was to use Delay And so that’s something we have in our plugin is basically you just delayed the JavaScript on user interaction. And it’s not really a hack because Google is saying this JavaScript is not used. So why load it? Basically, you’re just it until someone interacts with the page and then it loads. With the chat box, it’s an easy example because you can’t click the chat box until you move your mouse anyway. So it’s like, why load it right away? So delaying JS is a huge thing these days. I think it’s super helpful. And something I recommend pretty much everyone do.
[00:34:21.980] – Jonathan Denwood
You have to watch the show. I’m putting some comments. There’s a certain WordPress person. He’s put his two I didn’t see it. Thanks, Matt. All right, sorry, Brian.
[00:34:33.590] – Brian Jackson
Another big thing I see these days, and I can’t believe I’m still seeing it, but I see it literally every day, is people using TTF fonts. So basically, for people that don’t know, there’s different fonts. Ttf were used way 5, 10 years ago. Then there’s Waf, then came Waf2. You want to be using Waf2. The Waf2 ones are smaller, more compressed, the modern versions, and it’s like 98% browser You want to use. Wap2. But every time I work on sites, I still see. Ttf fonts. It’s a simple fix. People are always like, Awesome. They can go from each of these fonts, it’s like 80 gigabytes, down to a 20 kilabyte file. If you have five fonts, do the math on that. That’s a big decrease just by swapping to what they should have already been using. So stuff like that. Icon libraries is another huge one. I’m going to call out this person elements kit. They load a 448…
[00:35:33.720] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m not going to be calling out a lot of people, but I don’t care.
[00:35:37.330] – Brian Jackson
You were coming on this show, so you should have realized that anyway. I don’t mind calling some people out because they need to fix some of this stuff. It’s almost getting worse, like you were saying, these days. But yeah, they’re loading a 448 kilabyte icon file, and most of the time you’re not using… I’ve seen it down to sites. I have a tool where you can scan how much of the icon library you’re using. And a lot of time they’re using 0. 5 % of that 448 kilabyte.
[00:36:07.910] – Jonathan Denwood
This is all good stuff, but we’re talking about people that have hired numerous Fiverr people And every Tom Decanari has gone into their website and added stuff, removed stuff. They don’t even know what these Fiverr people have even done in their website. No, I agree.
[00:36:27.000] – Brian Jackson
No, I agree. I know exactly what you’re saying, because every time… A lot of people that I work with, they’ve done Fiverr jobs.
[00:36:35.370] – Jonathan Denwood
And it’s not that they haven’t got the money, they’re just tired. They just want to go to Fiverr, and hire any Tom Decanari. And If you’re broke, you’re broke, you’ve got to do what you got to do. But a lot of these people aren’t broke, they’re just tired.
[00:36:54.130] – Brian Jackson
No, I think what you said there is important because what I found in tickets is most Most of the people that are working with these Fiverr people don’t actually realize what the Fiverr guy did. And so part of its education, it’d be like, here’s why you don’t buy a 448 kilabyte icon library and you’re only using one % of it. Here’s why that’s a bad thing. A lot of people don’t even know anything about this stuff. The Fiverr guy went in there, just added all these elementary plugins and all this crap in there.
[00:37:25.420] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to be quite controversial here, but fair enough. But this is great stuff. But let’s be frank, if you’re using an animator or divvy, it’s all a freaking waste of time anyway, isn’t it? You’re finished anyway, aren’t you?
[00:37:40.950] – Brian Jackson
I will say Elementor.
[00:37:44.870] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re finished anyway, aren’t you, really? Unless you got a real good hosting provider, which we do. We have people that run really successful sites on divvy and an elevator. We used to, our provider used to, because it was like what you said in in previous interviews, it was the best offering at the time. But we just throw more server resources at it because they’re not prepared to spend the money on getting the site sorted out. We just, just I’ll keep them up where you just throw more server resources at it. But that’s all you can do.
[00:38:19.600] – Brian Jackson
That’s always one solution for sure. I will say Elementor has done a lot of improvement. The problem you get with Elementor- That’s been very mind, aren’t you?
[00:38:30.580] – Jonathan Denwood
But you’re a very generous person, aren’t you?
[00:38:32.720] – Brian Jackson
The bigger problem actually is not Elementor. It’s these third-party Elementor add-on plugins. These are the guys that are killing… The problem is once you have a client using Elementor, then they go down this rabbit hole of adding all these other elements or third-party plugins. So it’s like a…
[00:38:48.360] – Jonathan Denwood
At least 100.
[00:38:49.920] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. So it’s a nightmare. And if anyone…
[00:38:54.880] – Jonathan Denwood
This does keep adding more add on function add.
[00:38:58.170] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, exactly. Let’s see what else I got in here. Oh, animations. This is another one. I’m just going to throw this under the bus here. Lottie and Gzap, if you see any of this stuff, stay away from it. Don’t add these things to your site. Basically, for anyone that doesn’t know, animations take JS time, which takes CPU time. It all comes back to how fast the server can render things. It’s all coming back to resources. Every little animation you see, if it’s JS-powered, not every animation is-Yeah, but Brian, we got to have that homepage.
[00:39:36.210] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s got to pop. It’s got to pop, Brian. It’s got to pop. It doesn’t pop. You ain’t done your job right as a web design, it don’t pop. Can you give us some specifics? Well, I don’t know. I only know what I don’t like, and it doesn’t pop.
[00:39:55.900] – Brian Jackson
I always tell people, Yeah, you got to give sacrifices It has to be made somewhere.
[00:40:01.720] – Jonathan Denwood
My opinion it’s got to pop. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter that it converts, as long as it pops.
[00:40:08.370] – Brian Jackson
Yeah.
[00:40:09.880] – Jonathan Denwood
What else? He’s keeping it out of this. He’s giving it his roundup. I literally had a marketing director when I was corporately employed. He looked at one of my projects and he goes, I think it needs a little more sizzle and pop. And I almost spit my coffee. You’re finished. You’re finished. You might as well just go and cut your throat. You know you’ve had it. I’m sorry, Brian. This piece really needs some sizzle and pop. I’m just putting you off, Brian. I’m so sorry, Brian, but you knew this was going to happen anyway, Brian.
[00:40:40.200] – Brian Jackson
I have a good example of what I do in those situations, at least with my clients. So we’ll take a revolution slider as the example here. I will show them like- Did you have to swear? Well, I will show them like, Here’s a performance test with revolution slider running. Then I I will show them, when you turn it off, here’s another test with Revolution Slider not running. I show them the before and after, and you’d be surprised how much of a difference that makes. Something clicks. I think with most people, they’ll be like, wow, that may be I don’t need this slider going back and forth. Maybe I can live without the slider because it’s hurting the performance that much. If you show them visually, especially with tests before and after, I feel like that clicks with a lot of folks. Then it’ll be like, Okay, why don’t you just do a static hero with a nice CTA, that’s all you need. You don’t see Google in all these places doing fancy sliders. There’s a reason all those sites are static. Before and after, that’s a good way to convince a client. What else here?
[00:41:51.800] – Brian Jackson
Oh, Google reCAPTCHA. Oh, that’s another one. I have a doc on our site that has CAPTCHA alternatives that 95 % less weight than the Google reCAPTCHA. So I see that all the time because people just throw… They turn on the reCAPTCHA integration with, Gravity forms or whatever they’re using, and then they have reCAPTCHA loading everywhere. It’s just… Yeah.
[00:42:17.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, you mentioned because we provide Fluent Forms and Fluent Forms Pro as part of our… How unique package that… How that hosting providers won’t give you, by the way. But you still like fluent, but you’ve gone off to some other form plugin because why do you… Have you gone off… I’m going to upset Matt here, but who cares? He’s used to it, so he can handle it. Have you gone off Gravity? Because we tend, and I use it myself, we tend to use Fluent Forms Pro, but they are… I’ve got this… I still give Gravity their money, by the way, Matt. That should bring a much smile onto your face. But for the bigger projects, the custom projects, we use Gravity. Have you gone off Gravity forms?
[00:43:14.070] – Brian Jackson
I Actually, I haven’t used Gravity Forms, probably in eight years. I was Fluent Forms for almost up until last year. I was Fluent Forms for many, many years. And the reason Fluent Forms is the best out there in terms of performance. If you’re looking just to performance, Fluent Forms does a really, really good job. Now, if you need more complex workflows, that’s where I say Fluent Forms doesn’t always solve everything. And so I use WS Form.
[00:43:44.870] – Jonathan Denwood
I think-Yeah, I’ll forgive you.
[00:43:47.150] – Brian Jackson
I like WS Form, and the reason I use that is for an integration with Google Drive and uploading attachments. There’s just a couple of things that I like, how the workflow is better. And for our tickets, on our contact-It’s not like dealing with a client that’s got a WU commerce site, and they’re doing like 2 million plus turnover, and they got contact7 on their website, is there? Well, nothing wrong with contactForm7 either.
[00:44:15.920] – Jonathan Denwood
I got… This was donkeys years ago when it was first developed by that German chef guy. I think he was a developer who was in food and I asked… I put in a support, very polite, and he basically told me I could stick it up my backside, basically. Lovely guy. A real charmer. But I think that was Donkeys years ago. He’s long gone.
[00:44:39.840] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, I don’t know the history of that because I actually haven’t used contact for him. That was maybe back when I first start on my first WordPress side, I did. But yeah, I was fluent. Forms is great for performance. I like them. And then I like WS Form for more advanced stuff. But like, Gravity Forms is advanced stuff, too.
[00:44:55.290] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but there’s certain form plugins. I’m not going to, because I’m in enough trouble as it is. I’ve had too much coffee today, Brian, this morning already. But there’s certain plugins that when you see them installed and they’re talking about performance, sure. Unless you remove it, we’re all wasting our time, really, aren’t we?
[00:45:21.990] – Brian Jackson
No, I agree. Even with some of these contact forms, like Gravity Forms, I wouldn’t recommend running Gravity Forms if you all the add-ons on on the homepage. I would recommend try to run it on your lead page or on your contact only. There are things you can do, even if you have a bigger plugin to sometimes get around. But Fluent Forms is great if you want pure speed, as small as scripts as you can get, basically.
[00:45:48.510] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve got my other co-host for my other podcast listening to this, Paul Nico. Nico, it’s going to be better tomorrow, actually. It’s not going to be so bad, Nico. It’s just a witch’s brew. But if you follow, and I think you were right in previous interviews you had about this, obviously, I think it’s just having a staging site or somewhere you can play on. I think people say it’s the quality, not the volume, but I don’t totally agree with that. I think on a production site, you want to keep I can’t defend myself because I’ve ended up with a lot of plugins on the WP Tonic website, but I’ve learned my lesson and it really got to be… I literally will look at anything rather than install another plugin. I think there’s a middle ground. It’s the quality of the plugins, but you really do want to stop yourself from installing every plugin out of the sudden. Well, on the people…
[00:47:02.730] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, I agree with you on that because the people touting quality usually are not the people that are dealing with clients that didn’t analyze the quality of the 80 plugins that they have running. So in the real world, 80 plugins is a bad thing regardless of the quality, because clients don’t know the quality of the plugins. So like you said, the amount of plugins you have running in the real world really matter because it just decreases the amount of bad code that’s on there.
[00:47:35.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Back over to you, Kurt. Hey, hey, hey. If we were going to take things back again, And I don’t want to talk about WP engine and Matt. I want to say in 2024, what were the biggest changes in the platform that you think may have affected performance the most?
[00:48:00.410] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. So I do have a few. I have a few notes on this, too, that I jotted down, at least. And these are just for maybe performance changes, just not all just WordPress, but just in the performance realm. In 2024, like this last Here. First thing is, PHP 8. 3 and 8. 4 came out. If you’re not using one of those, you should test and upgrade to them now because-What was it, Brian? What are they?
[00:48:30.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, because to the people that don’t know.
[00:48:33.210] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, so like, PHP is a software that runs on your server. That’s what’s powering all your WordPress code basically is.
[00:48:38.920] – Jonathan Denwood
We’ve got a very broad audience, so mostly WordPress professional, but some people that won’t know what you’re talking about.
[00:48:44.160] – Brian Jackson
So If you don’t know what it is, you can go in WordPress on your site and go to Site tools or Site health tools in there on your dashboard.
[00:48:53.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Don’t do that on a pedagogy website.
[00:48:57.000] – Brian Jackson
Ask us, because some the plugins might stop working.
[00:49:01.950] – Jonathan Denwood
Don’t do that. Don’t listen to him. Don’t do it on a pedagogy website, please.
[00:49:07.230] – Brian Jackson
If you want to take the risk, then go down to site info and you can narrow down in there and see what version of PHP you’re currently running. If you’re on anything under 8. 2, I would say, go test on a staging site with the newer versions of… Because here’s an example, PHP 8. 3 is 10. 4% faster than PHP 8.
[00:49:34.650] – Jonathan Denwood
- It’s another major problem, isn’t it? A lot of people running sites on very old versions, and especially certain hosting providers. It’s unbelievable. In it. They’re generally, unless you ask, they won’t. But you hope that a lot of these sites, unless they’ve got some custom coding and they just can’t upgrade or something, is that their site doesn’t really matter that much. But you’d be amazed when you at the amount of sites, they’re making really good money and they’re on some ancient version of PHP, aren’t they?
[00:50:12.340] – Brian Jackson
No, I agree. Sometimes performance doesn’t matter.
[00:50:15.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Am I just old and cynical now? I don’t know. I think I’ve finished on I, Brian.
[00:50:22.820] – Brian Jackson
I obsess over performance, but I will say that sometimes performance doesn’t even matter based on who you are, because I I’ve said in previous podcasts, I like the Taylor Swift example. The Taylor Swift website is not optimized, but it doesn’t need to be, because people will still go to the Taylor Swift website regardless and buy whatever is on there. But the thing is, smaller people don’t have that advantage.
[00:50:48.440] – Jonathan Denwood
So the PHV, what’s the next thing before I interrupt again? Because I’ve made a this interview, and I’ve been interviewed so many times.
[00:50:57.070] – Brian Jackson
I’m sorry. So We have A5. There’s different image formats. There’s JPEG and PNG is what everybody’s been using for years. Then came WebP, which is a smaller version. You can compress your images to the WebP. And now we have A5. I don’t even know how that’s right. But Well, that’s a whole other bucket, isn’t it?
[00:51:17.350] – Jonathan Denwood
Because we install as part of ShortPixel to help them. But it’s a whole… It depend on what browser you’re using because there’s certain browsers that will support certain image standards, and there’s others that won’t. That’s a whole area in its own net.
[00:51:37.570] – Brian Jackson
Well, so A5 got what you call in 2024, that’s why I was going to mention this, is they got baseline support. Baseline is what Google is a new thing they’re using to say, it’s universally supported by all the browsers now. And A5 support is at 95 %. Oh, is it? Browser support. So I mean, I’ve had some clients that have gone just straight uploading A5s. And now I don’t know if I would be willing to do that yet, but I have clients to do that. And however, you would be safe to do that with WebP these days if you wanted to go straight to WebP. But that’s one thing that did change. So if you haven’t looked into Aafib yet, you might want to look. It’s definitely smaller than WebP. It’s not as big of a jump, though, from like JPEG to WebP, if that makes sense. But it is something I’ve converted a few of my sites to Viv now, just not all of it because it’s a big undertaking.
[00:52:35.030] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to let Kurt take over for five minutes because I’ve got something I’ve got to deal with. I’ll be back in a moment, folks.
[00:52:45.350] – Brian Jackson
Sure. I got a couple more. You want me to just run through?
[00:52:49.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, if you’ve got one or two more, I think that would be good. And then we can jump into AI a little bit.
[00:52:55.350] – Brian Jackson
This one’s more WordPress-specific. So WordPress launched what they call the speculative loading plugin. So basically what this does is in the past, with our PerfMatters plugin, we have this thing called Instant Page. What it did is it loaded a JS script, and when you hover over menus, it would try to preload some of those scripts in the background, on the mouse hover, so that when you went to the page, it was faster, essentially. Now, basically, Chrome and these browsers have this speculative loading API. So now there’s a support for this in the browser level. And so WordPress launched. It’s free by the WordPress performance team, speculative loading plugin. I’m actually telling people to install this and use it even over our Custom Page feature, which we’ll probably end up removing eventually. Basically, that takes advantage of the browser support, but to preload the menu navigation type of stuff. It’s something, if you haven’t looked at that yet, go check it out. I’m using it on our perfmatter site even. Take a look at that. A couple of other quick things here. As of September 2024, all browsers support fetch priority. If you don’t know what that is, go on our PerfMeter site docs and search fetch priority.
[00:54:17.950] – Brian Jackson
I have some stuff on there you can read about fetch priority, but it’s another one you should look into if you’re not using it.
[00:54:25.810] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s another thing I would like to point out that, Brian, If you really want to learn in detail this, Brian’s got a tremendous amount of resources on that website, and it’s a really great resource from people that really understand it. You have spent a lot of time writing out a lot of content, haven’t you?
[00:54:46.940] – Brian Jackson
I do publish a lot of tips. I don’t have time to blog these days, but I do publish tips that are not even PerfMatters always focus just about how to perform on our PerfMatters site. On our docs site, you’ll find all sorts of performance.
[00:55:01.700] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s one of the main resources that I go to educate myself on. Brian, you’ve done an excellent job.
[00:55:08.000] – Brian Jackson
Oh, thank you. The one last thing I will say here, again, this is technical, but sometimes it’s good to know, is in the past, there’s been GZip compression. This is at the server side, broadly compression, and now there’s this new one called Z Standard Compression. This is something Cloudflare is rolling It’s not behind the scenes to everybody, but if you don’t know what it is, I’m about to publish a doc on our Perfender site. It’s not quite there yet, hopefully within the next week or two, but it’s something you should take a look at if you’re not doing it already.
[00:55:44.670] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s your position? Because we ask all our people to set up a free Cloud Fair account because the security… We’re anal about security, and I spend a lot of money with Melcare and blogVault They’re the main, and I spend a lot of money with them, but they’re a great company, and I think security and backup, they are. And we got three vector levels of backup. We got to be We’re pretty anal about this, and we are, because there’s nothing… Not having a backup, a backup that’s not been had. So we’re pretty anal about it. But some people criticize using Cloudflare because they’ve had some security problems, but I still think the benefits outweigh any concerns. Would you agree? I think you do agree with that, don’t you?
[00:56:44.810] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. And I don’t know why they would have security problems with Cloudflare. Cloudflare should prevent more security problems.
[00:56:50.530] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, there’s been some things said that Cloudflare has been hacked.
[00:56:57.300] – Brian Jackson
Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, there’s always risk internal stuff. And it’s a company trying to make money. So yeah, definitely there’s risks.
[00:57:05.780] – Jonathan Denwood
And they’ve been criticized for some of their business practices.
[00:57:08.640] – Brian Jackson
But I’ve always found them to be pretty decent people to do business with. The hiring video of the firing video or whatever. Yeah. So, yeah, I’ve seen some of that stuff for sure. But I mean, I don’t think that should stop people from using a good product in the end run. So Yeah, I will still advertise Cloudflare, even regardless.
[00:57:37.060] – Jonathan Denwood
We go on to what AI tools use. Do you use any on a regular basis, or you think it’s Satan on Earth?
[00:57:47.790] – Brian Jackson
No. So I use AI. I would say, I was trying to think of this question the other day, and I use it probably a good 20, 30 times a day now. And this is up from last year. I would say last year, it was probably I was tinkering with it once a day or once every other day, just playing around. I use it all the time. Now, I will say I have a premium X account, so I use Groke a lot. I have a couple of examples of what I use it for. So the other night, I used it for some tax questions in Washington State. We have this nexus crap stuff we got to pay my state and Washington state stuff. I forgot because it’s only a thing you do once a year. I had some tax questions. I literally asked AI, I got the questions back. I was like, oh, that’s right. Okay, that’s how it worked. And so done.
[00:58:42.480] – Jonathan Denwood
Easy, quick. Obviously, the Washington tax site was down. Obviously, they don’t have you as consultants, do they?
[00:58:50.860] – Brian Jackson
Twice in a row, too. They took it down, and then they put another downtime.
[00:58:54.600] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s what happens when you’re running it on Jumna, isn’t it? We’re We’re going to drop the final question because I know Kirk’s got to go off. So, Brian, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you, what you’re up to?
[00:59:14.630] – Brian Jackson
Best way is probably just to… I’m on X a lot. That’s probably where I push the most stuff. I’m on Blue Sky, too, and all those places, too. I’ll respond. But yeah, on X at Brian Lee Jackson or our site surfmatters. Io. You can send us a message there if you have performance questions or if you want to see about Lee’s in our plugin, anything like that.
[00:59:37.030] – Jonathan Denwood
And I couldn’t recommend Brian more. He’s been very helpful, and he’s one of the top people. There’s so many a variety of people in WordPress, and Brian is one of them. So, Kurt, how can people find out more about you and what you’re up to? For business, it’s anything Manana Nohmas. Manana Nohmas on X, Facebook, and of course, mananaNohmas. Com. If you just want to make a connection, hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt von Annen on LinkedIn. It makes me easy to find. And thanks for being patient in this podcast, Kurt. It’s actually going to get crazier. We’re going to have some bonus content where we’re going to be talking about hosting providers, page builders, caching. We’re going to delve. I’m going to embarrass myself. Brian’s just going to look at me like, what the fuck, how I came on this podcast, but he’s used to it. I’ll be still a friend. You can watch the bonus content on the WP Tonic website. It should be fun or fun for you. Brian doesn’t care. We will be back next week with our Roundtable show, our notorious Roundtable show, where I have my monthly spewing of the leadership of WordPress and anybody else in tech that comes on my radar with my beloved panel.
[01:01:04.290] – Jonathan Denwood
It should be great. Brian, you want to listen to get some giggles? We will be back next week, folks. But like I say, we will be continuing the discussion, which you can view on the WP Tonic YouTube channel. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. Bye. So let’s go into hosting, Because obviously, you’re involved in Kinsta, and I think when you were on the Belgium’s podcast, you said Kinster, and it I always got on with Kinster. I think it was the PHP, but you pointed out that he improved that. I think if it was between WP Engine or Kinster, somebody saying so to or nothing, I would say straight away, just go with Kinster. Not because I think WP Engine are terrible, I just honestly think. But it depends what you’re looking for, doesn’t it? Because I think the main thing where people get a bit confused, there isn’t one hosting solution that’s the best for all these different type of user scenarios, is there? That’s the reality, isn’t it?
[01:02:32.050] – Brian Jackson
I would agree with that. Depending on what you’re doing, one might be slightly better than the other. Yeah, I would definitely agree with that.
[01:02:39.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Sorry, go on.
[01:02:42.560] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. Well, what you’re doing with the LMS platforms, that’s very different than just a static WordPress site, very different. And it’s different than even a WU commerce site. The LMS stuff is probably one of the most complex setups you can get with WordPress, in my opinion. And so With hosting, there’s hosts I would rule out immediately if I was doing LMS stuff. It depends on what you’re doing.
[01:03:09.480] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s your position around… Because you’ve had this when you’ve gone on somewhere interviews, and all you get is, well, all you need to use is cloud-based. I’ve got nothing against them. They got bought up by DigitalOcean. They were pushing DigitalOcean hard, but now, if you go, they’ve gone back to providing different cloud solutions. Obviously, digital, I think it’s the cheapest of their selection. What we’re doing is we’re using… We have two tiers. We have the smaller people, and then the people that got bigger, we put them on Vulture because it does make a difference based on my experience, but it’s only worth investing in all that if you We got a certain level of membership. But what’s your position around Cloud? Because I’m not anti it, but I also think there’s a certain group in WordPress that just push it And like you pointed out, the non-techie, I think it’s definitely the wrong solution.
[01:04:22.140] – Brian Jackson
That’s what I was going to say is I think the people pushing Cloudways are the slightly more technical folks. I I would not recommend Cloudways to a non-technical person. It’s in that hybrid zone of managed, but not. So you’re in there. And for a non-technical person, there’s too many things of, do you need to increase the RAM type of thing on your VPS that you’re running from Vulture. It’s just there’s too many things like that with Cloudways that I don’t normally recommend it to non-technical folks. But with that being said, I work on tons of Cloudways sites. There’s a lot of people using Cloudways. I would say it’s probably 30 to 40 % of the sites we work on on Cloudways.
[01:05:06.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Then you like Rocket. Net. You like them, and then you brought up big scouts. I never heard of big scouts. How did that get on your radar?
[01:05:19.840] – Brian Jackson
They’ve been just grinding in the background, silently. They’re bootstrapped, never do any marketing. So that’s why a lot of people I’ve never really heard of them. But they’re growing. They’ve been growing consistently. I think their big money is from… I’m just assuming, but they have a lot of food blogger clients, so like those running like Mediavine and RAPID. So all these food bloggers have millions of views. And so they’ve built up a really good base of customers around that niche. And I think they just partnered officially with Mediavine, which is like an ad network. So they’re in their own little niche, but they’re really great for Toasting, and then I like what InstaWP is doing, too. They launched hosting. I don’t know if you’ve used them before. They launched with the same agent tools.
[01:06:11.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, he’s come on the show.
[01:06:15.560] – Brian Jackson
I wouldn’t put a massive site on there. I’m just saying I like what they’re doing, and we’ll see how it goes.
[01:06:21.250] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I see where you’re coming. What about Rocket? Because I’ve got mixed feelings because I don’t get on with the CEO of Rocket. He’s done me I’ve had a couple of discussions and we’ve not gelled. But there’s a certain group, a bit the same different group that always talks about cloud where they always talk about Rocket, it will solve all solutions. I’ve got to say, even though I don’t get on with the CEO that well, is that they’ve seen to track action, haven’t they? But I think it’s hard to do that, and I wouldn’t include Kinster or WP engineers, but there’s a lot of legacy hosting providers that are just grim, aren’t they? Just They’re the rim news, aren’t they?
[01:07:17.310] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. No, I would agree.
[01:07:20.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. I I know a few people that are using this UK Hosting Provider 20i, and I used them a few years ago. I didn’t have a fantastic experience with them, but I was using reseller account, and I think they’re bad news. But have they been on your radar at all, 20i?
[01:07:49.010] – Brian Jackson
I get a client every now and then from 20i, so I’m definitely familiar with them. I can’t say anything negative or positive, I guess you could say, because the clients I’ve been on them, it’s just been It’s okay performance, but it’s nothing bad or good. So that’s all I can say.
[01:08:05.680] – Jonathan Denwood
They got their own cloud set up, that they reckon is unique for them, don’t they?
[01:08:12.160] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, I think they have. And I think they do some, try to do some performance optimizations, but I think with the clients I worked with, I had them turn all their stuff off, and then we just handled it in our plugin.
[01:08:24.000] – Jonathan Denwood
I was using Close for a while when I first started, and they were great, but it was so expensive. Oh, my God. Basically, they’re using Google. Why has Google Cloud become so expensive? Is it because they just wanted to How do you manage it, basically?
[01:08:47.520] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, I think so. I haven’t really followed the prices of the VPs as much. But I know Kintz is still using Google Cloud. I think Rocket. That’s using Google Cloud behind the scenes. Most of the big hosts, and the main reason is because they just do a great job at performance and optimizing for hosting performance.
[01:09:10.380] – Jonathan Denwood
How would you compare that to Vulture?
[01:09:13.590] – Brian Jackson
I would say Google is probably better for big production sites. However, Vulture is amazing. Back when I was doing VPS stuff before my managed hosting days, I was using Vultures, VPSs. And I love Vulture. It’s a great service. They have And I liked them over DigitalOcean, preferably.
[01:09:35.230] – Jonathan Denwood
Let’s go on to page builders, because I think there’s only three players, and I was probably going to get some cease and for what I said in the podcast, but never mind. But I think there’s three, and you’ve mentioned, I think, personally, we became big supporters of Cadence WP, but also Generate Press are pretty good. I think you love Generate Press, don’t you? But I think for the type of people that we’re trying to help, I think because Cadence, what Ben has done with Cadence WP has been fantastic and also provides a lot of WU commerce support. And obviously it’s owned by the same company that owns Learn.
[01:10:26.660] – Brian Jackson
Star.
[01:10:27.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, they’re. But I think I think basically you got Cadence WP. I think Generate Press. I’ve asked him to come on the show, but he never replies to my emails, so I’ve given up. But I don’t think he generally comes on podcast.
[01:10:43.430] – Brian Jackson
Tom’s a behind the type of guy.
[01:10:46.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. But he’s doing some great things because he’s introduced classes and that, hasn’t he? It’s quite amazing what he’s built there. Then you got the other one, which is Norn Gutenberg, and that’s Bricks, and that’s Tom, isn’t it? I think they’ve done an amazing job. And I think they’re the only three main players, isn’t it, that I could recommend to people. What’s your own feelings about this?
[01:11:14.830] – Brian Jackson
That’s literally the bullet list I give to clients when they ask, is I give Generate Press first, Cadence second, and Bricks third. And I use Bricks as like, if you want to use a page builder, if you must absolutely use a page builder, go with Bricks over, I would say, over Elementor or Divi or something like that. I like what Bricks is doing performance-wise in the page realm type of thing. Now, I still think you can do most things with Generate Press, but I do agree with you that.
[01:11:49.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, the thing is the Navigat… I see you sorted out the… Because it was the navigation system in Generate Press that I thought was a bit icky.
[01:11:57.260] – Brian Jackson
I think so, yeah. I mean, you can pretty much change anything now with It’s a lot different than it used to be one or two years ago. But I agree with you as far as Cadence does have some cool stuff for Woocommerce. They definitely focus more on Woocommerce than Generate Press does. So it depends on what you need. But like you said, I don’t think you can go wrong with any of those three, performance-wise.
[01:12:21.380] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to throw this to you to see what my instant reaction gets. If you had somebody say they were going to use Breakdance, what would you say?
[01:12:29.800] – Brian Jackson
I’m He’s not a fan of breakdance.
[01:12:32.040] – Jonathan Denwood
He’s another one I don’t like. I’ve fallen out with him a couple of times, and he lives up around Lake Tahoe, but he’s been nasty, too. He liked Deezer.
[01:12:42.410] – Brian Jackson
Oh, really?
[01:12:43.210] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[01:12:43.660] – Brian Jackson
All my opinions are based on what I see on a day-to-day basis in tickets. Generate press and cadence, as far as performance goes, those two are by far way above anything else out there. Brex is doing a great job, too. But And like, generate press and cadence are way beyond everything else.
[01:13:05.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, we’re in agreement. Then we get to what I call, what I said in the podcast, the black triad of So when it comes to the CDNs, because of our particular niche, we always push bunny. Net because if you’re going to host videos, and And we tend to push… As part of our bundle, we provide Presto Player, and Bunny with Presto Player works because it provides a lot of functionality that our user base is looking for. And the cost savings are enormous compared because Vimeo and somebody other, they’ve really bummed their prices up because they weren’t making any money. And then I think a couple of years ago, they got a new CD and a new chief officer, and they’ve done the prices is at Vimeo. But Bunny, I just love it. Then you got the people that you used to work for as well. I forgot their name.
[01:14:08.430] – Brian Jackson
The Swiss- Keyes to the end. Yeah, key.
[01:14:10.390] – Jonathan Denwood
But Bunny seems to dominate this. I think it’s We tell people to set it up and host their videos there and use Presto that we provide. But in general, I think it’s still a great offering, Bunny. Net. What’s your own thoughts about that, Brian?
[01:14:29.570] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, I don’t think you can go wrong with Bunny or KeyCDn based on what you need. The one other thing I would throw in there is that Cloudflare’s video hosting has gotten a lot better over the last two years. I feel like the integration with WordPress is a little more technical.
[01:14:46.650] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s the problem. I was looking at it, I re-looked at it six months ago.
[01:14:50.920] – Brian Jackson
I would say it’s not quite there yet, but keep your eyes on it, because I think in a year from now, it’ll probably be quite easy. And their pricing, obviously, because of the volume that Cloudflare does, it will probably be very, very good. I would keep them in mind for anyone doing video hosting. But yeah, Bunny, I see a lot of people using Bunny these days.
[01:15:10.720] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, the thing is we still… Because we offer Presto Play, and it’s got all that chapter and they have a functionality, and it works. He set it up to work with Bunny tightly. If you’re in our particular niche and you a lot of control over video, it’s just a good synergy. Yeah. But what about… You touched upon it in the podcast part of the show, you got this concoction of Object Cache, Object Cache Pro, Redis Cache. You got Cloudflare Edge. You got every form of… How do Can you try and explain this to clients and how do you rationalize it yourself, or do you just go crazy, basically, trying to work it out yourself?
[01:16:08.400] – Brian Jackson
I try to dumb it down. You have your page cache, which speeds up your pages. That’s what Rocket does. Then you have your object cache, which is your database cache. That speeds up so the database queries don’t have to run again as many times. Then you have your CDN cache, which speeds things up for distances. And those are the three things that I usually talk about. And then I usually don’t try to mention redis or mem or that stuff specifically, because that just complicates things. Because all the redis is just object cache. But once you throw in weird names like that, it just complicates it further. So I try to just say page cache, object cache, and then cdn cache. That’s the type of thing. But yeah, It’s a nightmare because I’m working with clients all the time where sometimes you’ll have to clear multiple layers of cache, or they don’t have a way to clear it from their dashboard. So then you’re having to put a query string on the end of the URL to break the cache to see the changes. It’s just a nightmare.
[01:17:17.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Lovely. I think you mentioned it in some of the other leading podcasts that you’ve been on recently, this whole fixation, it’s understandable, but I love to get some additional insight you about how people get totally obsessed with their Google page ranking, their speed ranking. And you pointed out that you can just take it too far. And I’ve had some clients, and I’ve just had to tell them man to man, I’ve come to Jesus discussion, and so you’re getting obsessed. And And there’s only so far, you’re never… It’s impossible to have a functioning WordPress website and try and get some ridiculous… It It won’t just drive you crazy. So how do you get… Because on the other hand, it is important, isn’t it?
[01:18:22.290] – Brian Jackson
It is, especially for the people that aren’t Taylor Swift, that we need… Us smaller folks, we need every advantage we can get, essentially. So performance is one of them. But here’s a good a hybrid thing that I tell folks that I think are obsessing too much is when you’re doing a PageSpe Insights test, you have the real user data at the top that’s collected over the 28 days, and you have the data at the bottom, that’s the lab data, the live data. Most of the time, a lot of times, the real user data will be better performance than the lab data, the live data. The reason is the live data is running it throttled, specifically to try to get the worst mobile it can find to try to help you. It’s saying, We’re going to run this on a super slow 4G connection to show you the worst possible scenario. But the thing that actually happens in the long run is the real user data, you might not get all those slowest phones hitting the site. And so the real user data might be slightly higher. So don’t obsess over the lab scores at the bottom.
[01:19:28.810] – Brian Jackson
Look at those real user data scores over time, because that’s what core web vitals is ranking or failing or passing you on, is the real user data there at the top, if that makes sense.
[01:19:39.680] – Jonathan Denwood
But do you think if you go with a decent hosting provider like Kinsler, WP engine, rocket. Net, and I think they’re credible. Cloudway, the right more techy, and you don’t get a beserk on the plugins and you’re using one of the page builders and you’ve got some common sense. I think you can get a pretty speedy website, can’t you?
[01:20:04.040] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, you can.
[01:20:06.390] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it gets attacked WordPress, and my madness in the podcast, I might go, It was all tongue in cheek, basically. But I think the good news is with the right setup with a bit using your plugin and going to your website and just educating yourself a little bit, you can avoid a lot of the pitfalls that we discussed during this show, can’t you?
[01:20:34.950] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. No, you can.
[01:20:37.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Sorry, go on.
[01:20:39.410] – Brian Jackson
I was going to say one more thing on this. I’ll just throw this tool out there. Easiest way to probably Google it, but mention it back to that real user data thing. Google launched a tool a couple of months ago called… It’s C-R-U-X-V-I-S. So Cruxvis. But it’s a free tool. If you just Google that, you should be able to find it. But you put in your URL, and it will show you with amazing graphs over time how much… How your LCP is doing, how your CLS is doing, and you can drill it down to everything. It’s much better than PSI. So go check that tool out if you haven’t, and it’s a great way to track improvements over time.
[01:21:18.980] – Jonathan Denwood
The other thing is delay and preloading. You touched that. I hope you’ve been impressed that I listened to all your interviews for my preparation for this.
[01:21:29.980] – Brian Jackson
Oh, yeah. No, I can tell.
[01:21:30.980] – Jonathan Denwood
I hope you’re impressed. So LPC, delaying and preloading, I think that’s pretty important. You touched on that, my own example about delaying JavaScript and that. I think this is a big thing as well, isn’t it?
[01:21:49.290] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, LCP is probably the biggest metric that I see people always trying to improve. And yeah, there’s just so many things. That goes back to the server response time, too. Even your host server response time can impact LCP. Every little thing can almost impact it. Like, preloading your largest contentful paint image is what you want to do. You can do that in our plugin, like preload your hero image on your site. All these little things matter as far as LCP goes. I have a great doc on our site, too, on largest Contentful Paint, and it goes through everything that impacts it, basically. So you can walk through. But yeah, LCP is a Can I ask you a quick?
[01:22:33.390] – Jonathan Denwood
Because you’re very knowledgeable on SEO and content marketing. I just want to ask you a question, and we call it a day because you’re giving us almost an hour and 20 minutes of your time. Obviously, you’ve got artificial intelligence and a lot of the biggest SEO influences on YouTube and the blogs I go to. Obviously, what Google has done in 2024, especially the second half of 2024 and the first month of 2025, they’ve had a lot of updates that affected quite severely people that were using affiliate links and blogging platforms, but they weren’t actual online business selling a service or product. They’ve been deeply affected. And then you’ve had less traffic going to people’s websites because of the new layout when people do queries in Google with their AI results. And a lot of people have said that SEO is finished. I think the traffic has died down for certain websites and that. But I think one of the things I’ve been disappointed in the general discussion is they haven’t… I’ve been thinking about it, and I just want to see if you think I’m on the right track. They haven’t really talked about intent, because a lot of those queries that might go on to your website, they were just looking for a fact.
[01:24:25.640] – Jonathan Denwood
So if they’re queries being answered by what Google’s doing, it doesn’t mean the more serious people aren’t going to your website. Is this making any sense, or you do, or do you think I’m completely off track?
[01:24:43.980] – Brian Jackson
No, I’ve thought about this a lot.
[01:24:46.650] – Jonathan Denwood
I do think, actually, Brian. I know it’s not surprising.
[01:24:49.520] – Brian Jackson
Yeah, no. No, and I will say in 2024, I’ve seen more SEO tickets than I’ve ever seen, like this last year. People are saying, My My SEO is tanking, my traffic is tanking. Some of them think it’s because of their performance. They don’t know what it’s doing, but I’ve seen more SEO tickets than ever. I definitely think the atmosphere is changing for sure. However, what you said is I wouldn’t want to be in just the content game anymore these days. But let’s say someone’s researching something that you have on your WP Tonic site. If they go into Groke, they get their answer Groke adds the little links there. If you’re providing a service, that person is still probably going to click into your site to get your service. That’s why I think the service-based businesses aren’t going to be impacted as much, if that makes sense, because the person still has to go get your product to fix the original problem. The thing is, I’m worried about is those people that are more in just content ad-based business. I had our No Gluten blog that I ran for a while. I sold that a couple of years back, but that made money just off of what’s gluten-free and stuff like that.
[01:26:05.630] – Brian Jackson
If you can just get the answer from Groke and not even need to go to the website, why would anyone go to the website then? So it’s like those types of sites I feel like are going to get hurt the worst.
[01:26:16.640] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m not going to over-stress this because I think these are just points of view. I don’t even think the people in Google and that really… Because they’re between a rock and a hard place themselves. Is that there’s an answer I want straight away, a factual answer, the quicker I get it. And you’d be amazed, something local, that how many loops you still have to go through to get some sensible answer. It’s still crazy, really. But then I’m trying to learn something. I tend to do a online wander, as I call it. You go to various resources, YouTube, websites, various resources, just to find out a broad synopsis, and then you do a deeper dive. I don’t see that being affected, really, because it’s Because the only thing that somebody would go against me, they’re saying that these large learning language models, it will become a personal assistant, and you have a conversation with it, and it will just package all that together. But I think we’re still… That might come in the next few years, but I don’t think anybody really knows, do they? I think that’s the propaganda that’s pushed, but I don’t think it really matches what we’re finding.
[01:28:03.140] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s your view about what I’ve just outlined?
[01:28:06.650] – Brian Jackson
It’s hard to know where things are going because I don’t know if you followed the… I forget what they’re called officially, but the test of robots, the robots he’s making in the factory. I do think in our lifetimes, there will be those robots.
[01:28:23.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, in yours, I’m a lot older than you. I’ve only got a few more years to go, thank God.
[01:28:30.050] – Brian Jackson
But I do see those in our houses, like folding the laundry. I do think that’s going to be a reality. And I think you will be talking to the robot while it’s doing things. And if that’s just groke in the robot there walking around, you can just ask it, what’s the weather? Answer me. Answer my tax question for me. I mean, I do see that- There won’t be any need for you, Brian. And I think everybody has this sense of like, nobody knows what’s going to happen type of thing because there’s so many things that could change over the next 5-10 years.
[01:29:13.040] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, they are really trying to… Who knows there? I’d be surprised if we see that in the next five years, but I might be wrong. But definitely the personal assistant with what Microsoft copilot, Gemini, they want to build all embracing personal consistent that provides. Obviously, the privacy consequences are there, quite alarming. But I think, and I might be totally wrong, because I think they’re pushing that But I think the amount of resources, hardware, and that, they’re probably pushing that a bit too much, in my opinion, but I might be totally wrong. It doesn’t mean that large language Edge models aren’t fantastic. I think there’s a lot of spin, but that’s always part of technology, isn’t it?
[01:30:10.840] – Brian Jackson
Yeah. Well, and the one thing you mentioned about privacy. In one of the last Mac updates, Apple pushed out Apple intelligence at the OS level, and I have turned that off on my Mac. I don’t have Apple intelligence on. Even I’m a little leery of… I don’t want just to analyze every click that I’m doing on my computer.
[01:30:32.120] – Jonathan Denwood
I have- Yes, but Brian, most people just… They put everything on TikTok, which goes straight to the news government anyway, right? They don’t bloody care anyway, do they?
[01:30:41.630] – Brian Jackson
I’m sure all the younger folks are flipping this on and rolling with it, but I have reservations regarding Apple Intelligence constantly running on my computer. Or I think Microsoft even did the thing of getting slammed or canceled, I think, for this, but you can roll back your computer to any click-in-time type of thing. But then people realized, well, then it’s analyzing everything that you’re doing to have that feature. It’s scary, but then again, is AI just going to know everything anyway? So it’s, I don’t know. That’s the thing.
[01:31:17.570] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, Brian, you’ve dealt with my man as well, but I think we’ve covered a ton of stuff, haven’t we? And I think it’s useful. But I think the best message, folks, is to go to Brian’s site, use his plugin, and dive into the resources he has on his website. And Brian’s very approachable. He’s one of the best guys in WordPress and will help you. We will be back next week, folks. Bye. Bye.
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