Make Your WordPress Load Faster In 11 Easy Steps
Over a year ago, I wrote one our most popular posts on the WP-Tonic website about the importance of page speed and performance when it comes to your WordPress-powered website. This article looked at website page speed and how it affects usability, and how page speed influences how Google ranks your website in SEO (search engine optimization).
In this podcast episode, we talk about 11 things you can do to make your WordPress site load faster. A lot of this is based on a 3500+ word article that I published, but we further extrapolate the ideas and techniques in that article during this episode of the WP-Tonic podcast.
Here’s the article we are discussing:
https://wp-tonic.com/blog/speed-up-wordpress-site/
Show Table of Contents:
0:00 Intros
2:06 Reviewing the 11 steps to making your WordPress site faster
2:59 Page speed testing tools
3:23 Google Page Speed Insights
3:48 Time to first byte is an SEO factor
4:05 Why large sites spend so much time on page speed
4:44 The waterfall view of browser resources
5:28 Chrome Developer Tools to see the waterfall view
5:50 How to find the time to first byte for your website
6:26 DNS and page speed performance
8:28 How hosting affects page speed
9:03 You will never have a fast website with shared hosting
10:29 Why managed WordPress hosting is superior to general hosting
11:52 The near-future: PHP7 and HTTP/2
12:23 What is better? nginx or Apache?
13:00 The biggest performance difference between general hosts and managed hosting
15:40 External calls and HTTP requests can affect page speed
17:20 How caching can reduce HTTP requests and improve page speed
117:52 Why you need to talk to a consultant before buying a base theme
18:35 The dirty secret about how 85% of web shops pick WordPress themes
20:40 Visual builders based on shortcodes are terrible for performance
21:38 Page speed affects your marketing efforts
23:25 You get what you pay for
24:28 The quality and number of plugins can affect page speed
28:20 How caching helps your page speed
31:04 Web fonts: how much does this affect page speed?
31:55 A short history of web fonts
33:21 The down side of using web fonts
36:07 Image optimization, and how easy it is to add tons of page weight without knowing it
37:21 A short history of web images
37:59 A huge problem with modern web design and website performance
40:35 Image compression tools like Kraken.io
41:50 CDNs: What are they, and how do they help page speed?
42:30 How CDNs work
45:40 General tips for learning more about improving page speed
47:45 Outrosand some news
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