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So you’ve got a swanky new website but you’re not happy with the speed. It just feels slow. You know your customers won’t like a slow site but do you know that speed is also a factor in SEO.
Here are some tips and WordPress plugins from Tim Nash at 34SP on how to speed up your website.
I’m afraid audio wasn’t great for this episode, please bear with it. I blame the internet!
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Episode Notes
How can you improve the security and speed of a WordPress website?
…the ultimate performance tip is to make sure that you have good hosting…but aside from that… the next thing is to work out where your bottle necks are, quite often it’s not where people think… performance is two things, it’s how fast your site really is but then there’s that percieved performance… We can make things feel and look fast while actually it is still being dog slow behind the scenes… we can use XP bug, that allows us to do proper profiling to see each function… we can look through and work out what is holding things up…
Tim Nash, 34SP
Recommended WordPress plugin
[Query Monitor is] a really good tool that allows us to go through and break down every page that loads, which scripts… which fucntions took how long to load. What Squel queries were on the page… you can see oh that’s weird, that plugin we installed last week is taking 30seconds to load… I dunno maybe we will just get rid of that one… it’s one of my favourite tools, it’s user friendly… it might look scary to start with but it really is just information and it’s pretty simple, it’s colour coded, so red bad, green good…
Tim Nash, 34SP
Tim’s biggest piece of performance advice
Ultimately the biggest piece of performance advice I give is to slim down your plugins… you can have lots of plugins but they need to be good on performance… I am not a fan of recommending performance plugins as they all work in very similar ways which all lead to problems further down the line… internally I have phrase that I use all the time which is cache and canon will screw with you… if you don’t know what you’re doing with cache it will screw with you… the thing that will really make a difference is going through and finding those problematic plugins and either removing them, tweaking them or going back to the dev and asking why it is taking so long to load…
Tim Nash, 34SP
