fast website

speed matters series

CMS PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION

Contact management systems (CRM) have a long history being slow, for amateurs, and inflexible.  No longer if you are using WordPress.  EngineX & Saturn9 have both moved from Bootstrap and React frameworks to WordPress because of the evolution we’ve seen:

  • Developer friendly – It’s easy to hook in custom code to get the job done
  • Fast – When optimized
  • Stable – WordPress crashes less than our previous most stable implementation of Bootstrap 4.0
  • Deep in capabilities that don’t require development companies to reinvent the wheel with excessive custom code

In this blog we will help you turn a slow (by default) WordPress site into a rocket.

 

This blog post assumes the following:

  • You have a solid understanding of WordPress and have created, at the very least, core beginner pages and have dealt with “plugins.”
  • You are using hosting that is NGINX based

With WordPress you need to understand what is directly slowing it down before you turn your focus on what will make it faster.  The following highlights cover the most common slowdown issues:

  • Slow plugins – It’s pretty common for novice WordPress users to install about 50 plugins from the beginning with the purpose of adding excessive features that will never be used or turning their web page(s) into ransom notes of animation and “junk.” Keep the plugins to a minimum and download a plugin optimizer that will tell you which plugins are eating your performance alive.
  • Incorrect php parameters – Explaining php in detail is beyond the scope of this article but you need to learn (just Google it) more about basics such as the .user.ini for example.  Not setting your memory limit, max execution time, and other critical parameters correct will slow your site down and make it unstable.
  • The wrong hosting – see website hosting matters.

There are a million utilities to speed up WordPress and many of them suck.  To keep my sanity I’m just going to outline what we use and not waste my time with a comparison which would take about 20 hours longer to write.

  • WP ROCKET – The king of caching plugins, WP ROCKET caches your website pages and optimizes the size and delivery of html/css to give you impressive load times.  It also will defer javascript plugins loading at the end of the page load.
  •  Asset Cleanup – WordPress has a lot of useless overhead such as RSS, oEmbeds, HTML comments, etc that are unneeded in most situations.  Asset Cleanup carefully removes these resulting in a leaner website.
  • NGINX helper – this is advanced stuff but if you are running on NGINX based hosting and you have control of it then this is a great add-on to help keep your WordPress cache’s (such as wp rocket) in sync with your server NGINX FastCGI cache.

Focus on mobile website speed with tips on how to get the fastest load times on site visitors with slow phones.

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