132 – Speed Up Your Website with NginXpress

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• WordPress Webinar
  • WordPress A to Z
  • July 12th, 2013
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Speed Up Your Website with NginXpress

Today’s guest is Branden Lawe, founder of NginXpress, has solved this problem by developing a performance-optimised server stack that runs on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) – Amazon’s VPS service.

Why is Website Speed Important?

Unless its just a hobby, the chances are ýour website exists to fulfill some sort of serious and important purpose:
– eCommerce (directly selling digital and physical products)
– Attracting customers to a bricks ‘n’ mortar business (selling products and/or services)
– PR (building brand reputation and trust)
– Recruiting support and donations for a charity or cause
– Other (e.g. affiliate marketing/review sites, etc.)

Whatever the purpose, there are 4 main factors behind a successful website:
– SEO (achieving good search rankings)
– Design (clear, logical and attractive layout that’s easy to use and no need to think)
– Content (compelling content that answers the visitors
– Speed

The 2012 Speed Awareness Month infographic http://speedawarenessmonth.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/infographic5.jpg shows that speed affects 3 things:

• SEO rankings (Google gives higher pagerank scores to faster loading sites)
• Conversions & revenue:
  • Mozilla: 2 seconds faster = 15.4% more conversions
  • Amazon: 0.1 seconds slower = 1% loss in revenue
• User experience:
  • 52% of online shoppers stated that quick page loading was important to site loyalty
  • 40% abandon a website that takes > 3 seconds to load
  • 47% expected (in 2012) < 2 second page loads – now it’s probably less!

The bottom line is that your website is often your first (and often only) chance to make a good impression. Think of it as an ambassador, out there representing your brand to the world. Don’t blow it by making your visitors wait while it loads or they’ll vote with their feet – and tell their friends about it.

Be sure to listen to episode 34 where Phil Graham outlined the 3 steps to a fast WordPress site:

• Move from shared hosting to a VPS
• Implement caching
• Use Nginx instead of Apache

If you take these three steps, the chances are you’ll end up with a super-fast WordPress site that’s capable of handling all the traffic that gets thrown at it.

Other Links Mentioned:

• aws.amazon.com
• webpagetest.org
• nginxpress.com
• loadimpact.com

Call To Action

• Sign up for next webinar
• Become a NginXpress beta tester at nginxpress.com