In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about ten performance improvements you can make to your website today, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast Episode No. 330.

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today I’m here with you for Episode No. 330. We’re going to talk about small little incremental changes that we can make to improve the performance of our website. And this kind of goes with the entire theme of the month of small changes that we can make to our websites to just make them better and continue to make them better.

So, that’s what we’re going to talk about in just a couple of minutes. I do have three announcements and a plugin that I want to share with you. So, let’s go ahead and dive right in. The first one is an article that comes from WordPress.com. Now you can, Save Your Favorite Images and Media on WordPress.com anytime. So, what this means is you can ‒ there’s a new Media section in your WordPress.com dashboard allowing you to Bulk, Upload, Edit, and Tweak your media files. And you can do that all from the WordPress dashboard.

You can edit the media, you can get everything all ready, and then you can add them into Post whenever you’re ready. It also has the ability to Search, so you can type in, like if there’s an image of a deer, you can type in “deer” and it’s going ahead and filter out all the images, except for the deer images. Which is pretty cool. It’s a really slick way to organize and manage your media.

This is something that’s always been a huge question that people are like, “How can I manage media? How can I organize them?” This is one of the first steps that WordPress.com is taking to try to manage and understand what type of media you have saved in your media library. So, if you are on WordPress.com, I highly recommend checking that out. And of course, the links to all of these three announcements will be in the show notes for Episode No. 330.

Another thing that I want to share with you today also comes from WordPress.com is unlimited premium themes are now included with the premium plan. And so what this means is if you are paying for a premium subscription on WordPress.com, now you have access to all of the premium themes that are within WordPress. So, WordPress.com has hundreds of free themes. If you have a premium plan which runs $100.00 per year, that now unlocks more than 200 new theme options, and it’s all included as part of the $99.00 plan for the year. So, that is something that if you are on WordPress.com, again you definitely want to check out to see if there are any new themes that are out there that may be interesting to you. So, that is the second piece of news.

And then the last thing, it’s not really news per se, but there’s a great article written by Pippin Williamson at pippinsplugins.com. You may have seen this already it’s been shared hundreds of times on Facebook and whatnot. But this was an article posted back on March 21, and it’s just thoughts and a reflection on price increase. So, Pippin Williamson runs Easy Digital Downloads; they have Restrict Content Pro, an affiliate WP. So, three main plugins in the WordPress ecosphere. And they decided last December to increase the price on all their extensions by 50 percent up to 250 percent, depending upon the plugins.

And, so that’s five times increase on some of the plugins that they were creating. It’s a really interesting story, it’s really long, so if you’ve got a chance and you’re running a theme shop or a services business or whatnot, it’s really highly worth the read. It’s really interesting to see that in January to February, I guess he was doing two-month increments. January and February 2016, their net revenue was $100,000.00. In August to September in 2016, their net was $100,000.00. In January to February 2017, their net revenue was $114,000.00.

And, so the number of refunds went down, and the number of net revenue went up, which I thought was really interesting. But the number of sales and the number of active subscriptions actually went down because they were charging more per. So, it’s a really neat article; I highly recommend checking it out and reading it. I got a lot of value out of it even though I don’t build plugins and I’m not charging for services, but I thought it was a really interesting article. I recommend subscribing to Pippin’s Blogs because he’s got a lot of great information. He’s one of those plugin developers I really look up to, so that’s over at pippinsplugins.com.

All right, there’s a plugin out there that is in beta right now that I wanted to share with you today, and this one is called Front-End Editor for WordPress. And this is a plugin that allows you to draft and edit posts. It’s got autosaving built right in. But basically, this is a plugin where you can just go to the front end of your WordPress site, and you can start editing things. You just click on the area, and you start changing things. You can bold or italicize things; you can strikethrough or add links or headings. You can add media right from the WordPress library, and there are shortcuts for creating order lists, or unordered lists, blockquotes, horizontal rule.

And you can just do all of this right from ‒ not from the WordPress dashboard, but right from the front end of your website when you’re logged in. It is a really cool plugin, it’s got a lot of neat features, and it can be customizable as well. There’s some filters that you can add links so you can go to this editor and whatnot. But this is a plugin that is brand new. I mean, it’s still in beta right now, but you can check it out. It’s called Front-End Editor for WordPress, and you can find it on the WordPress repository. And as always, the link is in the show notes for Episode No. 330.

All right today, we’re going to dive in and just talk about performance just a little bit because that’s one of the things that I get a lot of questions even on WordPress.com or even on Woo Commerce Support. It’s like, “Why is my store taking so long to load?” And, “What’s happening, how can I make it go faster?” It’s just a constant battle and a constant struggle for those who have websites.

And the studies are out there that show from 2000 to 2016, average human’s attention span dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds. And I’m sure that in the next 16 years it’s going to drop to 3 seconds or even 2 seconds because we are do distracted by so many things going on. If a page doesn’t load instantly, it seems like we off to somewhere else, or we’re on Facebook, or we’re doing something else. So, as a website owner, we need to make sure that our websites are loading quickly and efficiently and make sure that all the data is right there in the front of our customers so that they can do what they need to on our website.

So, there also a statistic out there that involved Amazon, Google, and other large sites that a one-second delay in page load can lead to a 7 percent loss in conversions. You’ll get 11 percent fewer page views and 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction, so that’s if there’s a one second delay. So just think if there’s a three or four-second delay, now we’re taking you’re losing about 30 percent of your conversions, which is really, really crazy.

So, first, we’re going to dive in and let’s take a look at what slows down websites and then we’ve got ten things that we can do to improve that performance on our website. So, we first need to understand why websites go slow. What makes a website load slow? And so here’s a few primary causes that could make your website run slow.

The very first one is Web Hosting, and this is probably the biggest issue that I see. A lot of people pay $3.00 a month for their website hosting package, and it just doesn’t have enough beef. It doesn’t have enough resources to make your content and everything that your website needs to do load really quickly. So, your website hosting server, if it’s not properly configured if it’s underpowered, that’s definitely going to make your website load slow.

And it’s one of the easiest low hanging fruits if you will. You can quickly and easy just get going with it and to upgrade servers or change hosting companies or whatever. And that can instantly make an improvement without having to do any other of these tweaks or things on your website. So, that’s the first thing to look at.

Another thing that could cause your website to run slow is your WordPress configuration. If your website is not set up to serve cache pages, then this will overload your server and cause your website to be slow or even crash completely. So, what this means is, every time somebody comes to your website, it has to load a page by going into the database and getting the information and displaying it on the web page. And then you have that times 100 thousand people all trying to come at the same. That, on a shared hosting environment, is not going to stand up and you’re definitely going to have some sort of crash on your website.

Another thing, Item No. 3 that could cause a website to load slowly is your page size. This means that you’ve got either too much content, or too many widgets or your images are way too big and they’re not optimized for web. The more data that you have on a web page, the bigger and worse, it’s going to be for that page to load. So, that’s something else to think about.

Bad plugins could be a reason that your website runs slow. If you’re using poorly coded plugins and that significantly slow down your website. If you’ve got too many plugins that are trying to do the wrong thing or if you’ve got too many plugins that are going out and getting information from outside sources. I know that if you add a plugin like a Twitter widget or a Facebook “Like” box or something like that, that has to communicate with the Facebook servers. And if those are slow in any way, that’s going to slow down the load time of your website as well.

That’s something to think about as well. That’s kind of the last piece as well, is that external strip. Anything such as ads or fonts or anything that is not hosted on your website, the more of those you have, the longer it’s going to take for your web page to load. So, those are some initial steps or initial ideas of what could cause your website to load slowly.

Now, what should we do about it? What should we do with our website that is running slowly? How could we make it improve? Or how could we make it load faster? So, I’ve got ten things that I’ve thought through and thought these are low hanging fruit. These are items that are kind of quick that we could probably work through this week to get our website running and optimized a little bit better to run a little bit faster.

Item No. 1 is “Choose the Web Host.” And you don’t have to have the dedicated, you know, top of the line server, paying $300.00 per month and all that good jazz. There are website companies out there that are devoted to WordPress websites. The one that I used currently for yourwebsiteengineer.com is Flywheel, and they are amazing. They do everything, they’ve optimized WordPress as much as possible, and they are 100 percent focused on making sure that WordPress runs quickly, efficiently, and smoothly and all that good stuff.

I have an episode out there that talks about all of the different hosting providers that I’ve used since 2010, when I started this Podcast, and I think I’m in the dozens. I think I’ve switched about a dozen times in those seven years and that’s mainly because either the performance wasn’t great or I was paying too much, and the performance wasn’t great. Or it was hard to use, or whatever, I didn’t like the way that the support system worked. There were tons of different reasons why I switched.

But this is something that if you really want performance increase, you can either from your main host that you’re using right now; you can bump up plans. You can get something a little bit more premium if you will, or you can go to one of these dedicated WordPress hosts because their plans are usually a little bit more expensive, but they have more resources, and they’re just a little bit better. So, that’s the first thing. Check and make sure that you’re using the right web host. If you’re comfortable with your web host, you think that everything’s working properly, then we can go along and to the next one.

Item No. 2 is called, “Use Gzip Compression.” And, so what this means is, this is optimizing your website by using Gzip compression. There are a couple of plugins out there, one’s called WordPress Gzip Compression, and one is called GZip Ninja Speed Compression, and it basically helps compress the data on your website, so it will load faster, it uses less bandwidth, and in some circumstances, it actually will help benefit via SEO as well.

Because there’s just different ways, like the faster, the website loads, the better the SEO ranking of your website. So, it basically allows Gzip compression if the visitor’s browser handles it and this will allow your browser to cache certain pieces of data. So, on your customers or your website viewers’ computer, it will actually load faster, which is pretty nice.

This is a plugin that hasn’t been updated in a long time, the WordPress Gzip Compression, so that’s something to think about. The GZip Ninja Speed Compression also hasn’t been updated in quite some time. So, those are a couple that are out there. There’s tons of different Gzip compression tools that are built into caching plugins, and we’ll talk about that in just a second.

Item No. 3 that you can fix this week is to “Get rid of unnecessary plugins.” This will give your website a little bit of a speed boost because it will make sure that all inactive plugins aren’t loaded. Even though you deactivate a plugin, it still has a small little bit of information that has to be loaded. WordPress has to go and see if it’s activated or not and that little bit of processing could slow down your website.

So, you want to make sure that you are getting rid of those plugins that you aren’t using. You can definitely do this; this is a pretty simple step. If you got any that are deactivated, I recommend just making a note; here’s the plugins that I was using at one point and then you can go ahead and just remove them. If you ever need them, you can always find them again on the WordPress repository.

Item No. 4 is to “Adjust your WordPress built in Cache.” Your WordPress site can get a small boost in speed from a very simple adjustment. This is basically a line in our wp-config file that will enable WordPress caching, especially some database queries that work behind the scenes. You can definitely do this, and it’s just one line of code. It’s in the show notes, and it’s a very internal cache, it’s very convenient. This cache can’t be purged, and it’s a very basic solution. It’s pretty basic, and you just add one line of code to that wp-config file.

So, Item No. 5 is to “Get a WordPress caching plugin.” And there’s a handful of them out there. W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache. There’s lots of them out there. Essentially what they do is they allow you to cache or save a version of your website or a specific page of your website or a post of your website. And, so when somebody comes to your website, it can load this data instead of having to go to the database in query and get all the information. A lot of big websites do this, and a lot of WordPress specific hosts have caching built right in. So, I’d recommend just taking a look at that if that’s somethings that interesting to you.

Now I have to mention that some caching plugins actually seem to work worse on a shared hosting plan. I don’t know what it is but some of ‒ I just experienced on Bluehost and GoDaddy. Sometimes if you disable the caching plugins, it actually makes the site work better which is kind of weird. But there’s got to be some sort of conflict internally for the caching plugin and the WordPress site. So, that would be something you’ll just have to work out with your host.

Item No. 6 is “To use a Content Delivery Network” called a CDN. If you have a lot of content or a lot of media and a lot of stuff on your website. A lot of maybe big downloads or things like that, you want to use a Content Delivery Network. It will help take some of the load off of your host, and then these items can be downloaded from a third party that is really specific for downloading. One of those things like, I mean, it’s not a particular CDN if you will, but Amazon S3 is a great place to host a bunch of media files because it’s really cheap to use Amazon S3 for storage. And it’s really cheap for people to download from Amazon S3. So, that’s something to think about as well.

Item No. 7 is ‘Optimize your WordPress database.” There’s two plugins out there, WP-Optimize, and WP-DBManager. Both of these will optimize your database. They’ll take away, and they’ll get rid of any revisions that post, any old content that’s not needed anymore in your database. When you remove plugins, it can help you clean up some of those setting and whatnot inside of your database. And just having a smaller database will faster, your website will load faster because your server doesn’t have to look through all the records. If there are less records, it going to obviously look through them faster.

Item No. 8 is to “Optimize images.” You can use WP Smush along with Jetpack’s Photon to make your images load much much quicker and just have the best performance and just load more efficiently, especially if people are looking at your website on a mobile device. Using Jetpack servers is going to optimize those images, and they’re going to be served from WordPress.com, and so it’s just going to take that load off of your server as well.

Item No. 9 is “You want to make your homepage load quickly.” So, that helps with search engine rankings; it helps with Google thinking your website’s really fast if your home page loads ridiculously quick. So, make sure that your only showing excerpts instead of full posts. Maybe only show two or three excerpts instead of seven or eight. You want to get rid of unnecessary widgets. Just reduce the amount of clutter of stuff that’s on your homepage so it loads really quickly and that will allow Google to think that your complete website loads really quickly.

Item No. 10 is to “Use up-to-date software.” It seems pretty obvious; we talk about this all the time. Update to WordPress version this, that and the other. Update Jetpack to this version as well. We talk about it all the time, but we don’t really talk about updating PHP and MySQL that often. But those are technologies that will make your website load faster because they are more efficient and they are just built for speed improvement. So, if you’re not running PHP 7 or MySQL, I think the latest version is 6 or 7, wherever that is. You just want to make sure you’re running those latest versions of those technologies as well on your server.

So, that’s all I want to share with you today. Lots to do this week and I will talk to you again next week. Take care.