Performance is a priority for all website administrators these days. Particularly with content management systems (CMS), web admins tend to employ a wealth of powerful theme frameworks (ex: page builders) and functional plugins on top of their base design and content. These in combination offer amazing features, but can pile up and take a toll on performance. As traffic scales, so too will your performance bottlenecks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the more popular (vetted) plugins usually serve their purpose well, the risk of slowing your site down increases as your use of plugins increases \u2013 due to the average resource consumption of each unit of functionality. This is especially noticeable with plugins that connect to remote services either with PHP APIs or with AJAX front end widgets. Let’s face it \u2013 these days we do need some plugins that connect with remote services and those will consume resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Managed WordPress hosts optimize their web server environments for WordPress and bundle in best practices like page caching for unauthenticated traffic and web application firewalls (WAF).\u00a0Top tier providers often bundle a\u00a0content delivery network (CDN) system to geographically serve assets. They also may bundle application performance monitoring (APM) tools to detect and debug any resource-intensive operations within your plugins or theme. There are many solid hosts that fit this criteria and the obvious example would be\u00a0WordPress.com<\/a>. You get what you pay for with hosting, yet optimized infrastructure is surely within reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now I’ll step beyond the host itself and delve into specific areas you can examine. Begin by measuring where you stand currently, even if you plan to change hosts. You never can measure enough! Use tools like GTmetrix<\/a> , Pingdom Website Speed Test<\/a>, Web Page Test<\/a>, Google PageSpeed Insights<\/a> to measure with. At full bandwidth your pages would ideally load within 2.4 seconds \u2013 the time conversions begin getting affected<\/strong> \u2013 and never go beyond 5.6 seconds. Pay attention to the differences between render time versus fully loaded time and your page size.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If your host doesn’t bundle one, investigate the best caching plugin and settings for your usage. Popular self installation options are: WP-Rocket (paid)<\/a> and W3 Total Cache (free)<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You will need to fully test your site with each change, so take your time and be careful! Use a staging site if possible, and always backup your live site before tinkering.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHere’s my advice to help you optimize your performance.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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