125 Eleven Key Steps To Make Your WordPress Site Load Faster

Over a year ago I wrote one our most popular posts on the WP-Tonic’s website about the importance of speed when it comes to your WordPress-powered website in regards to usability and how Google ranks your website in SEO (search engine optimization) terms.   https://www.wp-tonic.com/blog/11-the-key-steps-to-make-your-wordpress-site-load-faster/   In this episode, we talk about 11 things you can do to make your WordPress website faster. A lot of this is based on a 3500+ word article that Jonathan put together for the WP-Tonic, but we further extrapolate the ideas and techniques talked about there. https://www.wp-tonic.com/blog/11-the-key-steps-to-make-your-wordpress-site-load-faster/ Show Table of Contents: 0:00 Intros 2:06 Reviewing the 11 steps to making your WordPress site faster 2:59 Page speed testing tools 3:23 Google Page Speed Insights 3:48 Time to first byte is an SEO factor 4:05 Why large sites spend so much time on page speed 4:44 The waterfall view of browser resources 5:28 Chrome Developer Tools to see the waterfall view 5:50 How to find the time to first byte for your website 6:26 DNS and page speed performance 8:28 How hosting affects page speed 9:03 You will never have a fast website with shared hosting 10:29 Why managed WordPress hosting is superior to general hosting 11:52 The near-future: PHP7 and HTTP/2 12:23 What is better? nginx or Apache? 13:00 The biggest performance difference between general hosts and managed hosting 15:40 External calls and HTTP requests can affect page speed 17:20 How caching can reduce HTTP requests and improve page speed 117:52 Why you need to talk to a consultant before buying a base theme 18:35 The dirty secret about how 85% of web shops pick WordPress themes 20:40 Visual builders based on shortcodes are terrible for performance 21:38 Page speed affects your marketing efforts 23:25 You get what you pay for 24:28 The quality and number of plugins can affect page speed 28:20 How caching helps your page speed 31:04 Web fonts: how much does this affect page speed? 31:55 A short history of web fonts 33:21 The down side of using web fonts 36:07 Image optimization, and how easy it is to add tons of page weight without knowing it 37:21 A short history of web images 37:59 A huge problem with modern web design and website performance 40:35 Image compression tools like Kraken.io 41:50 CDNs: What are they, and how do they help page speed? 42:30 How CDNs work 45:40 General tips for learning more about improving page speed 47:45 Outros and some interesting news   =========================   WP-Tonic is not only a WordPress maintenance and support service, but we publish a twice weekly WordPress podcast where we talk with some of the brightest minds in WordPress development and online marketing.