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

 

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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.