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WordPress Site Speed, Perfected—Ask Me Anything

Menery

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Do you have any advice for speeding up the Wordpress BACKEND?

Frontend is blazing fast but my Backend is suffering since I run some resource heavy stuff like Woo.
 
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Sirrom

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Wow man great value! thanks a lot! Made my site a lot better with your tips!

I am experiencing a problem now though and i really hope that you (or someone else) can help. I don't think this is the thread for it but i am completely stuck and i don't know where to go with this. So im really sorry..

After i deleted a testimonial slider within the wordpress editor i got this error message:WhatsApp Image 2021-04-20 at 17.47.54.jpeg

I don't have programming experience and the people i know that do had no clue.. 1 person however thought that i accidently deleted a file that is called in the function and therefore i get this message?

I really hope someone can help me with this as i am getting pretty desperate.. Also willing to pay ofcourse if that helps
 

Serito

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Wow man great value! thanks a lot! Made my site a lot better with your tips!

I am experiencing a problem now though and i really hope that you (or someone else) can help. I don't think this is the thread for it but i am completely stuck and i don't know where to go with this. So im really sorry..

After i deleted a testimonial slider within the wordpress editor i got this error message:View attachment 37661

I don't have programming experience and the people i know that do had no clue.. 1 person however thought that i accidently deleted a file that is called in the function and therefore i get this message?

I really hope someone can help me with this as i am getting pretty desperate.. Also willing to pay ofcourse if that helps

Hi Sirrom, you should turn off notices so that the message isn't shown to the user. In Wordpress, this is done by editing wp-config.php and setting WP_DEBUG to false:

PHP:
define( 'WP_DEBUG', false );

- see Debugging in WordPress

Then you should investigate the source of the notice (maybe you removed the testimonial slider, but an empty row is still there? Just guessing).

Hope it helps.
 
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Sirrom

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Hi Sirrom, you should turn off notices so that the message isn't shown to the user. In Wordpress, this is done by editing wp-config.php and setting WP_DEBUG to false:

PHP:
define( 'WP_DEBUG', false );

- see Debugging in WordPress

Then you should investigate the source of the notice (maybe you removed the testimonial slider, but an empty row is still there? Just guessing).

Hope it helps.


Thanks!!
 
D

Deleted70138

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Do you know if language filtering for AJAX operations slow down performance? for WPML translator
 

journeyman

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Despite managing multiple WordPress sites, the Siteground auto-speed up plugin had made me lazy and complacent.

Thank you so much for reminding me and for such actionable tips, I have already improved the WordPress sites I manage significantly.
 
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Gazbo

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If there’s only one thing you do…

…for your website, add caching.

There are a lot of myths about how to speed up your WordPress site. Many of them involve making sure you have the fewest plugins necessary, a lightweight theme, deleting unused posts/images, cleaning your database, or even deleting past post revisions. And all of those “suggestions” are garbage if you have a great caching system setup. The easiest way to do that is through a plugin.

In short, caching makes your site a lot faster.

How much faster? We’ll see below.

But not all caching plugins are created equal. Some are easier to use than others. Some are faster than others. And some are more flexible than others.

So let’s find out which is the best solution for you (spoiler alert: I use Cache Enabler). But first, what exactly is caching?

Caching Explained

In essence, every time a visitor visits your website, a lot of code runs. The more feature-rich your site, the more code that will run.

Code takes time to run.

But what if we already know the output will always be the same? Couldn’t we just save the output and not run the code?

That’s what caching does! That’s the key to making your site faster.

Now there are four kinds of caching:
  • Server Cache
  • Page Cache
  • CDN Cache
  • Browser Cache
All four types of caching are crucial for a really fast site. But we’re going to focus on page caching, as that has the largest impact of the four. It alone could speed up your site by 0.5 – 8.0 seconds! (It depends on your site, though)

So the first time a visitor views your website, your host will run all the scripts and plugins to create the page the visitor sees. And it saves the output. Then, for every visitor after that, it just sends the saved output.

That’s page caching!

Let’s Find the Best Page Caching Plugin

So for this test, I found every caching plugin I could find and tested the speed for each of them to see which was the fastest. Here’s what we’re looking for:
  • Speed
  • Consistency
  • Ease of use
  • Flexibility
  • Works with NGINX
Ok, you may not know what NGINX is, but it’s the fastest configuration for your host. A proper host will have NGINX configured, but not all do.

Of the 15 caching plugins I found, only 11 worked on NGINX out of the box:
  • WP Rocket
  • Cache Enabler
  • W3 Total Cache
  • WP Fastest Cache
  • WP Super Cache
  • Cachify
  • Simple Cache
  • WP Optimize
  • Hummingbird
  • Breeze
  • Powered Cache
Not even some popular plugins like Comet Cache worked on my NGINX setup by default. To fix it, you’d have to dive into the server configuration. Not good if you don’t know what you’re doing, and not the easiest thing even if you do.

Others, like Litespeed Cache don’t work on NGINX at all, so they’re out of the picture.

The Setup

Ok, so there are many ways to test the speed for each of these caching plugins, but I wanted to isolate all variables possible to leave nothing up to chance.

So I hosted the site locally on my computer to eliminate all network variances. I chose a decently large and complex site which allowed us to see a difference from caching. And before running the tests, I did no other optimizations to the site and made sure that the plugin was in its fastest possible configuration.

For the tests themselves, I looked specifically at the time to first byte (TTFB). Which, in this setup, is only affected by page caching. I did 10 tests, took the average to find the speed, and took the standard deviation to find the consistency of the speed.

Finally, so you can see how much the caching made a difference, I had a control that had no caching whatsoever.

The Results
View attachment 27284
View attachment 27285
Lower is better for both graphs

Looks like the 3 fastest caching plugins are, Simple Cache, Powered Cache, and Cache Enabler. So let’s look at each of these in more detail because all of these are really close in terms of speed. So we have to take into account the consistency, ease of use, and flexibility to really determine which one is the best.

Simple Cache
View attachment 27286
Obviously, Simple cache is the fastest plugin I tested, but not by much. It’s only 3 milliseconds faster than Powered Cache and 4 milliseconds faster than Cache enabler.

But by far, it’s the easiest to use. Let’s look into more detail:
  • Just activate it to get ridiculous speed
  • No complicated features
  • Allows you to also set the cache expiry and GZIP compression
  • No possibility to exclude urls or anything similar
  • Incredibly consistent, tied with Cache Enabler for the best consistency
  • Not a wide adoption (meaning updates aren’t as guaranteed)
  • If you want to speed up your website a lot in less than two minutes without sorting through a ton of settings, then this is the plugin for you. Stop reading and install it right now!
To help you out, here are the settings I’d recommend.
View attachment 27287

If you know you won’t update your site often, you can choose a longer expire time. Just make sure it’s about how often your site will be updated.

Powered Cache

View attachment 27288

This one is just slightly slower than Simple Cache, but has a lot more options. Of these three fast ones, it is by far the most flexible. However, if you don’t what you’re doing, it’s by far the most intimidating of the three.
  • Not as consistent
  • Allows every option you could use for a page caching plugin
  • CDN integration
  • CloudFlare integration
  • Premium version
  • Quite complicated
  • Exact setup will depend on your site
  • Not a 2 minute setup
  • Could take a while to find the best options
  • Not a wide adoption (meaning updates aren’t as guaranteed)
Ok, so if you’re a power user, have sped up many sites before, or are extremely proficient with the technical caching lingo, then this could be the plugin for you. And the fact that you can exclude certain urls from caching is a plus with Ecommerce sites.

Though with this plugin, every site will need different configurations, here’s what I’d recommend as a starting point.

View attachment 27289
View attachment 27290

For the rest of the settings, you’ll have to decide what works for you. And again, for the cache timeout, put that to how often your site will update.

Cache Enabler
View attachment 27291

The third fastest plugin is Cache Enabler. It’s just as consistent as Simple Cache, and is a good middle ground between the flexibility of Powered Cache and easiness of Simple Cache.
  • Still really fast
  • Can setup in two minutes
  • No complicated features necessary
  • Allows for regex for exclusions
  • CDN integration
  • Automatic GZIP compression
  • Wide adoption with over 70,000 active installs
  • Multi-site support
  • Custom post type support
  • Supports responsive images
  • Works flawlessly with Autoptimize
  • Works on pretty much every site
Personally, I use Cache Enabler because it gets me the speed of a fast website, works on every site I’ve worked on since I adopted it, and gives me the flexibility I need when I need it.

Here are the settings I use as a default:

View attachment 27292

Again, change the cache expiry to however often you update your site.

What About Paid Caching Plugins?

Simply put, why spend money for only a possibility of a maximum of 25 milliseconds faster loading time? It doesn’t make sense!

After all, out of everything I’ve tested, free was the fastest.

Most of the time, premium versions don’t make the cache any faster. They just give you more features.

So why pay money for a slower site?

What About WP Rocket?

Whenever I tell people that I use cache enabler, every time they ask my thoughts on WP Rocket.

Because let’s face it, Cache Enabler isn’t a fair comparison to WP Rocket. Sure, the caching may be twice as fast, but WP Rocket has many more features. It’s not comparing apples to apples, it’s comparing apples to fruit salad.

The sort answer is that, well, it’s too slow for me overall.

For one site I worked on recently, I tried both WP Rocket and the equivalent version of my default setup. And I only replicated the same features that WP Rocket has. End result, my setup was twice as fast as the fastest WP Rocket configuration I could get… and it’s more flexible for doing advanced configurations. It was 2.9 seconds vs. 1.4 seconds.

That's just one recent instance, I've tried it many times in the past as well. Because I want it to be the best solution. It would make my job 10x easier.

Sure, if you have a slow website, WP Rocket can make it much faster. But even at 3 seconds to visually complete, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. As we saw above, that can mean 5-6 figures lost revenue each year (or more)

It would be far better use of your time to either hire someone who knows what they’re doing or to stay tuned so you can make your site faster than WP Rocket yourself.

Because next time, we're going to look at what WP Rocket does, and how we can replicate everything it does…

…but better.
Amazing post, great info. I was using Hummingbird before, switching to Simple Cache right away!
 

NorlansV

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How about LiteSpeed Cache Plugin with Quic.cloud CDN?

I think it's a pretty decent choice, and it's free. What do you think?
I also came up with this article, explaining how to best optimize the settings. (there are some details missing though)

 

Hitch-hiker

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Hi!
So I'm making a website for a client and she bought a cheap server. I only installed WordPress on a server and I didn't add anything yet to it.
Could anybody please tell me if the score below for totally empty WordPress is ok?
1640710862159.png
 
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Raedrum

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Wow @Nick M. see this is exactly why I love this forum, you can find serious technico-marketing studies, evidences in support.

This is great value and exactly my field, I will hang out here

Thanks a lot for your work and sharing !
 

Disciple96

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Hi!
So I'm making a website for a client and she bought a cheap server. I only installed WordPress on a server and I didn't add anything yet to it.
Could anybody please tell me if the score below for totally empty WordPress is ok?
View attachment 41336
This doesn't really matter.

Why don't you try this:

Go ahead and build your client's website.

Then, if you can still get this score on your own work, maybe you could consider some fine-tuning at that juncture.

To answer your question. Yes, this is totally fine. Maybe not premium-class, but good enough surely.

If your client bought a cheap hosting service... that's on your client. not your problem. Chances are this client isn't handling enough volume to really make a 300ms improvement worth the value anyways.

If they were, maybe you would consider talking to them about switching providers and getting refunded for their money. Maybe even getting their hosting through you directly. Unless your client has enough prospects coming to this website that adding a 5% increase in conversions is actually worth switching hosting providers, that 300ms difference will literally change almost nothing for them.

Of course, this is also how you eat. So it's up to you to decide what your client needs by carefully assessing their objectives and pain points, and telling them what they need to do for you to work on this project and make it a smashing success.

Maybe that means you provide hosting services through a reseller account and get yourself an easy revenue stream. Or maybe it means letting them be with their crappy host that you know is garbage because it's a hell of a lot simpler for everyone involved, short-term. You'll have to decide.

But, tbh, it sounds to me like switching hosting providers is at this point, not worth the hassle.

Unless their hosting service is a terrible value or something, or outright garbage, it's probably best to just stick with it. Later on you can always port the site to a new server if you really need lightning fast speeds for this client.
 
Last edited:

Xeon

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A very small and fast WP website optimized to the peak, always loses to a large, bulky Shopify site (the kind with 5 MB hero banners) in terms of loading speed.
 
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Zyzzz

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A very small and fast WP website optimized to the peak, always loses to a large, bulky Shopify site (the kind with 5 MB hero banners) in terms of loading speed.
What about core web vitals?
 

Xeon

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What about core web vitals?

A well-optimized WP site beats out Shopify any time in that. WP wins in everything except speed.
I drool when I see 34 MB Shopify sites loading in under 1 second.
 

Zyzzz

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A well-optimized WP site beats out Shopify any time in that. WP wins in everything except speed.
I drool when I see 34 MB Shopify sites loading in under 1 second.
I don't know much about Shopify but some of my sites load in under 2 seconds with help of speed + caching plugins, Cloudflare CDN, and a 6GB RAM VPS server.
 
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Astekki

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My site runs on a well-optimized WordPress theme, so I don't use additional plugins to speed things up. Only the image compression plugin is used. The loading speed www.host-tracker.com/en/ic/page-speed-test of my site is 3.27 seconds. I believe that this is a good indicator and it does not make sense to make the site even faster.
 

Supa

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My site runs on a well-optimized WordPress theme, so I don't use additional plugins to speed things up. Only the image compression plugin is used. The loading speed www.host-tracker.com/en/ic/page-speed-test of my site is 3.27 seconds. I believe that this is a good indicator and it does not make sense to make the site even faster.
I don't know about that testing site, but 3.27s is not fast. You should aim for at least below 2s, the lower than that, the better.

What I found to be most effective is a combination of using WP Rocket, ShortPixel for images (but other image enhancers will probably do as well), looking into what plugins slow down your site and, if possible delete or replace them, and a WordPress dedicated hosting company (I use WPspace).

My main problem wasn't desktop but, like probably for many others too, the mobile score. It used to be between 40-75, depending on what I tried. Since implementing these changes it now sits at 89-91 (and 99-100 for desktop).

Hope that helps.
 

Cameraman

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I don't know about that testing site, but 3.27s is not fast. You should aim for at least below 2s, the lower than that, the better.

What I found to be most effective is a combination of using WP Rocket, ShortPixel for images (but other image enhancers will probably do as well), looking into what plugins slow down your site and, if possible delete or replace them, and a WordPress dedicated hosting company (I use WPspace).

My main problem wasn't desktop but, like probably for many others too, the mobile score. It used to be between 40-75, depending on what I tried. Since implementing these changes it now sits at 89-91 (and 99-100 for desktop).

Hope that helps.
I agree that WP Rocket is a great cache and you should be aiming for below 2 second fully loaded page times. The problem that I've found with all caching plugs is that they just speed up what's already on the page. Most of the time slow page load times are down to the page content, and I don't just mean images.

I had problems with my site a few years ago with pages were taking around 6 seconds to load. After a lot digging, I found many of my plugins were loading themselves on every page or post, even if they aren't being used. I eventually found a free plugin called Asset Cleanup which allowed me to see what is being loaded in a page and decide if I wanted to stop it.

Site Speed 1.jpg
This is a screenshot from my WordPress backend showing my Contact form page. The items in red are plugins that load themselves on the page but aren't ever needed. I've therefore used Asset Clean up to dissable them.

This page now fully loads in 1.4 seconds and many of my post pages load in 0.9 to 1.2 seconds. This is using standard shared hosting on SiteGround andthe Divi page builder theme which a lot of people criticise for beign slow.

It's well worth trying Asset Cleanup but be careful and test your pages properly afterwards. You can easily break a page by unloading code that's needed.
 
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Astekki

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I don't know about that testing site, but 3.27s is not fast. You should aim for at least below 2s, the lower than that, the better.

What I found to be most effective is a combination of using WP Rocket, ShortPixel for images (but other image enhancers will probably do as well), looking into what plugins slow down your site and, if possible delete or replace them, and a WordPress dedicated hosting company (I use WPspace).

My main problem wasn't desktop but, like probably for many others too, the mobile score. It used to be between 40-75, depending on what I tried. Since implementing these changes it now sits at 89-91 (and 99-100 for desktop).

Hope that helps.
Wow, let me see the website which speed is 2 sec...
 

Supa

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Wow, let me see the website which speed is 2 sec...
A quick Google search brought this up:
 

savefox

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Simple Cache could not write advanced-cache.php to your wp-content directory or the file has been tampered with.
<?php
defined( 'ABSPATH' ) || exit;
define( 'SC_ADVANCED_CACHE', true );
if ( is_admin() ) { return; }
$plugin_path = defined( 'WP_PLUGIN_DIR' ) ? WP_PLUGIN_DIR : WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/plugins/';
include_once( $plugin_path . '/simple-cache/inc/pre-wp-functions.php' );
$GLOBALS['sc_config'] = sc_load_config();
if ( empty( $GLOBALS['sc_config'] ) || empty( $GLOBALS['sc_config']['enable_page_caching'] ) ) { return; }
if ( @file_exists( $plugin_path . '/simple-cache/inc/dropins/file-based-page-cache.php' ) ) { include_once( $plugin_path . '/simple-cache/inc/dropins/file-based-page-cache.php' ); }

I don't have any other cache plugins. How do I fix it?
 
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shayfer

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Fantastic write up! Maybe a little off topic but do ya'll use cloud hosting or onprem docker hosting for wordpress? I love how fast my docker setup is using wordpress but not sure how it would handle loads of traffic. Assuming I can get to that level.
 

srodrigo

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Myth #1: Load Time Matters
This myth has got to die. Because load time doesn’t matter.

Why?

Simple: users don’t care about load time. In fact 95% of the time, you probably don’t even notice how long it takes for a webpage to fully load (citation needed). And for the typical user, the only way to know when a page is fully loaded is to look for the favicon to appear. Are you looking there?
I must be the only weirdo out there who closes the tab if the site takes more than a few seconds to load.

Do you have a 2023 version of this thread? 4 years is pretty long in tech.
 
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