This presentation was presented on October 31, 2012 at BarCamp Tampa Bay, FL. It was made to discuss the basics of Optimizing your WordPress Site.

1. Optimize Your
WordPress Site
Better, Faster, Stronger

2. David Parsons
Work at HostDime.com
Web Developer
WordPress Developer
@david_j_parsons
djp424@gmail.com

3. Optimize
To make as perfect, effective, or functional as
possible
merriam-webster.com

4. My Definition
Better - Plugins
Faster - Speed
Stronger - Security

5. Why Optimize
Stupid Google
Speed has been a ranking factor sense 2010
Usability
Quality
Credibility

6. Why WordPress
Themes
Plugins
Community
Save Money
Greater Accessibility - CMS

7. Why Not WordPress

8. Better!
Plugins
Your Personal Unfair Advantage

9. Plugins
Image Compression
General - Upload images at exact size needed
Plugin - WP Smush.it (being dropped)
CW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer
Applications - One for Mac and One for PC
imageoptim.com and pnggauntlet.com

10. Plugins
Social Media
Tweet Old Posts
TwitPic
WP to Twitter
Twitter Feed for WordPress
ShareThis & TweetMeme Button

11. Plugins
Contact Forms
Gravity Forms
Contact Forms 7
Fast and Secure Contact Form

12. Plugins
Make Search Not Suck
Search by Relevance, Not by Date
Enhance The Display of Results

13. Plugins
SEO
WordPress SEO by Yoast

14. My Favorite Plugin
JetPack
Custom CSS
Mobile Theme
Subscriptions
Comments

15. Non-Plugins

16. Final Note on Plugins
Resist the Urge for Several Plugins
Deactivate and Delete old Plugins/Themes
Keep Plugins Updated
Go for the Better Supported Plugins

17. Faster!
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-speed-are-you-fast-does-it-matter

18. Why Faster?
Why is 3 or 4 seconds not good enough?
Phones
People are in a rush
Around 5% of the web still uses DialUp
“For Every 100ms Increase in load time, sales
decreased by 1%” - Amazon 2007

19. http://www.webpagetest.org

20. One More Tool...
Google Page Speed Checker

21. Hope Your Doing This
Have separate file for CSS
Load Javascript and other bigger things at
bottom of page

22. Faster
Quick Fix #1 - Cache
Browser Cache (Saving Files)
Expires Headers
Server Cache (One Static File)
Plugin - W3 Total Cache

23. More On Browser
Cache
https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/
blob/master/.htaccess
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Expires headers (for better cache control)
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Up To You!

24. Faster
Quick Fix #2 - Combine
Combine Your CSS Files
Combine JS Files
Tool - CodeKit
Why? - Less Server Requests

25. Faster
Quick Fix #3 - Theme
Choose the Right Theme
Themes with lots of Graphics will take
Longer to Load
Double Check CSS and JS
Keep Number of Requests in Mind

26. Compare and
Contrast

27. Faster
Quick Fix #4 - MaxCDN
http://www.maxcdn.com

28. Faster
Quick Fix #5 - GZIP
https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Gzip compression
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Or Use a Plugin
GZIP Enable
GZIP Output
Gzippy

29. Faster
Not A Quick Fix!
Hosting
Shared Host
Virtual Private Server
Fully Dedicated
Colocation (HostDime.com Specific)

30. Final Note On Plugins
Lets Not Get Crazy!

31. Stronger!
Go Away Spammers!
Spammers are constantly injecting scripts
Slowing Your Server Down
Essential Plugins
Akismet/JetPack
Spam Free WordPress
Other Option - Captcha

32. Stronger
Don’t Use ‘admin’
Don’t use ‘admin’ as your username
WordPress 3.0+ lets you change it
For older versions - Open phpMyAdmin and
run this query:

33. Stronger
P: Login LockDown
Only lets users try and log in a certain amount
of times

34. Stronger
P: Secure WordPress
• Removes error-information on login-page
• Adds index.php plugin-directory (virtual)
• Removes the wp-version, except in
admin-area
• Removes Really Simple Discovery
• Removes Windows Live Writer
• Removes core update information for
non-admins
• Removes plugin-update information for
non-admins
• Removes theme-update information for
non-admins (only WP 2.8 and higher)
• Hides wp-version in backend-dashboard
for non-admins
• Removes version on URLs from scripts
and stylesheets only on frontend
• Blocks any bad queries that could be
harmful to your WordPress website

35. Stronger
Move wp-config.php
WordPress automatically looks for wp-
config.php if it cannot find it
This way, no one except a user with FTP or
SSH access to your server will be able to read
the file

36. Stronger
Change Database Tables Prefixes
Default table prefix is wp_...
If left in tact, everyone knows the name
Can edit by going into wp-config.php
Plugin - WP Secure Scan

37. Stronger
Change Default Secret Keys
In wp-config.php you have 4 secret keys
define('AUTH_KEY', '');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', '');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', '');
define('NONCE_KEY', '');
Makes logging in to your site even harder for
those crazy hackers

38. Stronger
Protect wp-admin
Plugin - AskApache Password Protect
Block people from finding your content though
server access ... use .htaccess
wp-includes
wp-content
Plugins & Themes

39. Stronger
Passwords
Letters
Numbers
Special Characters
Caps

40. Stronger
Backups
Plugins
WP Database Backup
WP Backup to DropBox
Backup to Google Drive
Premium - VaultPress

41. Final Note On
Security
It Depends!
.htaccess

42. Take Away
Less Stuff = Faster WordPress

43. Thank You!
djp424@gmail.com
Tell me how I did!
HostDime.com
@david_j_parsons
Will Post Slides on Twitter
davidparsons.me
Slides will be on BarCamp Site