Some practical ways to speed up your WordPress website. Looking at plugins, configurations, do's & don'ts, server software and hardware changes.

2. 1. Minify css & js
2. Cache everything
3. Reduce external service calls
4. Replace “heavy” plugins
5. Reduce number of plugins
6. Don’t use “Super Themes”
7. Compress images
8. Use lazy loading
9. Use image sprites in your theme
10. Use a CDN
11. Disable image hotlinking
12. Use expires header
13. Reduce post revisions
14. Turn off pingbacks & trackbacks
15. Upgrade server hosting plan
16. Tune Apache
17. Replace Apache with NGINX
18. Add server cache
19. Optimise database (DB)
20. Move MySQL DB server
21. Replace MySQL with MariaDB
22. Upgrade to PHP 7
23. Load Balancing

3. Google likes fast sites = higher rankings
People don’t like to wait = they will go elsewhere
Fast sites can serve more visitors = better
conversion for you
Slow sites just plain suck!

4. How fast (or slow) do your web pages load?
Use: Pingdom Website Speed Test or Google PageSpeed
Tools
Make sure you test landing and popular pages and not
just the homepage!

6. Strips out whitespaces from CSS and JavaScript files.
= files are smaller = faster download
Better WordPress Minify
https://wordpress.org/plugins/bwp-minify/
Note: not all JavaScript files like to be minified. You can
also specify exclusion files to get around this issue.

7. Stores a “built” html web page & serves that to visitors
rather than dynamically build PHP page each time.
Caching can fit into different infrastructure layers:
• Browser Caching
Sending correct expiry headers on your web pages/elements
Browsers can then store and use already downloaded pages
• Server Caching
Usually a built-in web server module or an executable running
interacting with web server process. Or use caching plugins.

8. WP Super Cache - https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/
• Good introductory method of caching
• Minimal options – easy interface
W3 Total Cache - https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/
• Does a lot more than just caching: Minify, CDN, WP-
CLI support etc.
• Interface has a lot of options
• Needs to be set up properly
• Better for Nginx

9. Reduce external service calls as much as possible.
e.g. Facebook Likes, Twitter Feeds, RSS, Instagram Pics
Pages stop loading and wait until the external service
(server) responds.
Do you really need them all in a sidebar? On all pages?
You don’t have any control over the external service!

10. If you’re a WordPress developer, consider using or
developing a plugin which caches the external API data.
Do you really need to ask Twitter ever second for your
latest 3 Tweets? How often do you Tweet?
Think caching. Think WordPress transients.

11. Which plugins are using the most server resources?
Use P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) to find out!

12. Consider each plugin you “need”.
Every plugin
– comes with libraries (files) that need to be loaded from the
web server (for each page you use them on)
– calls the database (many times)
Does your plugin do one job or 30 different things?
Try to reduce the number of plugins you have or replace
bloated ones.

13. Super themes do everything but walk the dog these
days = lots of scripts & styles to load in = slow slow slow
What % of the super theme features do you use/need?
Can featured be turned on/off or are they loaded on
every page?
Can you replace with a simpler theme & specific
plugins?

14. Cameras and image editing software embed Meta Data
in images
– Colour Depth, Algorithm, Watermark, Geo & EXIF Data, …
Website visitors don’t need this = get rid of it!
Plugin: WP Smush.it
Developers: grunt-smushit, grunt-contrib-imagemin
PC: PNGGauntlet, Caesium Mac: ImageOptim
Note: JPGs compress better than PNGs

15. Loading data (images) inside screen area (viewport)
only. Images outside viewport are not loaded = fast
Easy for a developer to implement or use a plugin
e.g. BJ Lazy Load
Page only loads data that is needed by the viewport.
This can drastically decrease initial page load time!!

16. Sprite = 1 large mosaic image made up of smaller images
Use CSS to position image in place.
Sprites can be cached by browser = super fast!

17. CDNs are located world wide. Data is downloaded from
the CDN server closest to your geo location = faster
CDN

18. Plugin: Jetpack – contains FREE Photon CDN for images
*** FREE! ***
Others (not free): MaxCDN, CloudFlare, WPPronto
Note: W3 Total Cache can connect to CDNs

19. Hotlinking is when an external site links directly to an
image on your website server 
Can also be considered copyright theft!
Add to .htaccess (replace your-domain.com)
Note: you may have to add an exception for your external RSS feed
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?your-domain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .(gif|jpe?g|png)$ - [F]

20. Static images that don’t change often can be cached
safely in the browser by using an Expires header
Add to .htaccess
Note: A2592000 is 1 month in seconds
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

21. WordPress stored unlimited post revisions = database
bloat.
Large databases = slower website
Use the Revision Control to limit post revisions to 2 or 3
or whatever number makes you comfortable.

22. Turn these off!
Every time another blog mentions you, it notifies your
site, which in turn updates data on the post, slowing
down your site with processing.
Don’t worry! You won’t lose backlink SEO juice.

23. There’s a lot you can do to increase the speed of the
server.
Some solutions are quite technical to implement but you
need to analyse server data first.
First you need to find out what’s eating up all your
server resources.

24. Which server resources are being hammered?
Use New Relic (free version is fine)

27. On shared hosting  Upgrade to a VPS or managed
hosting
– Managed: Pagely, WPEngine, WPHosting
– Some restrictions on using certain plugins
Have a VPS? Upgrade CPU and/or RAM (memory)
Invest in SSD’s (solid state drives: like a USB stick)

28. Use ApacheBench – measures Apache performance by
simulating server loads (number of visitors & page hits)
How to tune? Depends..
Single site? Multiple Sites? How many clients is Apache
configured to use? How much RAM per httpd process
is allocated?
Great basic Apache tuning resource: http://bit.ly/123lscP
More advanced Apache tuning: http://bit.ly/1t8tZFl

29. Apache is very resource hungry.
It loads heaps of modules you may never need.
Replace with Nginx + PHP-FPM
( Pronounced “engine-x” )
Nginx is immensely faster than Apache, scales better
and has a lower memory footprint.

30. Varnish cache works really well with Nginx and PHP
Nginx
(web server for SSL)
Varnish
(server cache)
Nginx
(web server to pass to PHP)
PHP
(application stack)
Reason for Nginx up front is Varnish doesn’t handle SSL
termination requests (decryption & passing plain-text)

31. All WordPress post content (except for images) are kept
in the database.
Keep database size to a minimum with WP-Sweep.
“WP-Sweep allows you to clean up unused, orphaned
and duplicated data in your WordPress. It also
optimizes your database tables.”

32. Stick your MySQL DB on another server
First steps in “scaling out” (vertical scaling).
– Scaling up is adding more memory & CPU power to same
machine. You will hit a physical limit.
– Scaling out is adding more servers. Limitless.
VPS 1 VPS 2
NGINX MYSQL

33. MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL
relational database management system intended to
remain free under the GNU GPL.
MySQL owned by Oracle who acquired Sun
Microsystems.
Written by the original developer of MySQL Michael
"Monty" Widenius.
Direct replacement for MySQL

34. Performance: MariaDB 10.1 (green) vs MySQL 5.7.4 (red)

35. Ref: http://www.zend.com/en/resources/php7_infographic
Ref: http://php.net/manual/en/migration70.php

36. Load balancers try to send traffic to least busy server.
Use HAProxy for true scaling out.
MYSQL
HAProxy
VARNISH
NGINX
PHP
NGINX
PHP
NGINX

37. [Front Cover] wikimedia.org
[4] tools.pingdom.com
[5] tools.pingdom.com
[11] zeropointdevelopment.com
[16] w3schools.com
[17] wikimedia.org
[24] zeropointdevelopment.com
[25] zeropointdevelopment.com
[26] zeropointdevelopment.com
[29]nginx.org
[34] mariadb.org
[35] zend.com
[Back Cover] zeropointdevelopment.com

38.  20+ years in IT: Dev & SysOps
 WordPress Developer since 2008
 Plugins, APIs, Security & Systems Integrations
 Organiser WPSyd & WordCamp Sydney
zeropointdevelopment.com
@DeveloperWil
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