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Optimizing Wordpress Site for Speed on the Cheap?

by SEOGhost
35 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello. Does anyone know of a way to optimize a wordpress website for speed for little to no money? I tried a minify plugin and it completely messed up the look of my website so bad that I had to immediately deactivate it.
#cheap #optimizing #site #speed #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author Suleymen
    Originally Posted by SEOGhost View Post

    Hello. Does anyone know of a way to optimize a wordpress website for speed for little to no money? I tried a minify plugin and it completely messed up the look of my website so bad that I had to immediately deactivate it.
    Hey there you can use:

    Jetpack by WordPress.com
    Supercharge your WordPress site with powerful features previously only available to WordPress.com users.

    W3 Total Cache
    Easy Web Performance Optimization (WPO) using caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.

    WP Super Cache
    A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.

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  • Profile picture of the author Icematikx
    Switch your host to Site5 cloud hosting (£25/month). Wack WP Super Cache on there and welcome to the world of 600ms loading times.

    Also, to anybody thinking I work for Site5 - you're clueless. I just promote outstanding companies where credit is due.
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    • Profile picture of the author SEOGhost
      Thanks, guys. I am using Godaddy. Can I still get 600ms loading times with them?
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  • Profile picture of the author high_plains_drifter
    Install w3 total cache and setup Amazon Cloudfront CDN. Youll have decent load speeds for your visitors worldwide

    Also move to a better hoster Site5, Arvixe are 2 of the best.
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    If you really want to speed up the site, dump Wordpress, but that is a whole other issue...

    The plugins suggested will help. Better hosting will help. GoDaddy sucks. I mean really, really sucks. Most pornstars suck far less than GoDaddy. I would recommend just about any other host than GoDaddy.

    WP-Optimize is another good plugin that can help.
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    • Profile picture of the author Emir Hayric
      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      If you really want to speed up the site, dump Wordpress, but that is a whole other issue...

      The plugins suggested will help. Better hosting will help. GoDaddy sucks. I mean really, really sucks. Most pornstars suck far less than GoDaddy. I would recommend just about any other host than GoDaddy.

      WP-Optimize is another good plugin that can help.
      I have used HostGator, Beyond Hosting and GoDaddy and I can say I did notice much of a difference between the three. GoDaddy's new user interface is fast and very easy to use and their customer support is top notch (has been for me anyhow).

      Of course there are many different plans, I have never tried one of their VPS plans or dedicated hosting, that could be a entirely different ballgame.
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      • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
        Originally Posted by DreamTFK View Post

        I have used HostGator, Beyond Hosting and GoDaddy and I can say I did notice much of a difference between the three. GoDaddy's new user interface is fast and very easy to use and their customer support is top notch (has been for me anyhow).

        Of course there are many different plans, I have never tried one of their VPS plans or dedicated hosting, that could be a entirely different ballgame.
        Hostgator and Godaddy are both sad, sad hosts in terms of performance. That having been said - if you have used Beyond Hosting and are comparing their service to those two that doesn't say good things about them - which I'm a little surprised by.

        I've never used Beyond Hosting, but they've been on my list to try simply because of LiteSpeed. They aren't high on my list because of the lack of SSD storage service though.

        For those that haven't tried LiteSpeed with wordpress sites, it's worth checking out. It definitely makes things much more snappy and has the additional benefit of being able to mitigate a lot of lower level DDOS threats.

        That having been said, it may not sound like Beyond Hosting is the company to try litespeed with if their performance is being compared to HostGator or GoDaddy's.

        To be fair - I don't know what you consider the benchmark for a fast site is to begin with. Maybe 2-4 second load times is normal or even quick to some people.

        If it's a site I actually care about I shoot for the sub-second range, 400-700ms which is perfectly doable with WP with dedicated hardware as well as having the files & database are stored on SSD's + using a CDN like MaxCDN. For hobby sites, I don't pay the same attention at all. In fact I don't move sites to premium hardware/service/CDN until they have proven to have traction and make sales.

        None the less - here's really the answer on why you should shoot for sub-1-second load times and stay the hell away from Hostgator, GoDaddy, etc. Notice how much higher that red line is for 01 second versus 1-2 seconds or anything after it....

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        • Profile picture of the author Emir Hayric
          Well to be fair Wal-Mart traffic is also the like of nothing that anyone here will ever see... I highly doubt.
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          • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
            Originally Posted by DreamTFK View Post

            Well to be fair Wal-Mart traffic is also the like of nothing that anyone here will ever see... I highly doubt.
            Let's talk about how the color purple smells, shall we.... See that kind of random rebuttal would probably distract some idiot, but ... well.... I've been done this road when someone just brings up some random objection before and it's bullshit.

            Traffic volume has nothing to do with the data presented in that infographic - you just interjected that because you didn't like something or still want to justify your slow hosting.

            The volume of traffic Walmart receives does not affect the impulse purchasing decisions of each individual user based on the speed of that site. That's what you would call a "non sequitur." Since not all of the users visiting walmart.com communicating collectively, they are isolated and have nothing to do with each other's purchasing decisions (or conversions.)

            - In other words, the volume of traffic is not an influence on the conversion rate of that traffic other than how the volume impacts speed.

            The correlation between speed and conversion rate is a static metric, independent of the traffic volume. Whether a site has 10 visitors a day or 10,000,000 visitors a day, there is still a CONSTANT relationship between speed and conversions.

            The only way your cocked rebuttal of the information works is if the individual users were to work collectively and at that point, only then does the volume of traffic matter as it would begin to move the 'mean' action of decision making of the group as a whole. However, since they obviously aren't working collectively, the volume of the traffic has absolutely no correlation to conversion rate unless it affects site speed.... because site speed and conversions are the only two directly related data points in that image.

            Got it?

            No? Okay - here....
            Speed Kills Conversion Rates [Infographic]
            https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
            Why Faster Websites Make More Money [Infographic]
            Infographic: Web Performance Impacts Conversion Rates - LoadStorm
            In fact, just go here: https://www.google.com/search?q=site...sm=93&ie=UTF-8

            Ohhhhhhh, wait....

            I'm sorry - did I get in the way of you defending HostGator and GoDaddy over REAL hosting?

            Well excuse the hell out of me dear SEO Jedi Knight, let me just step aside. Obviously you've ascended to the top tier of SEO and conversion optimization ranks on those great hosts and I need to learn my role.



            Sure, we won't have walmart level's of traffic - but as that image and all of the others I liked to clearly demonstrate - site speed and conversion rates are DIRECTLY RELATED No Matter How Big Or Small Your Site Is, Or How many Or How Few Visitors It Receives.

            If anything, we should thank Walmart for conducting their conversion rate analysis simply because of how large their site is and therefore the amount of data they can draw their conclusion from.

            IE - Walmart having much more traffic than you do only makes the graphic MORE valid, not less.

            Next...
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            • Profile picture of the author nik0
              Banned
              Is it normal that when I test my site speed with a tool like Pingdom that it's now 1.2s and a minute after 4-5+ seconds? Hosted on Namecheap for what it's worth.
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            • Profile picture of the author Emir Hayric
              Originally Posted by godoveryou View Post

              Sure, we won't have walmart level's of traffic - but as that image and all of the others I liked to clearly demonstrate - site speed and conversion rates are DIRECTLY RELATED!
              I cannot believe you spent that long on a fiery pissed off reply.

              I wasn't attacking you at all and only commented that I have had no isses with GoDaddy.

              No one cares about your stats or believes every infographic they find on the internet.

              Get a life dude, your a psycho for real!
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            • Profile picture of the author raiko
              Originally Posted by godoveryou View Post

              - In other words, the volume of traffic is not an influence on the conversion rate of that traffic other than how the volume impacts speed.
              Unless it's at an actual Walmart during Black Friday and there are trampled dead bodies clogging up the entry doors. But, that's another matter.

              "Get a life dude, your a psycho for real!"

              LOL. You are kinda psycho about this stuff aren't you GOY? Maybe you should consider Valium or something to mellow you out. Then all your posts would sound like:

              "Just write good contents. Google likes good contents".

              Nah, I prefer the psycho GOY myself.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    The problem isn't the core WP files for page speed. It's either the theme or plugins that slow down a page loading time, both can be corrected. Don't use bloated javascript themes or unnecessary slow plugins.

    I don't use anything to speed up my pages, just simple small file size themes. The theme file size on the download zip file will usually tell you If a theme is bloated or not, small KB zip files are compact source code themes. Large MB theme zip files are bloated.
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  • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
    SSD Cloud Hosting with sufficient hardware - it doesn't appear the above $25-$30 cloud host offers SSD's. Get a real host like ASmallOrange. http://asmallorange.com/hosting/cloud/ A real Cpanel, 2 2.5GHz core VPS on a SSD and 2 gigs of ram for $30 a month. Or you can use that ghetto thing above...

    Anyways..
    Minify everything reasonable.
    Plugins (most of them) as listed about.
    Smush images.
    CDN (I suggest maxcdn)

    Really, hosting on dedicated hardware & SSD drive + the CDN are the big elements. Of course, apply common sense. Using a smaller jpg in place of a largeer pgn for example (site wide)... etc etc etc....
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  • Profile picture of the author SEOGhost
    What is a CDN?
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    • Profile picture of the author Apatrid
      If you don't know what CDN is you don't need it at all. Don't waste money. It is worth if you have huge amount of traffic. My advice is to tray different plug-ins and see whats working for you and spend no more then 20$ month for some dissent host. That's it.
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      • Profile picture of the author Melody
        Originally Posted by Apatrid View Post

        If you don't know what CDN is you don't need it at all. Don't waste money. It is worth if you have huge amount of traffic. My advice is to tray different plug-ins and see whats working for you and spend no more then 20$ month for some dissent host. That's it.
        You can get MaxCDN for $9 a month for 100GB - that's an amazing price for what it does for your site.

        Melody
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  • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
    Content Delivery Network -> Definition-> Content delivery network - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
    ^ LOL!

    Of course, nobody has brought up nginx... Just putting that out there as well.

    I suppose that if you want to be ninja about it you can go with digitalocean (who I love using for small projects) and setup wordpress/nginx. https://www.digitalocean.com/communi...n-ubuntu-12-04

    And if no Cpanel scares you, there's really no need for it at that point if you are at competent. You can even do SSL's under this configuration without much effort: https://www.digitalocean.com/communi...r-ubuntu-12-04

    DigitalOcean deploys 'droplets' in less than 90 seconds that you can easily clone on the fly anytime you want. They also use SSD's

    Further more, for $5 per droplet, you can deploy a lot of individual droplets for anything that you may need a lot of IP's for and don't care if they are on the same overall host. (wink wink, nudge nudge bh'ers)

    I should mention that if you are a newbie and need to open a support ticket for dumb things, digitalcoean isn't for you. They are cheap because they expect a certain amount of competency on your part.
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  • Profile picture of the author nadavs
    The main issue here is GoDaddy. I used them once for hosting some WP blogs, and it was unbelievably slow. I switched to another host (a cheap one) and it worked just fine.

    Right now I'm using a VERY cheap host, and it still works just fine. Stay away from GoDaddy.

    nadavs
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  • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
    Well, then I'm glad we've been properly introduced.

    Next time I hope you bring some data or information with you...
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  • Profile picture of the author Dr los3
    If it's a site I actually care about I shoot for the sub-second range, 400-700ms which is perfectly doable with WP with dedicated hardware as well as having the files & database are stored on SSD's + using a CDN like MaxCDN. For hobby sites, I don't pay the same attention at all. In fact I don't move sites to premium hardware/service/CDN until they have proven to have traction and make sales.

    MR. god. please teach me your ways. i have a site i really care about and is around 1-3. CDN is all foreign to me, i guess i could google it..
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  • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
    It's pretty straight forward. I'm on my way out the door but quickly:

    -Start with a solid base of good hardware, SSD's and reasonable network congestion. ASmallOrange Cloud VPS'es are okay.
    -Setup a CDN, MaxCDN is my preferred choice.
    -Minify/Consolidate CSS & Javascript
    -Cache your pages.
    -Make sure you have Gzip enabled if possible.
    -Keep pages a reasonable size. Any page approaching 1MB is too large and could probably be done using 400-600kb instead.

    There's all sorts of other things you can do like getting away from apache and going the Nginx route, or litespeed, or adding indexes to mysql for any kind of weird queries your specific site may commonly produce that aren't already indexed - or you could go way out in left field and replace mysql entirely with something else, although really - a properly indexed mysql should be just fine.

    The question is how far do you want to go with it, and those answers are beyond the limitations of this thread.
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    • Profile picture of the author GarrettMickley
      Originally Posted by godoveryou View Post

      It's pretty straight forward. I'm on my way out the door but quickly:

      -Start with a solid base of good hardware, SSD's and reasonable network congestion. ASmallOrange Cloud VPS'es are okay.
      -Setup a CDN, MaxCDN is my preferred choice.
      -Minify/Consolidate CSS & Javascript
      -Cache your pages.
      -Make sure you have Gzip enabled if possible.
      -Keep pages a reasonable size. Any page approaching 1MB is too large and could probably be done using 400-600kb instead.

      There's all sorts of other things you can do like getting away from apache and going the Nginx route, or litespeed, or adding indexes to mysql for any kind of weird queries your specific site may commonly produce that aren't already indexed - or you could go way out in left field and replace mysql entirely with something else, although really - a properly indexed mysql should be just fine.

      The question is how far do you want to go with it, and those answers are beyond the limitations of this thread.
      I definitely second this.

      Some other posters mentioned disabling some plugins and using a theme without a bunch of junk, which I definitely recommend as well. Another big thing a lot of people don't realize is to watch the size of images. Don't upload a large image and then resize it down. Resize it to the size you need before you upload it, and then upload it.
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  • Profile picture of the author Rank Watch
    Originally Posted by SEOGhost View Post

    Hello. Does anyone know of a way to optimize a wordpress website for speed for little to no money? I tried a minify plugin and it completely messed up the look of my website so bad that I had to immediately deactivate it.
    W3 Total Cache and W3 Super Cache are the best known plugins for this.
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  • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
    Yeah, I may have jumped on him pretty hard. I have a problem with non sequitur arguments, but it's my problem. I should simply shake my head and move on.
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  • Profile picture of the author BlackWoods
    To speed up your WP sites, you can:
    1. Use caching plugins like W3 total cache
    2. Minify your scripts, can be done with W3
    3. Use compression, can be done with W3
    4. Optimize your images, with EWWW Image Optimizer
    5. USe a faster hosting plan, perhaps at least a VPS, SSD will speed it up even further
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    • Profile picture of the author cagliostro
      Just install Hyper Cache EXTENDED (not Hyper Cache) that is special optimized for shared hosting.

      Be sure you set the server speed limit that your pages will keep serving from cache if above.

      And of cource find a real hosting company and a semi-dedi plan (a high end shared).
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  • Profile picture of the author inudu
    Make your website smaller with less images. All these plugins aren't necessary. Think Craiglist.org or Reddit.

    After you reduce the clutter, use Wordpress managed hosting or install a caching plugin. Not rocket science.

    I do these steps and all my sites load under 2 seconds. You can hire me to do this for you.
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  • Profile picture of the author Pdomain
    Banned
    But I can't hear bad things about HostGator, even you are on shared hosting......

    I think, the company leads all those tiny hosting companies...., it has strong history, good reviews by its customers, and it is still in promotional phase.... affordable too....
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  • Profile picture of the author vishwa
    I am on Godaddy Managed WordPress Hosting from couple of months and never face any problem or downtime so far. Support is excellent.
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  • Profile picture of the author Melody
    Can anyone recommend a good SSD host with good support response times? We just moved a couple of test sites to A2 recently - and the 2 tickets we've put in have seen responses in days not hours - not good.

    Not quite techie enough for Digital Ocean yet...any other personal recommendations?

    Melody
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  • Profile picture of the author samk2824
    Firstly , You Can Install CloudFlare Then Give a Try To Optimize Your Site Code Structure...Slow Coded Script Results Low Speed ....

    Also UnInstall Useless Plugins ...
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