WordPress Site Speed Optimization – What Works, What Doesn’t, & What Really Matters!

In this online workshop, we’ll show you what works (in the real world), what doesn’t (so you don’t waste a ton of time), and what really matters when it comes to optimizing your site speed so it loads lightning fast and delivers an amazing experience to your visitors, prospects, and customers.

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How To Speed Up A WordPress Course Or Membership Website

This webinar with WP Speed Fix founder Brendan Tully covers how to actually speed up a WordPress course or membership website. It walks through uptime and security fundamentals, which speed testing tools reflect real-world performance, and the technical checklist, hosting, DNS, caching, image compression, and HTTP/2, that gets a site under one second, plus three live site speed teardowns with real fixes applied on the spot.

What You’ll Learn

• How to build the foundation of uptime monitoring, quality hosting, backups, and security before chasing speed numbers
• Which speed testing tools give a real-world read on load time, and why Google PageSpeed Insights alone is misleading
• The technical checklist that takes a WordPress site from slow to loading in under a second
• Why membership and LMS pages need a different caching approach than a content-only website
• How three real websites diagnosed and fixed their biggest speed problems live on the call

Key Takeaways

• Set up free uptime monitoring today with a tool like UptimeRobot so downtime shows up before customers do
• Test a site’s speed on a phone, not just a desktop, since a phone has far less bandwidth and processing power to hide problems
• Move DNS hosting to Cloudflare if the current DNS response time is slow. It is free and often saves a full second
• Never enable page caching directly on membership or LMS content. Use object or database caching instead so private content stays private
• Audit installed plugins for anything injecting fade-ins, sliders, video backgrounds, or unused tracking code, since those slow perceived speed the most

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Meet Brendan Tully, The WordPress Speed Optimization Expert

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to this live webinar training. I’m Chris Badgett from LifterLMS, and I have a special guest, Brendan Tully from WP Speed Fix. We’re doing a two-part training series with Brendan. Today we’re talking about speed, and tomorrow we’re talking about SEO for WordPress LMS website creators. But today it’s all about speed. Brendan, welcome to the webinar.

Brendan Tully: Thank you. Thanks, Chris. Good to be here.

Chris Badgett: I’m stoked to have you here with the LifterLMS audience. We just did a podcast episode together where we talked about both these things. We’ll put a link in the chat about that episode if you haven’t checked it out, go ahead and download that or listen to it on your podcatcher of choice. But we talked about speed, we talked about SEO, and we talked about your journey as a course creator. You’re part and parcel to the course-building community here, and I’m stoked to get into it. There’s going to be a lot to learn. You’ve been in the trenches, speeding up WordPress sites, you’re a website builder, a serial entrepreneur. I’m really excited to bring you to everyone today. Brendan, thanks for coming, let’s get into it.

Brendan Tully: Cool, all righty. So we have a bit of a clickbaity title here, which is always good, talking about site speed. We can dig in on a slide if it’s not clear. I know this stuff back to front, and I sometimes assume that people have a very good technical understanding, which isn’t always the case. So if there’s something we need to stop on, slow down, or talk about a bit more, we can do that.

A bit about my background: I’ve been in the online space since the early 2000s. I built an online store quite quickly, quite large, and then fell into selling SEO services in 2008. We have a local SEO agency, and we started finding that hosting is the foundational layer of everything you do online, and site speed became a big part of getting clients onto good quality hosting. We started doing speed optimization as part of our SEO work, and it ended up becoming its own separate business. It’s still a small business, but it’s growing quite quickly. WP Speed Fix started off as a contact form on our agency website and became its own standalone business. Since we started doing that in 2015, 2016, we’ve optimized just over 2,000 sites now, roughly close to two and a half thousand, so we have a lot of experience with what works, what doesn’t, and what’s practical from a speed perspective in the real world.

What This WordPress Speed Training Covers

Brendan Tully: So what are we going to be talking about today? I’m going to give you four key things. People are kind of rationally passionate about speed, it seems to be this thing people are obsessed about and getting more obsessed about, but there’s something they’re actually missing that’s even more important than speed, at least twice as important, and super obvious as well, and almost nobody talks about it or is doing anything about it.

We’re going to talk about speed test tools, because there’s a handful of different speed test tools on the market and some of them don’t really give you the complete picture. If you’ve focused on using one speed test tool, for example Google PageSpeed Insights, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff you’re probably going to miss in terms of speed, in a practical, real-world sense that affects visitors. We’ll talk about the tools we use and how to interpret them.

We’re going to talk about what actually matters when it comes to speed. A lot of what you’ll read online is incomplete, or old, or written by affiliate marketers or content writers with no technical experience, or they’ve only ever optimized one site. We’re going to talk about what broadly works, and I’ll give you some simple action steps you can probably do yourself, or if you have a developer or access to tech resources, they should be able to do quite easily and get you some improvement in speed, or a very big improvement in some cases. Then we’re going to talk through a couple of live examples and do some Q&A, and dig into anything we missed or need more detail on.

Why Website Speed Affects User Experience And Search Rankings

Brendan Tully: Why is speed important? Why are people obsessed with it? Well, there’s a few reasons. A fast site generally is a better user experience, so our customers are happy. People today have very short attention spans and they’re quite impatient, so a faster site is just generally, all around, a better experience for people.

Google says it helps rankings. If you have a really, really slow site, fixing that problem, if people are sitting there waiting for the site to load, is going to make it rank higher. But if the site’s already fast, you’re probably not going to see a ranking improvement just by making it faster. That said, to improve the speed of a website you basically fix the underlying technology that drives it, and fixing some of that stuff can often improve rankings just as part of that process.

Then more conversions. A faster site generally means speed doesn’t become an obstacle to conversions, so typically conversions will go up with a faster site, but it really depends on the type of site and the visitor intent. If you’re in a high-intent environment where people absolutely must have what you’re selling, speed isn’t going to be a big issue. But if you click a BuzzFeed link from Facebook, you’re in a low-intent environment, and a slow site is really going to have a bigger impact when visitor intent is lower.

And then money. Basically, speed is all about making more money. A faster site should in theory make us more money, it’s all about the commercials. It’s really important to keep that last point in mind, because ultimately our goal is commercially oriented. We want happier customers, we want more conversions, and all of that puts more money in our pockets. A lot of people miss that in the pursuit of the fastest-loading website on the internet. They’ll cut their legs off, they’ll sacrifice the commerciality just to have a faster site.

Why Speed Optimization Should Account For Slow Internet Connections

Chris Badgett: Quick question for you, Brendan. You said you were calling into this webinar on 3G, right?

Brendan Tully: Yeah, or 4G. Sometimes, especially if you work on the internet, you’re often gravitating toward the best internet you can get in the area, but that’s not the case for a lot of the world. I think sometimes we don’t realize how slow a lot of the internet is. We think, because we’re internet power users, we’ve got good Wi-Fi or we’re hardwired into the internet, but that’s not the experience for most people.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and that’s true. The more time I spend traveling, the more I realize it’s not the same for everybody. Not everybody has that level of tech savviness either, they’re not that comfortable with technology, so there’s a large proportion of people on the web where, as something goes slower or doesn’t load, they just get up and walk away from the computer, or they’re browsing on their phone. I watched my parents using the internet years ago and it was so eye-opening, because everything happened so much slower for them, and they read everything. It’s a very different experience from someone who spends most of their work day on the internet, like I do. There are people who aren’t like that.

Brendan Tully: That’s a good point. Sorry to interrupt, I just wanted to highlight how important it is, especially if somebody’s in a slow area.

Why Popular Speed Test Tools Miss Important Blind Spots

Brendan Tully: Okay, the current state of play right now with speed. I don’t think anybody’s going to debate that everybody knows a slow site is horrible. Speed definitely has some importance, and like I said, the intent of the visitor is really important, it’s really going to determine how important speed is. Speed optimization is only one tool in our arsenal from an online marketing, commercial perspective, and it’s going to have a different impact depending on what type of site you have and what type of traffic and intent that traffic has.

Unfortunately, most speed test tools today have big gaps in their recommendations. GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, there’s probably a handful of other ones people are familiar with, but a lot of them are based on technology from several years ago. The technology driving the web is constantly changing, and a lot of what those tools recommend doesn’t really apply on the modern web today, even things that were important two or three years ago. There’s a bit of a problem there. We’re actually in the process of building our own tool that picks up a lot of these things, because there’s such a gap in the market with speed test tools.

And like I said before, site speed optimization can be a minefield if you’re trying to DIY it, because a lot of the content on the web, especially the content that ranks high about speed optimization, is quite old, outdated, or written by affiliate marketers, so they’re recommending stuff that isn’t necessarily the best from a getting-a-result perspective.

Why Uptime And Security Matter More Than Raw Speed

Brendan Tully: So let’s talk about the four main points. When people come to me about speed, there’s something most of them are missing, especially the ones who are rationally passionate about speed and think it must be lightning fast. What I want to talk about first is that the uptime, the reliability, the stability, and the security of your site is easily twice as important as the speed. Basically, if the site is down, it has zero speed, effectively. A lot of people are focused on optimizing the site but have done nothing about uptime monitoring, aren’t doing any maintenance, and aren’t really taking care of security.

If we’re looking at site speed as a commercial endeavor, and the whole purpose of looking at site speed is making more money, converting better, getting more customers, then the stability of the site, the uptime, the reliability, is at least as important as speed, if not twice or five times as important. This is usually the most overlooked thing when we work with clients. They always ask, it’s fast now, does it stay fast, what else do I need to do? My answer is always: you need to be looking at these things, and they’re an ongoing process, not a one-and-done. It’s something you need to have in place, especially if you have a membership site or an LMS where there are people on there all the time. Those sites are a lot heavier than a straight content site, so the reliability of the site actually matters more than the hosting underpinning it. Broadly, it’s very simple to take care of these things. It’s not difficult, it’s just something people aren’t talking about.

How To Set Up Free Uptime Monitoring With UptimeRobot

Brendan Tully: If we’re looking at uptime monitoring, you really have to have it in place. What we find, and we have uptime monitoring on all our agency sites, is that when we started doing it several years ago, sites on average-quality hosting could be down several times a day, or down for several hours at night while those servers were doing maintenance or backups, or when they’re under a lot of load.

There’s lots of tools out there, hundreds of uptime tools, but we use uptimerobot.com. It has a free version that checks the server or the site every five minutes, which is okay for a free tool, and the paid version checks it every minute. It’s really simple to set up, and the alerts are really good, it can send you a Slack message, an email, an SMS, it integrates with Zapier as well, so you can plug it into all sorts of systems. I’d say that’s the starting point, and there’s no excuse not to have the free version, cost is not an obstacle there, and it’s certainly not difficult to set up.

Why Cheap Web Hosting Costs More Than It Saves

Brendan Tully: The quality of the hosting is the next starting point. It’s a shame the hosting industry has trained people to think hosting costs three or five dollars a month. You’ve got to be realistic, the quality of the hosting has to match what you’re looking to do in terms of the site getting customers and how many people are on it at once.

A good quality host isn’t that much more expensive. Three or five dollars is the cost of a cup of coffee, but good quality hosting might be thirty or fifty dollars a month, so it’s not that much more, the cost of a nice lunch. Probably one of the big things with the people who come to us for speed stuff is they’re just on poor quality hosting that isn’t well matched to the type of site running on it. That’s a simple one to fix. It’s a bit of a project to migrate a site, but fairly straightforward, and from a cost perspective it’s a false economy to be on a super cheap host that’s down all the time. Paying a little bit more, the site’s going to be up, it’s going to be faster, and ultimately it’ll be better from a commercial perspective.

Why Regular Plugin Maintenance Protects Both Speed And Security

Brendan Tully: One that’s often missed is maintenance. You probably need to be looking at maintenance at least quarterly, or every six months. Once plugins get past a certain age, they’ll start to slow down the site in some cases. If you have plugins on your site that are a couple of years old, there’s a good chance they might be impacting speed.

Having something in place so you’re at least looking at plugin updates and patches on a regular basis matters, both from a speed, security, and stability perspective. A lot of people don’t have a system in place for that, they just log into WordPress and randomly update plugins, which isn’t really a great approach either, especially when you’re running an LMS that might have a lot of moving parts and be plugged into other systems.

How To Back Up A WordPress Site The Right Way

Brendan Tully: With backups, we say one is none and two is one, so we always try to have two backup systems. Generally our approach is we have a backup on the hosting, since most good quality hosting does some sort of backup, and then for all of our sites, several hundred sites we manage at our agency, we use BlogVault.

The reason we like BlogVault is, one, it actively tells us what it doesn’t back up. There are a handful of really popular backup plugins, but a lot of them have gaps, they don’t back up MP3 or MP4 files, things like that, and you don’t find that out until it’s time to restore the backup. BlogVault actively tells you what tables it’s not matching up in the database and you can go in and select those. A lot of backup plugins will only back up the default WordPress tables, and we discovered that on one of our membership sites using Digital Access Pass, which uses a different naming format for its database tables, we went to do a restore one day and it hadn’t been backed up in years.

It’s really important to use good quality backup tools where you have visibility into what they’re doing, and real-time backup is really good too. When a new member signs up, or you sell something and get an order, that’s a change inside WordPress, and with real-time functionality that change is being backed up. For an LMS and a WooCommerce site, that’s really important.

Basic WordPress Security Practices Every Site Needs

Brendan Tully: From a security perspective, basic stuff: proper passwords on everything, different passwords for everything, not using the same password on every site. We use 1Password to manage passwords.

Then look at something like Cloudflare, or a security service to sit in front of the site, filtering traffic live like a proper firewall, and some sort of plugin on the site to handle people trying to brute-force passwords, like Wordfence, or if you’re on a managed host like WP Engine, some of those features are built in already. That’s the broad strokes: uptime, stability, security, and maintenance. None of that’s really super technical, it’s all fairly DIY, it’s just a case of checking those boxes and making sure they’re sorted.

Why Google PageSpeed Insights Doesn’t Measure Real-World Speed

Brendan Tully: Okay, let’s talk about speed test tools, which ones you probably should be using and which ones you shouldn’t. There’s a weird assumption we see with a lot of customers, they come to us and want a hundred score on Google PageSpeed Insights, thinking that if they have a hundred score they’ll be number one at Google, which is not the truth.

PageSpeed Insights in particular doesn’t actually measure speed, it measures a technical checklist that kind of correlates with speed, but it’s incomplete. GTmetrix is a little bit better, but it also has some big gaps, so it’s important to be aware of those. Google Analytics actually has a speed section too, that will tell you how fast the site is loading, but the data in there is so far away from what’s actually happening in the real world that it might as well be completely wrong. It only samples one percent of your total website visitors, so from a statistical perspective it’s useless, and the way it measures speed isn’t great either. So it’s important to be aware of those things when looking at speed test tools, and not be so focused on the numbers that you take them as gospel.

Which Speed Testing Tools Actually Reflect Real-World Performance

Brendan Tully: The tool we use right now is tools.pingdom.com, because it’s the closest to real-world speed, and generally our goal is to get under one second in Pingdom. The speed still needs some interpretation, but once we’re under one second, that’s where the load begins to feel instant, really snappy, like the page loads instantly. That said, probably the best test of speed is how it feels on your PC, your laptop, or your phone, particularly your phone.

Why You Should Test Site Speed On A Phone, Not Just A Desktop

Brendan Tully: On a desktop computer you usually have a lot of bandwidth and a lot of CPU power, so it’s a lot more forgiving for sites doing a lot of JavaScript, heavy things, a lot of video, or stuff that needs a lot of processor power. A smartphone is a lot less forgiving, so generally it’d be wise to test speed on a phone, and if it’s slow there, regardless of what any speed test tools tell you, it’s slow. So those are basically the two tools we use to test: a smartphone, and Pingdom.

How Server Location Affects Load Time Across Country Borders

Brendan Tully: If we get under one second in Pingdom, usually we’re loading lightning fast, and that’s under one second in the country the site is hosted in. It’s important to keep that in mind, because typically once you’re going across a border, particularly a water border, you’ll see the site is half a second to one second slower. There are some ways around that, we use a content delivery network, but the site will always load fastest in the country it’s hosted in.

From a hosting-the-website perspective, it’s always best to have the site hosted wherever the bulk of your customers are. If it’s North America, that site should be in North America, and you have the option of East Coast or West Coast. If it’s Europe, or Australia, it should ideally be hosted in that country, and if you’re worldwide, probably the US is the way to go.

Why Speed Test Results Change By Time Of Day

Brendan Tully: It’s also important to interpret the speed test results, because they can be skewed by time of day, server load, tracking codes, embedded things like videos, live chat, all sorts of stuff. Time of day is a big one.

We’re in Australia, most of our team is in Australia with a couple of people in Europe, and what we find is if we have a speed fix customer on poor quality hosting, the hosting actually runs really fast for us during our day, which is nighttime in the US, but during the day in the US, when those servers are under load, the speed can be a lot different. The results always need to be interpreted, they’re never going to be black and white, they’ll always move up and down. Actually one of the live examples I have at the end, the speed test I ran yesterday is different from what I have today, so we’ll talk about that too.

Why Speed Should Never Come At The Cost Of Conversions

Brendan Tully: I can’t drive this home enough: you never want to sacrifice the commerciality of the website for speed. There’s a lot of people who treat it like a measuring competition, where they just need this thing loading super fast with ridiculous speed times, and they’ll cannibalize the site to get those fast loading speeds.

It’s always important that we never sacrifice conversions or commercial elements of the site to get a faster loading site. Pretty much the fastest loading site is a plain page of HTML with no images or formatting, but that’s probably not going to sell anybody. It’s really important to keep that in mind with any kind of optimization, not just site speed. Any optimization on the site should always keep those commercial goals in mind.

Why Site Speed Is A Negative Deliverable, Not A Growth Lever

Brendan Tully: We also have customers who come with the mindset that a faster site will get them higher rankings and more customers, but the reality is actually upside down, that thinking is backward. A fast site, and I’m talking about sites that are already moderately fast, going from moderately fast to lightning fast probably won’t get you higher rankings and probably won’t get you more conversions.

What’s actually happening is you’re not losing the rankings or conversions you would have had otherwise. It’s a negative deliverable. You already have those things, and slowness on the site is losing them, it’s not gaining you anything, if that makes sense. Speed is a negative deliverable in a sense, it’s the cost of entry to a sale. You’ll only really feel the benefit of speed when you don’t have it, you don’t necessarily feel the benefit when you do have it.

For people who want more conversions and want to sell more through the site, what they probably should be looking at is conversion rate optimization, not necessarily site speed as their sole focus. It’s important to keep in mind those are some of the mindsets customers come to us with that are well intended but a little bit wrong.

Content Sites Versus Database-Heavy Sites Need Different Speed Strategies

Brendan Tully: Now, what actually matters when it comes to site speed? I’m going to run through technical things here, and we can stop on any particular point if we need to. This is basically a broad to-do list, and these will get you eighty to ninety percent of the way there if you want to optimize your site for speed.

As a starting point, it’s important to consider what type of site you have. A content-only site, one that’s just serving up pages, a blog or a local business site like a dentist’s website, or straight sales pages, is going to be a very different optimizing experience from something using the database a lot, like WooCommerce, an LMS, or some other line-of-business system hammering the WordPress database. Broadly, if we split sites into two categories, content-only sites are very simple, they don’t need to do much other than serve up pages, whereas WooCommerce or an LMS is doing a lot, talking back and forth to the database, putting orders through, collecting content, pushing stuff into the WordPress database if it has a forum or a membership site. You can get away with really basic caching for a content-only site, but for a database-heavy site you’re going to have to think about the performance of the server and its configuration.

High traffic versus low traffic obviously has different config considerations, and probably the other thing to be mindful of is how many simultaneous visitors are on the site. If they’re concentrated, if the site is being hammered with traffic all at once, you’re doing a launch or something like that, that needs to be taken into account. The location you serve, whether it’s a single country or worldwide and how your traffic is skewed by country, and what resources you have, whether you’re a small business or solo entrepreneur with limited resources, or a seven-figure business with near-unlimited resources to throw at speed, are all important.

The big one is probably whether you’re content-only or a database-heavy site. A lot of people with memberships have their LMS on one site and the sales side or main marketing site totally separate, which is a good example of those two different types of sites. The sales side is very simple, just serving up pages, whereas the LMS site is quite heavy and doing a lot of work, so optimizing those two would be a very different process.

A Layered Model For Finding Where A Website Is Actually Slow

Brendan Tully: Okay, a little bit technical here. There are different layers when it comes to optimizing speed, and the site can be slow or fast at these different layers. If something at the bottom of this pyramid is slow, or at the lower layers, the stuff stacked on top of it is going to feel the effect of that slowness. We always start at the base. Using this model, we can really work out where the root causes of slow speed are, or where our opportunities are to optimize.

We start at the base with the web hosting, the quality of the web hosting, the location of the web hosting, and the raw amount of server power available and what hardware it’s running on. Like we talked about, having a good quality host is the absolute starting point, you’re never going to get it running lightning fast or reliably if you’re paying three dollars a month. For a basic website, twenty or thirty dollars a month on hosting will get you something nice and fast with very little downtime, and for a pretty typical content site that’ll be plenty.

Then we look at the server or hosting configuration. There’s a common assumption we see, someone has a dedicated server on Amazon, an AWS VPS server with a lot of power, and it’s still going slow, and that’s because the server configuration is poor. The raw server power is only part of the speed picture, the server configuration is also important. It’s like having a massive engine in a car, but if it handles poorly, it’s not going to go around the race track fast. There are different server stacks, and the server can be optimized in different ways to go fast or slow.

The DNS hosting speed is a very common problem almost nobody talks about online. From a technical perspective, you’ve got four parts to your hosting: your domain name, which you get from your domain registrar, your DNS hosting, your web hosting, and your email hosting. DNS hosting converts web addresses into IP addresses, so your computer or browser knows where to go and find that server. When you type a web address into a browser, your computer talks to the DNS server for your domain name to look up the IP address on that domain.

DNS hosting speed is really important. Some DNS hosting is really slow and can take a second or two to reply, whereas fast DNS hosting takes ten or twenty milliseconds. If you’re on a poor quality DNS host, you’re never going to get to that ultimate goal of under one second, because you’re losing all that speed at the DNS hosting layer.

The connectivity or bandwidth the server has matters too, particularly for an LMS. If you’re serving up zip files or MP4 files directly off the hosting itself and you have a small amount of bandwidth, that can be a problem. We see that sometimes. Server location we’ve already talked about, and a content delivery network is an easy way to speed up the site worldwide, which is really important if you’re serving a worldwide audience.

Caching is really important, you pretty much need caching for a WordPress site. In the simplest form, caching pre-does the work before the visitor hits the website. Page caching prepares the pages, all the database lookups and PHP processing are already done before the visitor hits the site, so they’re served a nice simple HTML file instead of the server having to talk to the database and execute all that code before the visitor gets the page. Then the next layer above that is the uncached layer, some things are not cacheable, some things can’t be done in advance, and it’s important to take those into account.

Then we have the page delivery to the user, sending the data from the server to the user’s browser, then the page render. Generally Google PageSpeed Insights is focused on the top three layers, the page render is where PageSpeed Insights is really focused, once the user’s device or browser has all the things it needs, the HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and images, it has to render that, put it together and show you the webpage. And then the user experience with the page, how they interact with it, things like pop-ups, fade-ins, and transition effects all affect that user experience and can affect their interpretation of speed, how the user feels when using the website, how fast it feels.

That’s the model we use when we look at speed. There are lots of different layers, lots of different components, and a bottom layer component, if it has a problem, anything stacked on top of it will likely have a problem too.

Why HTTP/2 Support Is A Foundational Speed Requirement

Brendan Tully: All right, so broadly speaking, here are the steps to get to that one magical one-second mark. We’ve talked about this several times now, using a good host. The host should have what’s called HTTP/2 protocol support. This is the protocol the web browser software uses to talk to the server. There are two versions, version 1.1 and version 2, which is a few years old now. If you’re on really old hosting, or you’ve had your site hosted for five or ten years, there’s a fair chance your host or that particular server doesn’t have this protocol.

This protocol makes a big difference in how quickly the browser can get stuff down from your web server and how quickly they can talk to each other. We want a good quality host that supports HTTP/2, and that protocol needs the site running in SSL mode, over HTTPS, in order to work. All the browsers now want to see the website encrypted, and the web browser software won’t use the protocol unless it’s over a secure channel. I’ll give you a tool at the end, and a link to a video that shows the difference between version 1.1 and version 2, but that’s really important for having the site feel snappy.

Why Cloudflare Is The Recommended DNS And CDN Provider

Brendan Tully: Point two, we use Cloudflare for DNS hosting. Cloudflare is our DNS host of choice, and it’s also the fastest DNS host in the world. The website dnsperf.com ranks all the DNS providers in the world, the top 100, by speed, and Cloudflare has consistently been number one for years.

Generally, if you’re on a bad or slow DNS host, moving to Cloudflare will get you often one or two extra seconds of speed, which can make a huge difference. We also love Cloudflare because it’s a content delivery network, and I think of all the CDN options it has the most servers worldwide, over 100 locations. For most types of sites, that’ll be the fastest content delivery network. If you have an LMS serving up heavy zip files, PDFs, or MP4s, anything that’s a chunky file, that would be the exception.

It also has a free plan that’s fine for most sites, and a paid plan that’s about 20 bucks a month, which is slightly cheaper if you buy it through the web host, which also adds some other image optimizations on top and a higher level firewall that filters out a bit of the crap hitting the website. There’s a lot of reasons to use Cloudflare, and it’s free as well. The other thing it’ll add, if your host doesn’t have HTTP/2 support, Cloudflare will add that too, so it’s an easy way around that problem.

Why Upgrading To PHP 7 Delivers An Easy Speed And Security Win

Brendan Tully: Point three, PHP is the programming language WordPress is written in, and using PHP version 7 instead of the older version 5 will generally make the site 30 percent faster. The more database-heavy the site, the bigger the speed benefit. WooCommerce is a big one, because you’re doing a lot of work in the backend managing orders and things like that, so it’ll make the backend faster too.

Most sites today should support the newer version, it’s just a matter of changing that in cPanel. You need to check compatibility first, and I’ll give you a link to a plugin you can run on the site that takes 30 minutes to run and will tell you whether the site is PHP 7 compatible. That’s a big, easy speed boost, you’ll get a 30 percent win roughly on both the backend and front end, if not more on the backend.

Also, the earlier PHP versions, 5 and below, are no longer supported, so it’s a bit of a security risk, and I think PHP 5.6 is being phased out next year at some point, so you’ll probably have to make that change anyway. That would be one to put on your to-do list, you get a security benefit and a speed benefit.

How To Compress Images Without Losing Quality

Brendan Tully: Point four, pretty simple, compress images with a compression plugin. We use ShortPixel right now. There are a lot of different image plugins out there that do roughly the same thing in terms of image compression. One thing I’d say is use lossless compression instead of lossy compression.

You’ll see there are options inside almost all image compression plugins for how compressed the images can be. You don’t want to sacrifice the quality of the images. Lossless is less file size but the same quality image, lossy is less file size but less quality. There’s a lot of articles online comparing the images side by side, and you can barely notice the difference, but broadly across the whole site you don’t want to cannibalize the quality of your images for a small marginal increase in speed.

A lot of speed test tools, particularly PageSpeed Insights and some others, want you to use really aggressive compression, but if we look at speed from a broader commercial perspective, photos are really important, and we don’t want to hurt the quality of our photos for a little bit extra speed or a slightly smaller file size.

Why WebP Images Deliver Smaller File Sizes Than JPEG And PNG

Brendan Tully: There’s a next level up of image compression that none of the speed test tools talk about right now, and that’s using WebP. You have JPEG and PNG file formats, and there’s also another file format, dot-webp, which is a much smaller file size at the same quality, but not all browsers support it right now. I think Chrome and Safari are the only two browsers that support it, but the file sizes are a whole lot smaller.

So if you’re a photography website, for example, where you can’t do without a lot of images, one way to squeeze more juice out of the file sizes is to use WebP file format images. There are two ways to do that. ShortPixel is one, it has a feature that can inject special code into the website that gives the web browser the option of downloading the WebP image if it supports it. The other way is to use Cloudflare’s paid version, which has an image optimization feature that swaps out JPEGs and PNGs for WebP images where it’s appropriate and where the browser supports it.

If you’re very image-heavy, that would be something to look at, getting WebP file format support. You’ll probably cover half the traffic, half the web browsers hitting the website, if you have that functionality in place.

Choosing A Caching Plugin For A Non-Membership WordPress Site

Brendan Tully: Using caching, you have to have this on a WordPress website pretty much, if your host doesn’t support it already. W3 Total Cache is pretty much the fastest caching plugin, but it’s super technical, not very DIY, most people don’t know how to configure it. WP Rocket is not as fast, but it’s much more doable, so if you don’t have any caching at the moment, WP Rocket would probably be the plugin to look at.

Why Membership And LMS Pages Should Never Use Page Caching

Brendan Tully: Now, it’s important, when we’re talking about membership sites, you never want to cache any of the membership pages, anything hidden behind a login. You can’t really cache those, because you’ll end up in a scenario where non-logged-in visitors will see the hidden membership content.

You need to be very mindful about having caching correctly configured on anything that has authentication, or on an LMS, anything hidden behind a login. I wouldn’t DIY mess with any caching on your LMS site if you don’t really know what you’re doing, or you’re not super technical.

How Object Caching And Database Caching Speed Up An LMS Site

Brendan Tully: There is another way to speed up an LMS website, or anything that’s database-heavy like that, that won’t expose the membership content, and that’s database caching and object caching. Your server needs to support something called memcached in order to use that. SiteGround supports it, for example, but other hosts like Bluehost or GoDaddy, cheaper hosts, won’t support it.

That would be something to dig into if you have an LMS that’s slow or not performing super fast. You can use object caching, in some cases database caching, if your host has memcached support. That’s getting into technical stuff, so I won’t go too much into it, but yeah, it’s really important that you don’t mess with page caching on an LMS site if you’re not technical or comfortable with tech stuff, because you’ll end up with stuff exposed to the world that shouldn’t be.

Why Removing Unused Plugins And Tracking Code Improves Speed

Brendan Tully: Some simple ones: disable any plugins and tracking code you’re not using. If you have analytics tools you’ve used in the past that still have code on the website, just get rid of them. Often there are plugins that have been hanging around for years that can just easily be deleted, or duplicate plugins. Sometimes we see three or four plugins doing SEO things when a single one, or the host, will do everything, and there’s also a sitemap plugin installed.

Any plugin duplication, old plugins, every plugin on the site needs a reason to exist, and every plugin executes code at some point. Don’t use plugins as an easy way out, for example using a plugin for tracking code where you could hard-code the tracking code into the theme or use something like Google Tag Manager. Quite often we’ll get websites with three or four plugins installed just to inject tracking code, analytics, or live chat. Avoid using plugins if you can help it, in other words.

Why Fade-Ins, Sliders, And Animations Slow Down Perceived Speed

Brendan Tully: Don’t use any kind of fade-ins, soft loads, transition effects, animations, sliders, or banners. All that sort of stuff adds delays into the site render, or makes the perceived speed of the site slower. Animations and sliders in particular feel slower to the visitor, because the site needs to load before that animation can run. We want to ideally disable anything like that. It doesn’t necessarily show up on a speed test tool, but it will impact how the speed feels to the visitor.

Banners are generally not great for conversion anyway, so we want to get rid of them wherever they’re not appropriate. Slider plugins are extremely heavy from a speed perspective, and often load several JavaScript files, so we want to be mindful of that, and quite often we’ll see sites with multiple banners or slider plugins installed.

Why Video Backgrounds Are Heavy On Speed And When To Avoid Them

Brendan Tully: Video backgrounds are the same. They’re very trendy and can look great, but they’re very heavy, both from downloading the video file, which could be five or ten megabytes, and because they need a lot of processor power to execute, so they can feel very heavy, particularly on a slow device like a smartphone, and also on a desktop if it’s a heavy video background. You need to be mindful of that. If you have the option not to use a video background, I’d get rid of it.

How Lazy Loading Images And Third-Party Code Speeds Up Page Load

Brendan Tully: Use uptime monitoring, we talked about UptimeRobot. Little Warden is also a good tool for monitoring some of this technical stuff. Hosting in the country closest to your visitors, we’ve talked about that.

And then some advanced stuff: cloud image compression for WebP file format support, and lazy loading. Lazy loading can be a really easy way to speed up the site, lazy loading images and lazy loading YouTube videos, meaning those elements on the page don’t load until the user scrolls down that far. We can also lazy load third-party tracking code and live chat code using Google Tag Manager.

I won’t go through it here, but I can link you to a video that explains it in more detail. Particularly, some tracking codes and live chat codes are really slow and heavy, and we can lazy load those using a trick inside Google Tag Manager, to really lighten that initial page load. A really advanced technique uses HTML caching inside Cloudflare, but I won’t talk about that in detail, it’s super technical.

Live Site Speed Teardown Of The LifterLMS WooCommerce Store

Chris Badgett: That is a plethora of information, I’m going to have to rewatch this and really dig in.

Brendan Tully: It can be quite overwhelming, but those ten points would get you eighty or ninety percent of the way there. They seem technical, but once you implement them, image compression is pretty easy, install a plugin, run it, follow the instructions, and that’s pretty straightforward.

Chris Badgett: I’ve poked around with some of that stuff, and like you said, you’ve just got to roll up your sleeves and get into it. Let’s get into these examples.

Brendan Tully: I’m going to look at your site to start with.

Chris Badgett: Go ahead, throw me under the bus.

Brendan Tully: All right, let me switch back to my browser, let’s go live, this could be dangerous if my internet doesn’t play the game.

Chris Badgett: LifterLMS.com is a website, and then we have some subdomains, but you’re looking at the main dot com?

Brendan Tully: Yeah, which for those of you watching, and we do have a lot of WooCommerce users, this is a content-heavy site that’s mostly a WooCommerce store.

I took this screenshot a few days ago, and then ran the test this morning just before we jumped on the call, and it was actually quite a bit faster. This is a perfect example of speed being variable. We went from two and a half seconds there to 1.7 seconds, so the speed does move up and down with the time of day. We’re not under one second, but I have some things that might get you there.

How Live Chat And Video Widgets Were Blowing Out The Load Time

Brendan Tully: Let’s talk about some key points here. You had a two-and-a-half second load time. I love your chat bot, though, there is a way to solve that. The Drift live chat was actually blowing out your load time.

When we look at speed, we break it into two: the core of the website, everything loading off WordPress and the hosting, which we have almost total control over, and the third-party stuff, the analytics code, live chat, remarketing code, Facebook tags, that sort of thing. We don’t have that much control over the third-party stuff, other than putting some tracking codes in the footer where they load faster, or removing tracking codes that aren’t actively being used.

In your case, the Drift live chat was blowing you up in almost all elements of speed. Two and a half second load time, a 3.7 megabyte page size, one and a half megabytes of that was images, and 1.3 megabytes was your Drift and your Wistia video. So half the page is effectively Drift and Wistia, which is huge, and we can lazy load that somehow.

How To Lazy Load Live Chat Code With Google Tag Manager

Brendan Tully: There’s a technique we can use, the lazy loading of the live chat. We take the live chat code, use Google Tag Manager, and add a delay into that code, say five or six seconds. What happens is the site loads up nice and fast without that 1.3 megabytes of Drift stuff, and then Google Tag Manager starts its counter in the background, and five seconds later it pulls through the live chat code.

From a visitor’s perspective, it doesn’t really affect their experience, because they’re not going to load the site and go straight to live chat one second later, but it does have a big impact on speed. That’s my sneaky way of solving that problem. We also do that a lot with ActiveCampaign code, because it’s not going to make a huge difference to the reports inside ActiveCampaign if it has a few seconds’ delay on the load as well.

Chris Badgett: That’s a good point, and I think, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases, we have our Drift live chat set to be on a delay anyway, so we’re already slowing it down. It might as well be lazy loaded.

Brendan Tully: Exactly. But you’re pretty well optimized from a code perspective, it was looking good. Those were really the big chunks, the Drift was really the thing hurting you.

How WebP Compression Would Cut The Site’s Image Weight In Half

Brendan Tully: For the images, you’d probably get quite a bit of savings if you had WebP images instead of JPEGs and PNGs. On some browsers you’d have about 800 kilobytes of savings.

Chris Badgett: That’s only Chrome and Safari at this point?

Brendan Tully: Yeah, I think Chrome, Safari, and maybe Opera too. I think you’re using a plugin called Smush, but I don’t even know what that does.

Chris Badgett: No idea either.

Brendan Tully: Smush will compress the images, but it won’t do the WebP conversion. ShortPixel has a section that says something like add picture tags, replacing image tags with picture tags, which gives the browser different options for images. It has the original JPEG and also the WebP file format, so if the browser supports WebP, it’ll just pick up the WebP file.

There’s a tool from a company called Cloudinary that will tell you what kind of compression you’ll get with WebP files instead. Yours came out to about 800 kilobytes of difference, half the size, so you’d go from one and a half megabytes of images to about 800 kilobytes. ShortPixel has a free version that compresses a hundred images, and the paid version is about ten bucks for 10,000 images, so it’s basically nothing.

The other things you had were 166 resources downloading, which is quite high, on a fast-loading website we’d only have between 50 and 100, so again the Drift and Wistia are blowing that out. Your time to first byte, how long the HTML takes to download, was a little higher at 450 milliseconds, but I wouldn’t sweat that too much, it’s a WooCommerce site, it’s quite heavy, you’d expect that. You could potentially lazy load your video too, but Wistia is probably the fastest of all the video platforms, YouTube and Vimeo can be quite slow, Wistia is pretty fast to load, so I wouldn’t sweat that.

It’s really the Drift live chat that’s blowing you up, and I’d probably just monitor OptinMonster and ActiveCampaign, which can be slow sometimes, but the live chat is really what’s causing that variable speed.

Live Site Speed Teardown Of A Painting Course Website

Chris Badgett: That’s a good point. So that’s the LifterLMS example. I had another one, Kathy sent through, I’m not going to try to pronounce this website, but it’s a painting site, Learn To Paint.

Brendan Tully: We had a three second load for this one. I think it was a little faster if I switch back over here, 2.8 seconds. Again, it highlights the variable nature of speed.

Chris Badgett: Do you know if the URL’s on there?

Brendan Tully: This one here, let’s reload it. I’m not sure if he’s on the call, but I just wanted him to know, he submitted his site for the list to be reviewed.

Chris Badgett: This was actually a surprise, he has a video background at the top, what you were saying to be careful about, right?

Why A Well-Built Video Background Did Not Hurt This Site’s Speed

Brendan Tully: Yeah, but we take commerciality into account. This is a site about drawing and imagery, so I’d give it a pass for it, and it’s really not affecting the speed, it’s done really well, probably one of the best I’ve ever seen in terms of a video background.

He only had a couple of issues really. He had a 1.5 megabyte site size, which is really small for this type of site given he’s dealing with images, but it took three seconds to load.

Basically his issue was time to first byte. He’s on SiteGround, which you’d expect to be fast. SiteGround is probably the fastest cheap cPanel host, one of the reasons is because they have that memcached, that memory caching for database and object caching, which gives the site so much more juice.

So he’s on SiteGround, and we would typically expect a SiteGround customer to load in about 800 milliseconds, maybe one second. I’d say maybe there’s a plugin issue, as long as he has caching set up. If not, that would fix the problem, but if he has caching already, there’s probably some other plugin interfering with the page load. Some plugins, particularly any plugin injecting code into the page, can slow the site down a lot, so there might be a plugin he has that’s causing some issue. If he gets caching set up, he should probably get in touch with us on this one.

Live Site Speed Teardown Of An Astrology Course Website

Chris Badgett: Anthony’s saying in the audience that his site is 4.59 seconds and he’s very ready for your help.

Brendan Tully: What’s his web address? Let’s do a live one.

Chris Badgett: Anthony, you’re going live here, type your web address in the chat. It’s astrologyuniversity.com.

Brendan Tully: Let’s load it up, this one here I assume. Let us know if we’ve got the right site, Anthony.

Chris Badgett: He’s saying that’s the right one.

Brendan Tully: Let’s use this North America data center for testing. Where do you live, Anthony? What country are you on?

Chris Badgett: He’s on the West Coast, US.

Brendan Tully: It’s a fairly basic site, there’s nothing that inherently should be slowing him down. Let’s see what it says. Five seconds.

Definitely slow. The page size is pretty big, at four and a half megabytes, so there might be one or two images that are really big, and 160 requests, definitely on the high side.

How Missing Caching And Slow DNS Were Costing This Site Four Seconds

Brendan Tully: Let’s interpret the results here. Like we talked about before, there’s the core of the site, which we have a lot of control over, and the third-party elements. For him, his time to first byte, the HTML file, is where it’s really slowing down, it’s taking about four seconds basically to load. It would appear he has no caching at all set up, that’s what I’d guess.

If you hover over the elements in Pingdom, the narrower they are, the faster they’re loading, and it gives a breakdown of the individual components. His DNS hosting is taking 376 milliseconds, nearly half a second to resolve the DNS. If he moved to Cloudflare, that would cut it down to ten to twenty milliseconds. There are probably two things to do: look at caching, and look at Cloudflare.

If we scroll down, you can see the hosting itself is probably good quality, because once the HTML file loads, all the other elements load really fast, 50 to 100 milliseconds, so the hosting is fine, it’s dominantly caching.

How WooCommerce Cart Fragments And Unused Plugins Add Load Time

Brendan Tully: We had a five second total load time, so he probably has a second of other elements loading up. AppSumo can be a little bit slow at times, every feature inside Sumo loads up a JavaScript file. There are a couple of things I’d look at: turn off any features in Sumo that aren’t actively being used, that will reduce the number of files it’s loading. Quite often people install Sumo, haven’t used it or looked at the features in a while, or moved on to something else, so it can just be removed.

There’s other stuff going on here too, this is very common if he’s using WooCommerce, this get-refreshed-fragments thing, that usually controls the cart icon in the header. It updates the cart icon across the site when the page loads, and quite often it doesn’t do anything. There’s a plugin that disables that. It’s 1.4 seconds of load time there. What it’s doing is the website going back to the server, sending a request, probably asking how many items are in the cart, and the server sending that back.

I didn’t see a cart icon in the header, so if we’re not using that, we can probably disable it, there are plenty of plugins called disable-cart-fragments or something along those lines that just get rid of that function, which will cut out 1.4 seconds of load. And then everything else here, this is live chat, we’ve got a lot of live chat stuff, almost all live chat tools are slow because they’re very heavy, they need several files to load, the live chat is basically a whole application, usually 10 to 20 files load to drive it. This is very common, we see all this stuff loading in the last one to two seconds of the load, live chat code and a lot of Sumo stuff.

The Simple To-Do List That Gets A Slow Site Under Two Seconds

Brendan Tully: So I’d say the to-do list would be: look at Cloudflare, sort out the page caching, make sure it’s working, if it doesn’t look like it’s working and there’s a plugin installed already, it’s probably not working. Turn off anything in Sumo that’s not actively being used, if you’re just using opt-ins and things like that, we often switch people to Thrive Leads, because it loads everything out of the WordPress instance instead of third-party servers. And then I’d look at lazy loading the live chat.

Those would be the big hit list, and that would probably get him down to around one and a half seconds, if not faster. Interpreting the results like this, just going through the list and looking at the files, anything that’s long, is a good place to start. It’s pretty clear what’s causing the speed here, because you can identify the fatter, longer lines.

Why CDN Coverage Varies By Provider And Region

Chris Badgett: You’ve got some questions rolling in. Lionel’s asking, if you’re using a CDN, does it make a difference when you’re using the speed test tools?

Brendan Tully: I’m not sure I fully understand the question, but the CDN in theory should speed up the website load. A content delivery network is a network of servers around the world, so in theory a large proportion of the website content should load off the server closest to the visitor. Different content delivery networks have different numbers of servers and work slightly differently. It should be faster, the CDN should impact speed positively, though sometimes, depending on how it’s configured, if it’s configured badly from a technical perspective, it might actually slow down the site.

Chris Badgett: Let me ask a question to help people understand, especially newer folks. I believe SiteGround is located in Eastern Europe, I could be wrong, WP Engine is based out of Austin, Texas, I don’t know where their servers are, but does a CDN essentially mean no matter where you are in the world, it’s supposed to load fast, is that the promise?

Brendan Tully: Yeah, it’ll speed things up worldwide, but there are always elements that have to be fetched from the home server, the original source, wherever it is physically. It’s always best to have that in the country where most of the visitors are, and if you’re equally worldwide, hosting somewhere in the US would be the way to go, because you’re hitting the bulk of English-speaking traffic anyway, and connectivity is generally fastest in the US.

But the CDN will speed up a lot of the website worldwide. Some CDNs don’t cover the whole world though. Max CDN, which just merged with another company, by default doesn’t have its Asia and Australia locations turned on, it’s a feature called Flex Zone. In that case, a third of the world isn’t covered by the content delivery network, so understanding the coverage of your CDN provider is important.

Chris Badgett: Adam Silver’s commenting that SiteGround the company is in Sofia, Bulgaria, and they have servers in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, and Singapore.

Brendan Tully: Yeah, that’s about right.

Why HTTP/2 Support Matters More Than Minification Plugins

Chris Badgett: Robert’s asking your thoughts on magnification plugins, I think he meant minification.

Brendan Tully: Yeah, so we generally use Autoptimize. I’d start looking in the theme settings first, because quite often the theme will do a lot of that work. I’d check through that, a lot of themes have a performance section now where you can turn on a lot of stuff that speeds up the website, that by default is turned off, or was turned off when the site was in development because it interferes with development.

Minification will help, and a lot of speed test tools focus a lot on it, but it’s a fairly marginal improvement. If you think about it, minification removes line breaks, spaces, and extra comments from code, so it compresses files very slightly, but we’re talking maybe a few hundred bytes or one or two kilobytes. The web server is already compressing it with gzip, effectively zipping the file before it sends it, so it’s already quite compressed. While speed test tools focus a lot on minification, from a practical, real-world perspective it doesn’t do that much.

What does help is combining the CSS files, if you have a lot of JavaScript and CSS, using the combining function will speed things up in some cases, but what will speed them up even more, and none of the speed test tools talk about this right now, is the HTTP/2 protocol. On the LifterLMS site, I think we had 166 things needing to download from the home page, so with version 1.1, the browser needs to make 166 connections to the server. With the newer version 2 protocol, it makes one connection, everything comes down over that single connection, so there’s much less network overhead, which gives a much more snappy feel, like the website loads really fast.

That’s one benefit of the new protocol. The other benefit is something called HTTP push, where the browser connects to the web server, starts processing and requesting files, and the web server replies and says you need these other files too, sending them without them being requested. The new protocol removes a lot of that overhead, and it supersedes some of the recommendations you’ll see around the web about minification and combining JavaScript and CSS.

When To DIY Speed Optimization Versus Hire It Out

Chris Badgett: Can you tell us more about what you offer over at WP Speed Fix? I mean, you’re educating the DIY person in this training, but what do you offer?

Brendan Tully: We’re actually in the process of changing the lineup a bit, but broadly we have three main speed packages. One is a basic, broad-strokes standard optimization, where we run through and set everything up in the best-practices format, generally for people who have a slow site and just want it fast.

Then we have a middle-layer, more ongoing optimization, where we actively look at the site, flag what needs to be fixed, and build a bit more of a strategy around making it fast. And then we have a higher-level, more consulting-type service, for bigger sites, maybe a web app or something like that, where it’s basically a consulting service, we work one-on-one with their developers or with them to work out what needs to be done to speed it up.

On a bigger site, it’s important to keep in mind that some of these are serious changes, on a web app you can’t just go changing DNS hosting because you feel like it, there’s an on-flow effect to everything plugged into that. The bigger the site, the more traffic, the bigger deal these changes are, you need real change management around some of them, you can’t just jump into WordPress and start deleting things and changing plugins as you want.

Chris Badgett: That’s a good point.