Hey guys,
Here are my notes from the Optimizing WordPress for Speed and Conversions session at Affiliate Summit East 2012 in New York by David Vogelpohl from Marketing Clique, Nicholas Reese from Microbrand Media and Willie Jackson from W3 EDGE.
Optimizing WordPress for speed and conversions can have an immediate impact on your bottom line. Learn how to turn WordPress into a revenue driving machine.
David – definitely no more than 3 seconds, really want your site to load under 2 seconds
Waterfall view – how long it takes each individual element on your website to load
Dedicated wordpress hosting – optimized for wordpress
Page.ly
zippykid
WPengine
Sign up for a CDN
– Distribute content closer to visitors
– reduce server load
Check W3C compliance
– Check W3 compliance of your website with http://validator.w3.org/ the organisation that sets the standards for HTML
Reduce Javascript
– Remove excess tracking scripts
– Consider static elements
Optimize Images – try WP Smush.it
Reduce Plugins
– Misbehaving plugins can be a big speed drain
Optimize Posts Lists
– Display excerpts not whole posts
– no need for social share buttons, they just slow down, people don’t share until they see the full post anyway
Create a mobile version
– mobile optimized CSS
Nick says – sites that have a bounce rate over 60 – 70% will drop out of the first page results, and the biggest impact on bounce rate is speed
Caching – make a static copy and serve that to the visitor next time
The PHP and interaction with the database from lots of request is what slows a site down
For the most part there is no need to have a dynamic site like CNN as you are not updating it constantly
Google found, for every ½ second of load time that’s added, search volume drops by 20%
Yahoo 400ms = 5-9% drop in traffic
Amazon – 100ms – 1% drop in sales
If Google is ranking your page high and people are bouncing back – that is a poor user experience
If your page load times are too high and those users are bouncing, that will affect your rankings
Willie says – the smaller number of resources you need to pull from to load your page the faster it will load, pulling content from all other sites like Facebook API etc slows it down
GTmetrix.com – register for an account and measure the performance of your site over time, shows a graph of how fast your site is going
Plugins / Resources to help you speed up your site:
– CW Image Optimizer
– WP Optimize – will optimize your database table and clean things up, as when you install plugins they leave things and your database builds up. Cleans out orphaned database tables.
– P3 Plugin Performance Profiler
– WordPress SEO
– Image Optim
Don’t keep any plugin active on your site when you are not using it
Drawback of shared hosting – your performance is dependant on other people who are hosted on the same server
David – said when they had a denial of service attack with 1 million page requests an hour, it took 50 sites down
Cloudfare – makes your site faster and more secure by routing DNS
Hacking groups send websites a tonne of traffic so no-one can then access it
