“I Feel The Need, The Need For Speed…”

Optimizing Your Website for Speed

We have designed and host a large number of websites, and the Top Gun mantra was often shouted in our team meetings. To accommodate, we upgraded to a new service with GoDaddy. The upgrade, however, limited some of the available resources. The resource limitations were causing some websites to crash. It was extremely frustrating, until we found a way to minimize resource usage, allowing us to optimize for speed.

All our sites are now faster. And we are on a platform that supports the newer version of PHP (the core coding platform for WordPress).

These are steps our tech team took:

• We removed some plugins that were running in the background, including Google XML, Wordfence, and Akismet.
• We added WP Super Cache, a plugin that generates static html code from the dynamic WordPress content. After the html is generated, visitors will process the html rather than the heavier PHP scripts.
• We modified the timing of the automated backups so that they would run in off hours, at staggered intervals.
• We added a robots.txt file to every site to reduce the frequency of webcrawlers.
• We ran WP Smush on websites with a lot of images, to optimize the image sizes.

In plain English…the work delivered 3 benefits:

1. Our sites are faster.
2. Our sites use far less resources.
3. Our sites are more appealing to the search engines, because page speed matters.

If you need help in getting your sites to be faster, more stable and better at attracting customers, we’re here to help. (Cue: Highway to the Danger Zone…)