137 - Make your WordPress website load faster with Jan Koch

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In this episode:

Discussion - Make your WordPress website load faster with Jan Koch This podcast episode is all about speed. Getting your site to load as fast as possible which we all know is becoming an increasingly important topic, especially regarding your site SEO. Now there are many, many parts that go into making a website load fast. Too many in fact to spell out in great detail in a single podcast episode. Luckily though, our guest, Jan Koch, has taken much of the hard work out of finding this information and put much of it into one single blog post. There you're going to find much of what we're talking about in this episode of the WP Builds WordPress podcast. Broadly speaking we dwell on the following areas: Hosting

What should you be looking for in a host? The answer is not always about spending as much money as you possibly can, but certainly it's not about spending as little as you possibly can! Cheap, shared hosting is not going to be your best friend. It's unlikely to be optimised to run WordPress and it's also going to be pushing the absolute maximum out of the minimal infrastructure that they have dedicated to your WordPress website. You need to be asking questions of your host, or researching answers to questions such as what hardware do they store your WordPress file on - are they using SSD's? Can you have SSH access to modify the files? Are there any limits on the number of pages that they will allow to be loaded each month and is there a cap on the data that they'll send across the wire for you? Can you upgrade the site in the event of a spike in traffic, and can this be automated for you. What about backups etc. I could go on, but you get the point. Explore all of these things and get the answers that you need and then pick the host that suits your budget.

Minimal theme

Now, we're not trying to get you to use a particular theme here, but we are saying that if you want your WordPress website to load quickly, then you need to think about the theme that you're going to be using. Sure, it's beguiling to go and buy a theme that has all of the latest feature - this fancy sliding interface, and custom post types for every single possible scenario, each with their own template files to make them as interesting as possible. You can do this, sure you can, but at the expense of speed. If you want your site to load fast, you need to use a theme that is as minimal as possible. One that does what it needs and no more. You can add the 'more' later if you really need it, but you don't need all-the-things right at the start, they're going to slow you right down.

Caching

I'm no expert at caching, but safe to say that if you can make it so that the users of your website can access a cached version of your website pages, that's going to be faster than if WordPress has to build the pages each and every time they are requested. Within the different caching plugins there are many, many different options and we touch lightly on them.

• does the order of caching matter?
• reduce the number of resources loaded - merging .js and .css - careful though, this can lead to your WordPress website breaking
• test on a staging server which is the same as the original - staging
• set expire headers so that you can leverage the browser cache where possible
• Image optimisation - use the correct dimensions for your site and then strip unneeded metadata from the images - be aware of the settings. Do you want your compressions to be lossless or lossy?
• Lazy loading images can reduce the original payload from the server and allow your visitors to get fast access to your pages.

It's a very interesting discussion and I hope that you manage to get something out of it and that you have faster loading websites as a result! Mentioned in this episode: https://wpmastery.xyz/wpbuilds - Make WordPress Load Faster Than 1 Second Jan's Twitter - @iamjankoch GeneratePress Astra Page Builder Framework WP Rocket Swift Performance Smush