WordPress Optimization

facilitated by Ria and Andrea

notes by Genevieve

Cloud Flare

• Free and paid plans
• Security
• CDN = Content delivery network. Reroutes websites to different servers around the world - deliver your website from local proximity server

Speed of delivery

• Speed of delivery factors in Google optimization algorithms
• jQuery - loading just specific files on the CDN

Fonts

• Complicated! Google fonts?
• Security - better to load your own fonts from your own server, but it varies from site to site.

Cruft

• Cruft = Something extraneous - code that is left around, perhaps for a prior use, but no longer relevant

Lazy loading

• Browser will load anything being brought on the page - rolling layers of dynamic loading
• XT - really easy on WordPress plugin
• Recommended to LazyLoad Facebook and Twitter feeds
• Google Translate - slows by seconds, decreases optimization
• Resetting sizes of images impacts load time -> lazy

Metadata

• Stripping out metadata
• Services for lossless compression
• Takes out backend information that is not necessary to view image -> increases load efficiency

PDFs

• PDFs are tricky because they are heavy
• Perhaps use a third party service or a java script library
• PDFs are proprietary!
• Optimize your PDF file for web view
• Can use third party plug-ins

Other Optimization Tips

• Build systems that auto-scale images, or other optimizers
• Responsive image
• Look for WordPress 4.4!
• SourceSet - standardization of image optimization
• Using transparent PNG -> Ratios of images, placeholder space -> Background frames, containers

Videos

• Lazy load the videos
• API set up to get the thumbnail
• jQuery load thumbnail, then load bigger file if/when user activates

Cache

• WordPress Supercache
• Dynamic sites -> Supercaching goes straight to cache instead of connecting = database calls
• Use plug-ins to manage/delete caching
• WP-CLI = more advanced command line

P3

• P3 - Plug-in performance profiler
• Interprets WordPress plugins' performances
• Back-ups redundancy!
• By GoDaddy :-(

Hosting providers

• Electric Embers co-op
  • Highly recommended
  • Reliable, small, do not have a control - minimal but dev-friendly.
  • Becoming WordPress hosting providers (always up on WordPress progress)
• Flywheel (Based in Nebraska)
• WordPress Engine - recommended

Traffic

• Whole other level of SEO consideration
• Levels of traffic can be critical with active usage
• Must have CDN, supercaching, etc.