WordPress website speed gains: Hosting by WpEnigne and DNS by DNSMadeEasy
This is how I built one of the fastest WordPress websites ever made!
WordPress Speed Up Optimisation Blueprint
The WordPress Speed UP Optimisation Blueprint (oldest: Version 1 newest: Version 2) makes WordPress websites load LIGHTENING QUICK! The process steps have been specially designed to assist “non developers” (someone who has been using WordPress for a while but isn’t a full time WordPress developer) to build their own super fast WordPress website without calling on the expertise of a WordPress developer.
Why?
Firstly, this often requires more assets to be added to the WordPress website than necessary which makes the website load slower. Secondly, it takes a long time to build a WordPress website and then undo alot of code to make it run well – not to mention finding good plugins amongst a sea of other plugins is a big challenge. There’s also another downside: steps 2. and 3. often take longer than step 1. even for professional WordPress developers. Finally after completion of the 3 steps the outcome may not even be an efficient high speed WordPress website. For example: if your WordPress theme uses critical assets and you eliminate the critical assets in step 3. will your WordPress website function? Probably not. Unfortunately, I’ve learnt this lesson the hard way when I was a junior WP developer many years ago (on more than one occasion).
My motivation behind building one of the fastest WordPress websites in the World
I’ve been a WordPress developer for over 12 years and during my time I’ve read a lot of mis-information online when it comes to WordPress hosting, WordPress speed enhancement and performance gains. My motivation is simple: to help WordPress website owners who want to build a fast WordPress website to actually do it themselves. I’ve created the WordPress Speed Up Optimisation Blueprint to assist them.
Update Log
WordPress updates are released and WP API changes. We have made the following changes to maintain a super fast WordPress website.
Update 25th December 2018:
- Page Speed on Pingdom: 133 ms (0.024 speed gain)
- GTMetrix website speed test results: 210ms from location: London
- Google PageSpeed Insights score 100/100 on mobile and desktop
- Installed Twenty Nineteen WordPress Theme
- Installed SpeedThemeWP.com Plugin
- Updated WordPress to WordPress 5.0.2–en_GB (automatically)
- A higher speed WP website was achieved in a few minutes! The theme and the plugin did all the work without requiring any coding. Awesome 🙂
- Activated all of the SpeedThemeWP.com settings in my dashboard but decided not to add a favicon (fewer requests = faster website)
- Disabled the Genesis Child Theme and removed both the parent and child theme. I deleted these too.
- I finally added the WP Optimize plugin to my website, ran all the options and then disabled and removed it.
- As a result of removing the Genesis theme we’ve lost the shortcode header and css styled buttons – but the site is loading faster!
- Users that wish to replicate this for themselves need: WpEngine hosting, DNSMadeEasy DNS, Twenty Nineteen Theme and my own SpeedThemeWP plugin!
- HTML header is much more minimal (resulting in a fractional page speed increase!)
Code snippet of header:
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en-GB">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
<link rel="profile" href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/11" />
<title>:)</title>
<link rel='stylesheet' id='twentynineteen-style-speed-theme-optimised-css' href='...twenty19.min.css' type='text/css' media='all' />
<script type='text/javascript' src='...jquery.js'></script>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.wpspeedupoptimisation.com/" />
</head>
- The HTML footer is minimal tool.
Code snippet of footer:
<script type='text/javascript' defer src='...script.min.js'></script>
<script>
/(trident|msie)/i.test(navigator.userAgent)&&document.getElementById&&window.addEventListener&&window.addEventListener("hashchange",function(){var t,e=location.hash.substring(1);/^[A-z0-9_-]+$/.test(e)&&(t=document.getElementById(e))&&(/^(?:a|select|input|button|textarea)$/i.test(t.tagName)||(t.tabIndex=-1),t.focus())},!1);
</script>
</body>
</html> - Permanently disabled the WPEngine CDN – it was resulting in a 99% mobile page speed score
- The WordPress Speed Up Optimisation Blueprint V2 has been published.
THE INFORMATION BELOW IS NOW OUT OF DATE BUT PUBLISHED FOR REFERENCE TO SHOW THE SPEED IMPROVEMENT JOURNEY
Update 14th July 2018:
The WpSpeedUpOptimisation.com WordPress website has a premium DNS provider, a high performance hosting package and it runs the Genesis Framework Parent Theme alongside my very own customised Speed Optimised Genesis Child Theme. The Genesis Speed Optimised Child Theme is available to download on my blog tutorial article. All of the steps in the WordPress Speed Up Optimisation Blueprint are concise and easily to follow and include links to the service providers that helped me to achieve real WordPress speed gains. Within my article I’ve included the speed test results demonstrating real website speed gains.
Where do I get one like this?
The fast WordPress theme, the WordPress speed optimisation steps and the WordPress speed up steps AKA “The WordPress Speed Up Optimisation Blueprint” are available on my website for free.
If you want a faster than standard WordPress website, follow the tutorial steps.
Update on 20th July 2018 (below)
Post WordPress Speed Up Optimisation Blueprint discovery after adding more content…
Since launching and adding more content into the WordPress CMS we’ve seen our speed decrease slightly (as expected).
These speed tests were taken after the final podcast once the WPSpeedUpOptimisation.com website had more content in the CMS:
208 ms (0.208 seconds) – Page Load Speed From London – GTMetrix.com [23rd July 2018]
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.wpspeedupoptimisation.com/MgpxeZvU
308 ms (0.308 seconds) – Page Load Speed From Sweden – Pingdom.com [20th July 2018]
https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/dwcOg1/https://www.wpspeedupoptimisation.com
These findings identify: as a site matures and more content is loaded into a WordPress Dashboard (new posts and pages etc) – it is highly likely that the web page load speed will become slightly slower due to the additional time required searching through a larger database of content. The time taken to do this is longer than if there was just 1 web page of content in the mysql database.
The two speed tests (links above) were taken after the final podcast on 20th July 2018.
About the author:
More websites made by the author: bootspeedwp.com – Bootstrap and WordPress in a speed optimised parent theme, childthemewp.com – one of the largest WordPress child libraries in the World, slibdesign.com – WordPress web developer (London based), slibstream.com – WordPress fix tips by Ben and ultimatebanners.co – large format signage printing with next day delivery.