mat t hewwo o dward.co .ukhttp://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/site-speed-is-money-how-i-earnt-30587-in-6-hours/

Matthew Woodward

Site Speed Is Money – How I Earnt $30,587 In 6 Hours

Matthew Woodward - Tried & Tested SEOYour slow website is costing you more money thanyou think.

A one second delay in load t ime decreasesconversions by 7%!

But what does that actually translate into f or this blog specif ically?

Let’s take a look at the conversion loss calculator to measure how much money the blog is missing out onevery day because of page- load times.

I suggest you do it f or your own site as well!

Woah! So reducing site speed by 3 seconds will result in an extra $29,076 per year prof it!

Even if I could reduce it by just a second I can make an extra $8,988 a year!

That’s a whole bunch of money I’m leaving on the table! More than some people earn in a year that I’m throwingaway by not making a f ew simple changes.

There are numerous case studies and reports on how site speed directly inf luences conversion rate.

How To Measure Site Speed

You can use a couple of f ree tools to measure the speed of your site f rom various locations.

WebPageTest.org – This has a huge amount of locations and browser choices.

Pingdom – A much simpler / lightweight approach to testing your site speed.

I actually use both tools to measure my sites speed. I use WebPageTest af ter each optimisation step toensure I haven’t increased the load time by mistake and I use Pingdom bef ore and af ter the speed optimisationis complete.

You also need to consider where your audience is located – f or the most part my readers are USA/UK based

with India taking the 3rd spot so I made sure I measured the site speed f rom each of those locations.

How To Make Your Site Load Faster

So now you know how slow your website is and how much money your losing everyday it ’s t ime to f ix that!

Here is my original Pingdom test-

And here is the same test, f rom the same location af ter my optimisation-

I reduced my load time by 4.37 seconds to just half a second which puts me at least $29,076 better of f thisyear.

Not bad f or a day’s work!

So let’s take a look at exactly what I did to achieve that and precisely how each step af f ected load time.

Testing Details

For the purpose of the granular testing af ter making each change I used WebPageTest.org.

The reason f or this is because it allows me to test f rom more locations with dif f erent browsers and run 5tests back to back to get an ‘average’ result.

I decided to monitor how my changes af f ected 3 key pages of the site-

Original Performance

Bef ore we start the test let’s measure how each of the 3 pages currently perf orm.

Page Miami London Delhi

Home 5.682s 5.121s 7.022s

Tutorial 7.974s 9.682s 9.127s

Forum 5.802s 5.583s 6.728s

Update WordPress & Plugins

The f irst step in my speed optimisation was to update to the latest version ofWordPress and update all of the plugins.

Always make a backup of your site bef ore doing this or making any other changesto your site.

To perf orm the updates just click on Dashboard > Updates and f ollow theinstructions

Time Saved

Page Miami Time Saving London Time Saving Delhi Time Saving

Home 5.293s -0.389s 4.772s -0.349s 6.492s -0.530s

Tutorial 7.799s -0.175s 8.173s -1.509s 9.127s -0.103s

Forum 5.894s +0.092s 5.594s +0.011s 6.520s -0.208s

Well that took about 60 seconds to do and already the site is loading 0.35 seconds f aster on average acrossall of the tests.

Just another 0.65 seconds towards the f irst 1 second goal which is worth $8,988 to me!

WPEngine

Next I decided it was time to move away f rom my cheap shared hosting to a much more robust andprof essional host.

Af ter a lot of research and reading I settled on WPEngine.com – WordPress & speed is their specialty.

They have some f antastic f eatures such as a CDN, automatic daily backups, one click backup/restore,separate ‘staging’ area to test changes without af f ecting the live site and a bunch of other stuf f .

They have their own custom written hardware based caching system so there is no need f or separate cachingplugins like W3 Total Cache f or example.

The servers run Nginx which is much f aster than Apache and resources scale based on demand so your sitenever slows down even if it hits big spikes of traf f ic.

And last but not least, they were providing near instant support on Christmas Day!

But how did the move af f ect the load time of the site?

Time Saved

Page Miami Time Saving London Time Saving Delhi Time Saving

Home 3.888s -1.405s 4.166s -0.606s 5.646s -0.846s

Tutorial 6.788s -1.011s 4.527s -3.646s 7.304s -1.720s

Forum 4.764s -1.130s 4.966s -0.628s 5.82s -0.700s

WOW! – That’s an average saving of 1.299 seconds!

Just a 1 second improvement is worth $8,988 a year, so a 1.299 second improvement is worth about $11,600!

Not bad f or a $29 per month investment & it took less than an hour to move my blog over to WPEngine!

Total Time Saved – 1.649 secondsTotal Extra Income – $14,821

Content Delivery Network

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps speed up your site by making sure things like your CSS and image f ilesare mirrored all over the world.

So when someone in India requests your webpage they connect to a local server in India making things niceand f ast!

This is a great way to ensure your site loads quickly no matter where the user is in the world!

It costs an extra $19.95 per month with WPEngine on their cheapest package and is included f ree of charge onall others.

Time Saved

Page Miami Time Saving London Time Saving Delhi Time Saving

Home 3.476s -0.412s 3.762s -0.404s 5.040s -0.606s

Tutorial 6.237s -0.551s 4.258s -0.269s 6.439s -0.865s

Forum 4.204s -0.560s 4.133s -0.833s 5.378s -0.442s

So with the CDN enabled we managed to shave an extra 0.549 seconds of f the load time! So f ar so good andthat takes us past the 2 second savings goal!

Total Time Saved – 2.198 secondsTotal Extra Income – $20,840

Remove Facebook Comments

I have thought about removing the Facebook comments system quite a lot recently f or a number of reasons.Originally I used Facebook comments with the intention of them driving extra traf f ic f rom Facebook, Socialactivity and adding a bit more ‘authenticity’ to the blog.

However a lot of you guys get put of f leaving a comment as you tend to like maintaining a separate personaland business lif e.

Secondly the comments section is a key area f or conversion when setup correctly but I haven’t got round tomaking those changes just yet.

So Facebook comments were removed and I used this plugin (enable it then open every page on your site) tocopy all of the comments f rom Facebook into my WordPress comments database so I didn’t lose any of them.

Time Saved

Page Miami Time Saving London Time Saving Delhi Time Saving

Home 3.105s -0.371s 3.401s -0.361s 4.879s -0.161s

Tutorial 5.070s -1.167s 4.001s -0.257s 6.027s -0.412s

Forum 3.924s -0.280s 3.928s -0.205s 5.104s -0.274s

That makes f or yet another average saving of 0.387 seconds!

So in ef f ect having Facebook comments on my site was actually costing me roughly $3,700 a year f or thesacrif ice in page load time.

So much f or them being ‘f ree’ to use!

Total Time Saved – 2.585 secondsTotal Extra Income – $24,598

Nearly at the 3 second goal now!

Code Optimisation

Now it is important f or me to point out that I suck at coding in a big way. So with that in mind someone thatknows how to write code could probably have done a much better job.

Anyway the aim of the game here is reduce the total size of the page, the number of HTTP requests and tomake sure Javascript is loaded asynchronously so it doesn’t block the rest of the page f rom loading.

Here is precisely what I did-

1. Plugin CSS – All CSS that was dynamically inserted by plugins was moved to the themes stylesheetusing this tutorial.

2. Plugin Javascript – Exactly the same step as above but f or the Javascript (I did a particularly poor jobon this)

3. Async Java Loading – I made sure Javascript was loaded asynchronously and updated social mediasharing buttons. You could probably use this plugin and this one.

4. Optimised Javascript/CSS – I used this site and this one. Although this plugin might work f or you.

5. Google JQuery – I loaded JQuery f rom Google

6. Unused Plugins – I deleted all unused plugins

7. Removed Analytics – I was running Google Analytics, Statcounter & Clicktale – I removed Statcounterand Clicktale

8. Optimise Database – I ran WP Optimize to make sure the database was as lean as it could be.

Time Saved

Page Miami Time Saving London Time Saving Delhi Time Saving

Home 2.943s -0.162s 3.250s -0.151s 4.445s -0.434s

Tutorial 3.395s -1.675s 3.828s -0.173s 5.598s -0.429s

Forum 3.768s -0.156s 3.921s -0.007s 4.974s -0.130s

So all of that comes out to an average saving of 0.368 seconds adding another f ew thousands dollars ontothe annual total.

I’m sure someone that knows what they are doing could do much better though! I plan on hiring someone toperf orm this step once I have f inished tweaking the blog to my liking the coming weeks.

I have already made some changes that have undone parts of my code optimisation.

Total Time Saved – 2.953 secondsTotal Extra Income – $28,072

Image Optimisation

You can usually reduce the f ile sizes of images substantially without sacrif icing on quality. This will mean usershave to download less data each time they hit your page.

First of all I downloaded my entire site and ran it through the JPEG Reducer which is a great piece of f reesof tware. Once that was done I uploaded all the f iles.

Then I installed WP Smush.it to bulk compress again to ensure maximum savings were made.

Once you have ran the Smush.it plugin please disable and remove it, leaving it enabled actually slows your sitedown!

Time Saved

Page Miami Time Saving London Time Saving Delhi Time Saving

Home 2.835s -0.108s 2.912s -0.338s 4.292s -0.153s

Tutorial 3.192s -0.203s 3.814s -0.014s 5.344s -0.254s

Forum 3.516s -0.252s 3.697s -0.224s 4.688s -0.286s

With all of the images optimised that amounts to a f urther saving of 0.203 seconds on average which takes uspast our 3 second goal!

Total Time Saved – 3.156 secondsTotal Extra Income – $30,587

Wrapping It Up

So in just 6 hours with a f ew simple changes I was able to shave 3.156 seconds off the average load time ofthe site which will results in an extra $30,587 profit because of the increase in conversion rate this will bring.

Not bad f or 6 hours work huh?

The biggest change came with the move to WPEngine and enabling the CDN service which took less than anhour!

Those changes on their own accounted f or an 1.848 second improvement which is worth roughly $17,910 tomy bottom line prof its per year.

Granted my hosting now costs $48.95 per month instead of $0.99 per month but I think I can swallow thatexpense

That only leaves one thing to do – a litt le jiggy dance in celebration!

Page by Page Summary

For all you data geeks check out how each change af f ected each pages load time step by step.

Homepage

Miami Time Saving London Time Saving Delhi Time Saving

Original 5.682s - 5.121s - 7.022s -

Update WordPress 5.293s -0.389s 4.772s -0.349s 6.492s -0.530s

WPEngine 3.888s -1.405s 4.166s -0.606s 5.646s -0.846s

CDN 3.476s -0.412s 3.762s -0.404s 5.040s -0.606s

Facebook Comments 3.105s -0.371s 3.401s -0.361s 4.879s -0.161s

Code Optimisation 2.943s -0.162s 3.250s -0.151s 4.445s -0.434s

Image Optimisation 2.835s -0.108s 2.912s -0.338s 4.292s -0.153s

Tutorial Page

Miami Time Saving London Time Saving Delhi Time Saving

Original 7.974s - 9.682s - 9.127s -

Update WordPress 7.799s -0.175s 8.173s -1.509s 9.024s -0.103s

WPEngine 6.788s -1.011s 4.527s -3.646s 7.304s -1.720s

CDN 6.237s -0.551s 4.258s -0.269s 6.439s -0.865s

Facebook Comments 5.070s -1.167s 4.001s -0.257s 6.027s -0.412s

Code Optimisation 3.395s -1.675s 3.828s -0.173s 5.598s -0.429s

Image Optimisation 3.192s -0.203s 3.814s -0.014s 5.344s -0.254s

Forum Post

Miami Time Saving London Time Saving Delhi Time Saving

Original 5.802s - 5.583s - 6.728s -

Update WordPress 5.894s -0.092s 5.594s -0.011s 6.520s -0.208s

WPEngine 4.764s -1.130s 4.966s -0.628s 5.820s -0.700s

CDN 4.204s -0.560s 4.133s -0.833s 5.378s -0.442s

Facebook Comments 3.924s -0.280s 3.928s -0.205s 5.104s -0.274s

Code Optimisation 3.768s -0.156s 3.921s -0.007s 4.974s -0.130s

Image Optimisation 3.516s -0.252s 3.697s -0.224s 4.688s -0.286s