optimizing your site for holiday traffic
TRANSCRIPT
Optimizing Your Site for Holiday Traffic
Is Your Website Ready?
#wpeholidays
Your Presenters
Terell Moore Operations Engineer, WP Engine
❖ Native Austinite
❖ Site Speed Guru
❖ Wannabe Tennis Champion
Taylor DondichVP Engineering, MaxCDN
❖ Obsessed With Speed
❖ Wordpress Performance Hacker
❖ Semi-Pro Rock Band Rockstar
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What you’ll learn:
❖ Why speed matters❖ Best practices for keeping your site scalable for
peak traffic❖ How CDN can take a load off your server and
increase speed❖ Actionable tips and tricks to optimize your site
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Why Speed Matters
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Why Speed Matters
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Why Speed Matters
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How to Prep Your Site for the Holidays
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1. Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
2. Balance the Workload3. Updates
1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
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What is a server request?❖ Each asset loaded on your site
➢ Images, CSS, Javascript
1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
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Why is improving your site’s server requests important?❖ Browsers have a max parallel
requests limit❖ More requests = more time
1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
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❖ Minification & Concatenation❖ Cache❖ Image Compression❖ CDN
1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
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What is minification?❖ Removal of unneeded data or
whitespace in text files (CSS, Javascript, HTML, etc)
What is concatenation?❖ Combines multiple text-based files
into one for more efficient loading
1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
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How can you minify?❖ WordPress plugins
➢ Better WordPress Minify ➢ Autoptimize
1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
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What is cache?❖ Storing previously generated data
for faster subsequent loading
1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
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How can you cache?❖ WordPress plugins (not needed on
WP Engine)➢ W3 Total Cache➢ WP Super Cache
1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
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What is image compression?❖ Removing unneeded bytes from
image files➢ Lossy : Degrades image quality➢ Lossless : Does not degrade
quality
1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
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How to compress your images?❖ WordPress Plugins
➢ WP Smush➢ EWWW Optimizer Cloud
❖ Through your photo editor
1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
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What is a CDN?❖ Distributed servers to balance web
requests
1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests
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How to enable CDN?❖ WordPress Plugins (not needed on
WP Engine)➢ W3 Total Cache
2. How to Balance Your Site’s Workload
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❖ Balance your workload using dedicated services ➢ CDN for images, CSS, Javascript➢ Video host (i.e. YouTube, Vimeo,
etc)➢ Comments (Disqus)➢ Popular posts (Jetpack)
3. Updates
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❖ Why are updates important to speed / stability?➢ Updates are usually bug-fixes to
address performance or stability
Why CDN Matters
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Taylor DondichVP Engineering,
MaxCDN
❖ Previously @ Yahoo
❖ A constant tinkerer
❖ Obsessed with your site’s speed
About MaxCDN’s Network
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❖ WP Engine users already benefit from their partnership with MaxCDN➢ Smarter technology for faster
routing➢ 19 global “PoPs” (Points of
Presence) for shorter routes➢ Servers built for speed
About MaxCDN’s Network
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Review Of Previous Tips
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❖ Smaller requests❖ Minification (review)❖ Concat CSS and JS files (review)❖ Smaller images (review)
Additional Tips
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❖ Optimize your theme➢ Less reliance on images➢ Less widgets/helpers
❖ Reduce 3rd party Javascript libraries➢ Async vs. sync libraries
❖ Visit MaxCDN One for more WP tips
I Feel The Need. The Need For Speed.
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❖ Test your speed➢ PageSpeed Insights (Google)
■ See overall page speed■ Mobile vs. desktop■ Offers actionable suggestions
PageSpeed Example
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Getting Into The Details
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❖ Test your performance➢ WebPagetest
■ Waterfall detailed graphs■ Tests from global locations■ Test different browsers
Getting Into The Details
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Getting Into The Details
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Always Be Testing
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❖ New changes can skew your performance
❖ Always test after plugin updates!❖ Do you need that new Geewhiz?
Resources
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❖ Infographic: How Website Speed Impacts Performance http://wpengine.com/blog/site-speed-infographic/
❖ In-depth 3-part Webinar Series: How to Handle Peak Capacity & Speed Up WordPress Siteshttp://wpengine.com/speed-up-wordpress/
❖ Prepare for Holiday Traffic Tips/Links from MaxCDNhttps://www.maxcdn.com/wpengine-webinar-holiday-traffic/
More info:WP Engine MaxCDNCall Lizzie Villarreal at Live chat with
Support 512-827-3585 x3431, or Team at maxcdn.com
Chat with a rep at wpengine.com
Want to follow today’s speakers? Terell - @tee_rail
Taylor - @TDondich
Q&A
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