Speed Up WordPress Websites - Part 1 - WordPress Cairo Meetup

Editor's Notes

• #4: Page load time is the duration between clicking the link and displaying the entire content from the web page on the requesting browser.
• #6: Test multiple times until you see everything is loading from cache
• #9: You can't treat all WordPress sites the same when it comes to performance. Static and highly dynamic sites are two very different beasts!
• #17: We can’t dig into HTTP/2 technical stuff, but it has so many feature that make your website performance and the communication with the hosting server much much better.
• #18: Network Latency: Network latency refers to the time and or delay that is involved in the transmission of data over a network. In other words, how long it takes for a packet of data to go from one point to another. TTFB: stands for time to first byte. To put it simply, this is a measurement of how long the browser has to wait before receiving its first byte of data from the server.
• #20: All you need to do to start using Cloudflare is to 1- Create a cloudflare account, it’s free. 2- Change your nameservers to the nameservers provided by Cloudflare
• #21: Image optimization is another straightforward thing you can do which has a significant impact on your overall page load times. This isn’t optional; every site should be doing this! According to HTTP Archive, as of November 2018, images make up on average of 21% of a total webpage’s weight.
• #22: You can
• #24: PNG always comes in a large size, use it for simple images. Like screenshots, images with less colors. Use JPEG for colorful images. As you can apply both lossy and lossless optimization techniques to it. WebP is a new image format introduced by Google. Still not supported by all browsers. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images
• #25: By the way, WordPress compress each and every JPEG image you upload to your WordPress site. You can disable this feature if you want or set the compression ratio add_filter( 'jpeg_quality', create_function( '', 'return 100;' ) );
• #27: These are a network of servers (also known as POPs) located around the globe. They are designed to host and deliver copies of your WordPress site’s static (and sometimes dynamic) content such as images, CSS, JavaScript, and video streams.
• #28: Traditional pull CDNs cache a copy of all of your content and media, but a request from the client is still made directly to your hosting provider. KeyCDN and CDN77 are examples of traditional CDNs. A reverse proxy CDN is slightly different. While it still acts likes a CDN, it intercepts all incoming requests and acts as an intermediary server between the client and your host. Cloudflare and Sucuri are examples of reverse proxy CDNs. This is one reason why you have to point your DNS directly to these providers instead of your host.
• #31: Faster Delivery With Caching: CDN has its own cache and it caches your asstes
• #33: With a CDN the original data still resides at your host, the CDN simply has multiple copies of it. When caching expires on your CDN assets it re-queries your host for the latest copies of the files. CDNs are meant to cache files for long periods of time. But due to the fact that they have so many POPs, there could be a lot of re-querying going on as cache expires in different regions. Offload Media When you offload media or files it means actually moving the original physical location of them off of your hosting provider. So while it might appear that the files are served from your site, they are really located somewhere else entirely. Besides reducing additional queries back to the host, the number one reason obviously is to also save on disk space.