Transcript:
In this video, we're going to take a look at some ways to speed up
your website. One of the easiest ways is to make your images have
smaller file sizes. We're looking at a gallery here and if we click
this fish, it goes to the full size image. Now my browser is
presenting it to me in such a way that I can see the whole thing.
The image is actually much larger and, if I click again, it zooms
like this. So this is a really, really big image. Here's that same
image on my computer. If I right-click and go to get info, we can
see right here that it is 5.4 megabytes. That's a really big image.
Now we've seen in another video that WordPress actually makes
multiple versions of images when you upload them so if I
right-click on this one and view image in a new tab you'll see that
it's actually much smaller and I saved that one and that one is
only 33 K, which is really quite good. So what that tells me is
that this page itself is really going to load pretty quickly but
if people want to click and view this image it can be very tedious
if they're not on a super fast connection. So how can we make our
images smaller? This website is called Optimizilla and it is
perfect for compressing your images, reducing the amount of data
in the image while maintaining a good quality picture. Let's click
upload files and I'll upload this large one. Now, simply by
uploading it and accepting the default settings we compressed it
by 74%. Here's the original and here's our compressed. You can't
really tell the difference and you'll be able to tell even less
of a difference when it's actually shrunk, on-screen. But we can
do even better. There's a quality of 70 now. We've reduced it by
89%, we're down to 602k. If you zoom in, you still can't really
tell the difference. So let's go some more. Now you can see some
difference here but if we zoom back out you still can't really
tell. We're down to 369 K, down 93%. So now I'm going to click
download. We have fish-min. So here's fish and here's fish-min,
can't really tell the difference. Now the one that WordPress
compressed got down to 33 K but imagine if we started with
something that was already so much smaller and file size that
would get our smaller sizes down even more. Large images are the
number one thing that's slowed down your website. If you can
compress those and make them load faster, your site will go a
lot faster. The next thing we can do is called caching. WordPress
has a plug-in called WP super cache. When you load your
WordPress website, it actually talks to a database a whole bunch
of times and it builds the page every time. With a caching
plug-in, rather than build it every time, it saves it so that
the next person gets the one built by the last person. It's much,
much faster. Incredibly faster. If you expect any kind of traffic
at all on your website, I strongly recommend you get a caching
plug-in. There's an entire series at ostraining.com about cashing
your website and making it go faster. Now there's a caveat to using
a caching plugin that's very, very important. This site is hosted
on GoDaddy and GoDaddy has a built-in caching system. You can tell
because when you go under the GoDaddy icon here, there's a flush
cache. Now many WordPress specific hosts offer built-in caching.
If they do that, you don't need a plug-in and, in fact, your
plugin may cause trouble. I also recommend that you use it rather
than using a plugin. Don't try to turn it off and use your own
plugin. The one built by the host for their servers is almost
certainly going to run much more smoothly than any plugin you
could get because it was custom built for their servers. So if
you're already on GoDaddy, be sure to use their caching system
rather than another caching system. So, to summarise, the two
things that you can do to speed up your site the most are having
much smaller image file sizes and using caching. Now I say these
two as opposed to these seven or these 10 or whatever because these
two are by far the most significant advantages. There are many
more other things you can do to speed up your site but the speed
ups get much smaller the farther you get from here. Smaller images
and caching provide very dramatic differences and the great thing
is you can go back and do it now even if you already have a site.
You can go back and take your images, optimise them and re-upload
them. You can add caching at any time. So if you already have a
site or you're building from scratch, be sure to have compressed
images and a good solid caching system.