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  • Speeding up Your WordPress Site
  • Speeding up Your WordPress Site

Video:

 

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.