 But welcome to speeding up WordPress. So before we get started, real quick, I do quite a bit of things. So since we're late, I'm not going to dive into all this. But I teach web development. And I also own an agency that we create digital marketing products, such as plugins and various SaaS apps as well as an agency side where we have clients. So let's get to the actual why we're here. So why does speed matter? Has anyone heard that speed matters for SEO? Has anyone heard that before? OK, yes. That's a huge factor. When it comes to SEO, almost every search engine optimization, almost every search engine, almost everything out there has speed as a factor. So that's a really big factor. But maybe you don't care about that for whatever reason. It also, many, many studies have shown that your conversion rate is also dependent on speed. So for example, if you're selling something or you're trying to get someone to sign up for your email list or you're trying to get them to download your e-book or do something on your website, for every second you have a drastic decrease in the amount of people that do what you want them to do. So in today's session, we're going to go over things you can do to speed up your website. So I already mentioned that. So we'll go on. So when it comes to conversions, there's a few stats I just want to throw at you real quick. Walmart found that when page load increased to four seconds, conversions decreased dramatically. So even four seconds reduces your time frame. Now Google hopes you to be loading under a second. That is what they look for. A lot of us are probably not there yet. But that is the goal is to get it loading less than a second. Now, 79% of dissatisfied customers will not come back if the site is slow. So if you have a slight site and it sounds really interesting, they try to go to it and it's really slow, four out of five people will not try to go back later. They'll see it. They're like, oh, I don't want to go that site. That's site slow. They'll move on. 47% of customers expect pages to load within two seconds. So if you test your site and you're at three or four seconds, then you're losing over half the people that could be going to your website. And then lastly, 16% are willing to wait up to five seconds on a mobile page. So if your site is taking a while to load, most people on mobile phone will leave your website. So those are some numbers to help back up why we care about speed. So hopefully that's somewhat convincing since we're rushed to that part. But if not, it is really important to have your site fast. And that's why we're focusing on it today. So the very first thing we need to do before you can actually know what you need to do to improve your site is to figure out how fast it is and what it's currently performing at. And to do that, there's a few tools we can use to figure that out. So on the screen, I have a couple tools that are listed. These are my personal favorites, but there's actually hundreds of them. If you were to Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo website speed test, you're going to find hundreds of them. But the ones that tend to be the better ones are the ones listed on the screen. So we have Pingdom. And this is a nice free tool. It's tools.pingdom.com. GTmetrics is nice. It's gtmetrics.com. They also have a WordPress specific test. So if you enable the WordPress option there, they'll give you some data and tips based around WordPress sites. So that's really handy. Google page speed insights. This is really nice because it's by Google. So they know what they're looking for for their search engine. So probably the things they're highlighting there is probably things they care about in their search results. So that's one that I like to use as well. Lastly, if you're somewhat familiar with the developer tools in most browsers, they also have a speed test there. That's a little bit more technical, so I'm not going to go over that part today. But we are going to look at Pingdom in just a moment. Does anyone have questions on those before I dive into one of those? Any questions so far? Great. So if the internet's going to play, I'm going to attempt to run through one of these. And while that's loading, if it loads, most of these work exactly the same way. You just type in your URL, and then hit Scan. And they'll come back with a grade rating. So usually it's A, or B, or C, or D, or E, or F. Sometimes it's on a 0 to 100 scale, and it just gives you a number. Yes? Yes. So the Google developer tools, I don't think that's going to load, but the Google developer tools, what that does is just reloads the page using the browser itself. So your internet speed will play factor there. Whereas these other three tools, they use their server to run it. So you're going to get slightly different numbers depending on what your internet connectivity is. It's good to probably do both. If you know how to do both, it'd probably be best to do both. But does that answer your question? OK, great. So we'll let that run. We'll just jump back to the slides for now and see that ever comes out. So when it comes to these numbers or grade scale, they're going to give you a variety of things that you need to look into. And we're going to go over some of those terms today. But the very first thing that matters when it comes to speed is your host thing. If you go and find host thing on a provider that advertises $0.99 a month or free, you're probably not going to have a fast site. So speed matters a lot. And hosting providers know that. And the really good ones maintain their servers. And they give you really good resources. They do a lot of things. But if you're paying for really cheap hosting or free hosting, they're not doing that for your site. So that's something to consider. Now you can get inexpensive hosting for relatively cheap from good companies. Most of the sponsors here have plans starting at $5 or $6 a month. So you don't have to spend hundreds to get good host thing. But if you're spending $1 or $0.99, it's probably not going to be good hosting. And when it comes to this, I'm not going to get super technical right here. But when it comes to hosting, when you're looking at it, things like the bandwidth levels, the resources, the RAM, the memory, even the site storage and the type of storage it's on, all of those numbers matter. So if you're looking at hosting and you're comparing different numbers, and one says maybe two cores, one says eight cores, you don't have to actually understand how all these work. But knowing the higher the number is usually better means more resources are behind your website. So for example, you might not know exactly how the memory works, but if something says, oh, you have 512 megabytes, and the other one says you have 5 gigs, that's good. Usually the higher is better. Same thing with the cores, same thing with a lot of the other numbers. So looking for higher capacity servers in your hosting plan will help tremendously in the long run. A lot of the things we're going to go over is going to help a lot. But having good hosting should always be the very first step. Does that make sense? Does anyone have questions on that? Does anyone want to ask about a particular hosting provider? I don't want to recommend one because I know there's a lot of people, but yes. They're OK. I've had really bad experiences with them, but they are a really good sponsor in this space, so I don't want to say really bad things. But they're OK. They're definitely not the worst, but they're OK. Luckily, the ones that I consider the worst are not sponsors today. So I can say the I-page and one-on-one tend to be the worst in speed tests and security tests and everything else you can think of. And they're the ones that advertise $0.99 a month. That's why I throw out those. But as long as you're not on those two, usually you're at least a step up. Yes? That's a good one. It's a little bit costlier. So I don't know. That might not be in everyone's budget. But WP Engine, if you're looking for the best, the managed WP hosts tend to be really good. So Pagely, WP Engine, Flywheel, A2 host things starting up their own version. So those tend to be really good on the higher end, but they also are a little bit pricier. So that depends on your budget. Does anyone have a yes? I'm sorry? LiquidWeb's really good too. So most of the ones that you see around the WordCamps tend to be really good. So we see LiquidWeb a lot. We see DreamHost is OK. And we see it. So most of those tend to be OK. Pressable's a really good one. Yes? That's a good mid-tier one. So for the price, it's really good. So that one's OK. Hey, Frank. Yes? So what's interesting is, so we look at this lower one, and we go, wow, $3.95 a month. Well, the middle one, that's $6.95 a month. That's like double the cost. $6.95. I mean, come on, people. Let's spend $10 a month, or $15 or $20. You're paying for better performance. And so we think, well, this one's twice as expensive, and we're talking about dollars here. When it comes to, depending on your budget, that's why I try to throw in a variety of options. Like SiteGround starts off $6.95 a month, and then DreamHost and Bluestar like $4.95 a month. So if your budget's non-existent or really small, those are going to be OK. If that's what your budget is, those are fine. But if you can, if this business matter is super important to you, and you're making some money off of it, get it going on a slightly higher plan is probably a good idea. But I'm not going to say you have to do that, because not everyone has that kind of budget. So just to clarify. So there's a lot of terms with hosting. And I've given talks on this before, and it's like entire talks around types of hosting. So I'm going to just send a quick soundbite answer. You have a variety of different types of hosting. So you have shared hosting, you have VPS, you have dedicated, virtual, they have a whole other term for it. They manage hosting and dedicated servers. Each one has an extra level of resources and dedication to your site. So when you're on shared hosting, such as on HostGator or the lower tiers of Bluehost and Dreamhost, then if you have some site and a person next to you has some site, and they have a lot of traffic one day, they're using some of your resources, slowing down your website. So that's where shared hosting is can be a downside, but they're also the cheapest. So depending on your budget, it's a great place to get started, as long as you're on an OK host. And then once you can move up to something such as the use cloud, but almost technically all of these are in the cloud, so it's a loose definition there. But if you can transition up to a more virtual system, so SiteGround has dedicated virtualization, so your resources aren't being used by other people's resources. And some of the higher plans on Bluehost and Dreamhost, they have those as options. So that would be where you would move up into one of those better ones, depending on what your budget is. But when you see the word cloud, that's such a thrown around term that some people even label shared hosting as cloud, or dedicated servers. So don't worry about that term. I would ignore that term in those cases. Any other questions on hosting before we go to the next? Oh, yes. So WordPress.com is a slightly different beast when it comes to hosting. They're really good in terms of, if you had to have a map of all the different hosting providers, WordPress.com would be at least in the middle, if not higher. So they're an OK one, depending on what your goals are with the business. Last one. That was a really fun one. It's a little bit more technical, so not everyone's going to be able to jump into that one. But that's good. Usually when it comes to S3, SES, and light sale on all the Amazon properties, they tend to be really good. So after you establish some hosting provider that you are comfortable with and you think they're going to be fast, the next major factor is your theme. And this is a fun number. If you have a good theme and you have a bad theme, a bad theme can make your site four times as slow as the good theme equivalent. So that's massive. If your site could be loading under a second, and you switch to a bad theme, now it's loading at four seconds. Now 84% of the mobile users are leaving your site. So that's a dramatic change that's really important. So when it comes to themes, you want to select a good theme. Finding quality theme providers. So I listed three, but these are just three out of hundreds, so I don't feel like you have to use these exact three. But I want to list some examples. Finding a good theme developer or a good theme agency is very important. Now when it comes to repository, if you're finding a free theme, it's not something that you could easily be like, oh, who's this developer? What's the quality? There's a little bit more to it than that. So the thing I suggest is running the theme demos through one of those speed tests. So almost every theme you find, whether it's on theme forest or repository, they usually have a site somewhere set up as a demo. So if you run that through a speed test and compare that to another theme's demo, you can speed test both those and see if maybe one's potentially faster. Now the issue is that there's a lot of factors that play there. There's their own hosting provider. Maybe some options they have. So it's not an exact one-to-one test. That's a great way to get started in comparing themes in terms of speed. Does that make sense, everyone? Yes. I haven't played with it yet because it's fairly new. But when it comes to studio press, usually I trust most of the things they do. But I haven't personally played with it, so I don't have any data for you. Any question on testing a theme or what to look for? Yes. Yes, the Divi builder line. So the company's elegant theme, so I just list that so most of the themes there tend to be really good as well. So a few slides ago, I had the four listed. So you could do the Pingdom and enter the URL from the theme demo is what I'm referring to. Yeah, so there's a plug-in and a couple of things out there that test the quality of code. It tends to be a little bit more technical, so I don't want to throw out too many terms that are a little confusing. But if you're interested, we can maybe chat afterwards. So the theme now, when it comes to the actual theme features, since there's so many different themes and they all have different functions, I can't dive into every single particular theme right now. But the first thing to test is that speed test and then going from there. And then a couple of things to remember is usually if a theme has more features and more customizations, there's a lot more processing going on the background, meaning they'll probably be slower. So when it comes to themes and you're picking out themes, it's better in most cases to choose one theme that does something really well, like a photography theme, and they only have photography, as opposed to a general purpose theme that has thousands upon thousands of options. Because when you configure all those different options, now it has to process all those options when you're loading the page. Now, not all things. Some things do things really well. The Avada theme, for example, has thousands of options. And they do things a little bit different, so they're better than some of the more general purpose themes. So that's not all themes are bad in that case. But it'd be something to consider. More features it has means more processing it has to do, meaning it generally could be slower than a single purpose theme. Does that make sense? Yes? So AVAD8, one of the most popular premium themes out there, and yes. I don't personally like it, but I know it's so popular, so I try not to say anything bad against it. But what's nice, they're much better now. Two years ago, they had all the code would run all of the time, so it was a really bad theme. But since they have more modularized it, so you can turn off entire feature sets. So that's a good step. They'll never be faster than a single purpose theme, though, because of those options. But they are when it general purpose, they're one of the better ones. Any questions on that before I? Yes? Oh, sure. So the three examples I had listed were studio press, elegant themes, and i-themes. Now i-themes has started to discontinue their themes. They're moving away from themes. But those are three as an example. Usually those are good quality. But there's lots of good quality ones out there, too. So any questions on themes before we? Page rollers are a really big topic right now, so I don't want to say too many negative things there, but it could, depending on how much you have going on the site. So some of them, if you went crazy and built out a massive page with page rollers that all have all these extra options and all this, it could have an issue, as opposed to something that's just typed into the regular editor. But it really depends on the page roller and exactly what you're creating. So not always would be the answer there. Any questions on themes before we go to the next? You're saying that the page roller is not bad. Well, Divi is technically two different things. So there's a Divi theme system, and then there's a Divi builder. So the Divi builder is one of the better page rollers. I'm not saying page rollers are bad. Page rollers are OK. I was just, it could be used incorrectly if you went crazy with it, is my point there. But any questions on themes before it? Yes. Page rollers are a really lengthy conversation. It really depends on how you're using it and what specifically page rollers you're using. In general, page rollers are OK. I don't want to say page rollers are a bad idea. In general, they're OK. I want to get carried away with all the different configurations you could do there. Would be my only warning there. But in general, they're OK to use. Just to clarify, did that help the answer there? Did that give you an answer? So the page builders, they kind of sit on top of the theme. So usually, as long as your theme's OK, there's not a significant difference between using one theme or another with a page builder. That doesn't usually make much of a difference as long as it makes the difference theme-wise but not interacting with page builder-wise. So that aspect wouldn't matter as much as comparing two themes against each other. So does that answer your question? OK, great. Anything else on themes before we go to the next? OK. So the next question I get asked all the time is how many plugins are too many? And I'm sure you've had that question. Or you've heard that question. That's a really popular question in the WordPress space. And the answer is there is no right answer there. Because every site is different and every plugin is different. So for example, if you had a plugin that gives you a single shortcode, it's a really small plugin. You could have hundreds of those and it would barely affect your performance. Whereas if you have something like WooCommerce or Jet Pack or something that's much more meatier and you had 100 of those type of plugins, your site would be so slow no one could use it. So it really depends on the type of plugin. An average site averages around 20 to 30 plugins. So if you're well under that, then you're probably OK. Now if you're well over that, then you probably want to ask this question, do you need that plugin? So almost every plugin you have out there, I'm sure you could say, oh, I really love that. I love that someone can see an animated icon. As I go, you probably don't need that though. Every plugin you add adds a performance issue with your website, even if it's a really tiny one. But it does have something there. It loads extra files. It loads extra processing. So every plugin you add can affect your performance. So the least amount you can use, the better. Now you don't have to delete all your plugins, but having less is better than having more. But there is no right answer to how many should I have. I think I pretty much said that. So if you do not use a plugin often, deactivate it. So if it's something that you use once a year or once every six months, don't even leave it running. If you can avoid it, you could just deactivate it. And that way you don't have to worry about it until you go to use it again, depending on the exact plugin. So for example, if you have a plugin that manages a contest for whatever reason, and you only run that contest once every six months, then there's no reason to really have that performance conflict on your site all those other times when you only run it that one day every six months. Depending on the type of contest, naturally. So and then the other thing is that if you don't use it at all, go ahead and just delete it. So all the code on your site, if you leave it active and you're not using it ever, then just go ahead and delete it. There's no reason to have that going against your performance. Does that make sense? I know saying there is no right answer is not the best thing you're probably looking for. But is that any questions on maybe plugins or what you're after? Yes, sir? So there's a few different answers there. In terms of speed, no. So in terms of speed, if it's not active, that code's not being run, it's not doing anything processing. But in terms of security and all these other things, it's probably best practice told to delete it if you're not using it. But in terms of speed, there's no performance thing. Yes? A little bit, we're going to go over a couple things in just a moment that are directly applicable. But when it comes to WooCommerce, there's a lot of other factors at play. So there's a little bit more things you could do beyond the stock. But there's quite a bit in the rest of the stock that are still directly applicable. Any questions on plugins before we? So when it comes to after we worry about our hosting, we worry about our themes, we look to the plugins a little bit. The next major step is something called caching. How many people have never heard of caching before? Is that a thing that some people? OK, do you know exactly what it is for those who don't? OK, a little bit. OK, so in caching, unfortunately, it's this word that people use a lot in a lot of different settings. So it doesn't always mean the same thing. But in a very basic definition is that it creates versions of a page and resources that can load a little bit faster instead of having to run through processing. So there's a lot more technical jargon that I could throw in there. But in a very basic version, it creates a copy or some version of resources that don't have to run through processing. So for example, every time you go to your website, if you went to your home page right now without caching, then it has to load up. It has to pull out the data from the database. It has to pull out the content of the page. It has to bring out the title. It has to process your layout. It has to do all this processing stuff in order to show that page. So caching at a few different levels will run all that processing and then create a copy of that and go, hey, here's the final version. So anytime that anyone goes to your website, they go, oh, here's the final version. We don't have to go through all that processing again. So it can remove all that processing step and only show them the final version. So that's a caching in a nutshell. Does that make sense before I go into some more examples? OK. So when it comes to caching, there's a few different levels of caching. So for example, there's server level caching. So this is sort of what I was just explaining, where something makes a copy of the final version of your page. So depending on who you host with, they may have this enabled. This is not something that we usually do ourselves unless you're managing your server environment yourself. But a lot of the higher end hosting providers will do this set for you, but not always. And so what server caching will do is almost exactly what I was saying, where they monitor your pages and they make direct copies of it. And then if someone tries to go to a particular page, they'll send them that copy instead of having run through all the processing. And then when you make a change, sometimes the server caching will do something called purge the cache for that page. And that's where they'll run through that process again to create a new copy of that page to make it much faster just sending that page instead of running the processing. Does that make sense? Is that confusing to anybody? OK. So if you have the option, server cache is really great because it's outside of the WordPress ecosystem. But most everyday hosts, that's not an option for most people. So if you have the option, that's a great thing to look into, like varnish and memcache. And it's a bit technical, so not everyone can do that route. There's some hosts, like I said, some of them will do it. And that's a great avenue to pursue. Now if you can't do it, there's some plugins that'll do this at the WordPress level. So they'll do this same exact concept, except whereas the server, how the server is different, is that the server doesn't have to load WordPress to send that copy. Whereas a plugin, some of WordPress still has to load in order for the plugin to load to send that copy. So there's a slight decrease in speed between server caching and plugin caching, but not much. It's a very nominal amount. And it really depends on the exact server configuration, a plugin configuration, which is well beyond the scope of this talk. But the three plugins that you probably have seen at least one of these at some point, it's W3 Total Cache, Super Cache, and Breeze. All three of these do pretty much the same exact thing, where you turn it on, and they'll start processing and creating the cached copies of your pages. Now some of them have more finer controls, so such as W3 Total Cache and Super Cache have a bit more controls that you can say, well, this page, Never Cache, or this page, always flush when I make a change. You have a little bit more control where it's something like Breeze. It's usually you just turn it on, and it starts working. So it depends on what level you're looking for. You might want to experiment with the three different plugins. But most of them, the end goal is almost exactly the same between the three plugins. Do you have a question? Well, the thing to remember is when you purge cache, it has to run that process again. So it depends on how often you're editing and what you're changing. If you make changes, it's OK to go and just purge the cache, and for that page. If you purge all the cache through the entire site, that's not something I would recommend doing often, depending on how much changes you're making. But usually, most of these and most servers, you can have just purge the cache for an individual page. So you make a change on a page or a post. You would purge the cache for that, so it would remake that cache version of it. And because these are done fairly quickly, it's not something that you'd have to schedule, oh, I need to wait until 2 AM to purge the cache. It's not that level. So you could do it as soon as you make the change, purge it, and then move on. Unless you have a really heavy traffic site, if you're talking like thousands of visitors a day or tens or hundreds of thousands, maybe you do it a little bit different, but for most people, you could just purge it once you make the change. Yes. I'm going to mention that in a few slides, actually. OK. Any other questions on that part so far? So the last one I wanted to briefly mention is browser caching. So I know it's not up there on the slide for a second, but browser caching isn't something that most of us have control over. But how browser caching works is when we open, in this case, Safari, or Chrome, or Opera, or Internet Explorer, or Edge, or any of the other ones, some of them will do browser caching. And what this does is it downloads some of the files from your site and keep them within the browser. So the next time a user goes to your site, they only use the files local, and they don't have to redownload them from your website. This is a natural process. Most browsers do this automatically. So it's not something you can really do or change. But that might, every now and then, you might make a change. And a user is like, oh, I don't see this change. And you'll have to ask them to empty their browser cache. And that's how that system works. It's not something that we usually interact with. These are something browsers do all themselves. But it's something to be aware of. Just in case you do make a change, their browsers might still have the old change, depending on what you changed. So that'd be another thing to consider. Does that make sense with caching? Yes. So that's slightly more technical. So do you have a specific question about it? Or are you just asking in terms of, so it's probably at plug-in or server level? So the network level, it's not something. There's lots of extra caching out. There's actually object caching and database caching. There's a lot more to caching than this brief example. So it could be at a variety of levels. But that would be a question for your hosting provider, and just be like, hey, what's going on with the caching here? I can't seem to purge it. And they'll probably, because they have giant logs, they can just go, oh, well, this is what's going on, and we can fix that. That's probably where you should start with that question. Depending on how you have it set up, by default, most of them will think to purge content when you change it. But if not, most of these add a little purge cache button, either on the page or in the admin toolbar, or somewhere that you can see when you're editing the page. So you would just click that button then. Well, unfortunately, none of these systems, you would think they talk to each other, but they don't. All these are independent caching. So if you have a, where's this cache at question? It could be a variety of places. So in most cases, it'd be just like clearing the plug-in cache and then checking the server cache and just clearing out until you find it. And that's, yes, sir? Oh, I thought you had some feedback to that. I thought you had another. Yes. Yes. Now, we're going to mention CDNs in a moment, but yeah, that's another spot. So there's caching everywhere. So unfortunately, most sites that are just getting started, they only deal with these couple ones. But once you get to a more advanced level where you're doing it at your own and stuff, then you start dealing with all these extra level caches. And unfortunately, there's no easy system to find out which one's still cached. I know it's probably not the answer you're hoping for, but we do, definitely, because I experience that same issue all the time. Any other question on caching before we move to offloading? OK. So offloading. So like caching, so with caching, we have this system that pre-processes everything, creates this cached copy that it can send to the browser. So offloading is similar to that, except instead of having it within your server or within your ecosystem, you're sending parts of your resources of your site, so images, files, things along those lines, to other places that might load faster than your own site. So for example, what is it for? There. So for example, a CDN, if you've never heard this term before, this is an awesome system, but this is a content delivery network. This would be an example of offloading. So how content delivery networks work is they have a variety of servers across the world where they make copies of some of your files and store those all around the world. So for example, if I'm here in Atlanta and I have a site hosted here in Atlanta and someone from Jacksonville, Florida tries to access that site, it just goes down the road and goes, here's the content. Well, if someone from Seattle or Japan tries to load the website currently, then it has to send that data all the way to Japan from Atlanta or all the way to Seattle. What a CDN does is they go, oh, hey, we have a server right down the street from you. Here's your content here. So it makes what they're receiving get received much faster than coming from your own site. So the CDN network just makes copies of these various files and stores them at various other servers around the world, whichever is closest to whoever's trying to view the content. Now, you can offload a variety of items. So the most popular thing is usually images. But if you have maybe a lot of PDFs or zips that you, for whatever reason, they can download or buy from you, that'd be another thing you could also offload. You could also do maybe styles or scripts if you do a lot of heavy styling and scripting and things, you could also put those into CDNs or any other place. And so these would be examples of things that you could quote unquote offload. Now, there are a couple plugins that help you with this. So Amazon S3 and WPS3 offload, that's a huge mouthful, but that would be a really good option. That would offload it to the S3 system, which is in Amazon. So has everyone heard of S3 before? Is that a new term for anyone? Okay, so S3 with Amazon, they have this huge giant ecosystem of e-commerce where you go and buy stuff. But in reality, behind the scenes, they have this massive web development circle of tools. And one of these tools is something called S3, which is pretty much a collection of servers that can house files. So think of like a Dropbox or Google Drive, but for web development purposes mostly. So this is a network of these servers and they call it the S3. So that's a place that you can store some of your files. And there's quite a few plugins. This is one of the plugins that I use, Amazon S3 and WPS3 offload. But if you search in the WordPress repository, there's lots and lots of plugins that do this sort of system. Now, depending on your hosting provider, some of them will have a CDN that you could use instead and they'll handle that step for you. So for example, a flywheel, site ground, and a couple of the others, you just turn on the CDN option and then they'll start doing this for you. So if you're interested in this, that would be the first step I would recommend is looking at your hosting provider and see if they offer that option. Some of it's for free depending on what plan you're on. Some of the times it's just an extra upcharge. It just depends on the hosting provider you're with. But that would be a great first step. And then if they don't offer that, then find some offloading plugins such as the one that's listed there. Yes? Yeah, depending on, so for example, I'm gonna mention like Cloudflare and Cloudfront and a couple of those. So if you're using anything of like those, they also have this caching and CDN quite a bit that built in. But we'll get to that in just a moment. Thank you, yes. Usually they're on special servers that are configured just for like sending files. So they're not worrying about all this extra processing going on. So they tend to be faster inherently just because that's exactly what they're focused on. Not by like massive amounts, you're not gonna offload and instantly be 20 times faster. But it's because of their single use purpose. They're inherently a little bit faster and the proximity as well. Yeah, so they're still beneficial, just not as beneficial. Does that answer your question? I just gotta get that caching involved when I do. But that's right, it could be in Colorado and let me reach that guy in L. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. So it makes sense. It's simple, it's switch, turn on the switch. I think you had a question, Chris. So the WPS3 is the foreman that offloads your stuff to Amazon, is it? Yeah, the WPS3 offload plugin. Do you have a question? Yeah, we have a client. Even if the client's gonna be local or whatever, server hosting providers, they might be in California. Yeah, if you choose a different host. So for example, GoDaddy's Phoenix, I think. I wanna say they're in Phoenix. So if you're hosting on Phoenix and you're here and your clients are here and your customers are here, well, it's still having to go back and forth between here and Phoenix. So that'd be another thing to consider. Thank you. Yes? So wordpress.com, there is a CDN option, I wanna say. I haven't used them recently, but I wanna say they have a CDN option switch, just like most of the hosting providers. So you would check with them first and then if not, then you would look into other CDN options, such as going to S3. Another popular one is Max CDN. Max, yes, Max CDN. That's very popular in the wordpress space. So that'd be another one to possibly look into as well. So the next big factor is images. And if you want to quickly speed up your site and you're very image heavy, then this step would be the answer. So the big question is, do your images have to be that big and almost always the answer's no. So in reality, three quarters of your users are viewing it from your phone and it's about 400 pixels wide. So if you need to load the 5,000 pixel wide image, you probably don't need that. So when it comes to images, the smaller the image file, the faster a page will load. So for example, if you go out with your nice brand new Nikon camera or Canon with that extra zoom and all these pixels, you take a picture and it's like, wow, it's only 4.5 gigabit file. We're just gonna upload that and then every user, it'll only take a half an hour to load my page. So you don't wanna do that. So the smaller the file, the less data has to be transferred to the browser, the faster your page will load. So now there's no recommended number. Now a good number to aim for is like 100 kilobits or 200 kilobytes, but that's, it really depends on your site and the type of image you're after. So if you're trying to display a photo gallery and they're really high quality or a photographer, you probably want a little bit higher quality. If you're somewhat, if it's just like icons, then that, you know, it really depends on exactly what it's after. But the number to aim for is like 100 to 200 kilobytes or smaller, preferably much smaller. That'd be a number to aim for. Definitely not anything megabytes. That would be massive. You probably don't wanna do that. Do you have a? So parallax is done usually mostly in front end code. So it's all within the browser. So depending on when that process gets started, it could be a factor, but it's not usually the image with the parallax that's the issue. So parallax and images, there are slightly different systems. They just use images. So changing the image size won't affect the parallax per se. They're loosely tied together. Does that sort of answer your question? Well, it could be both. If your images are super large, then that'll be slow down the loading of your site. Whereas the parallax usually doesn't get started until the page is loaded, that the system that powers that. So usually these are at two different stages of loading. Depending on how the parallax system is built. So that just, it really depends on the exact system. But usually it's images come in, get loaded and then parallax. Unless you have some other features we'll get to in just a moment. So they're not always inherently tied together. Yes? All this bossy stuff about, you don't need any of the images up there, so I'll just put that one on. The sort set's a good point. That's a bit of what technical, so I don't want to dive into that right this second. The issue is, it is, except the themes have to actually use it the right way and the plugins have to use it the right way. So I wouldn't rely on that. So theoretically that one should be good, but it doesn't mean all the plugins you have that are displaying images are good. So that'd be something to consider there. But. So when it comes to image, but thank you for that great point. So when it comes to images, if you're asking how to get smaller files, the very first step is just smaller dimensions. That's usually the massive part. So if you have something that's 5,000 pixels wide and you only need probably like six or 700 pixels, just reducing the size of the image, the dimensions, will massively cut down the size of the image. So there's a few different ways you could do that if you have Photoshop and computer that's not everyone does, but you could even use like paint. You could use Gimp, GIMP, that's a free tool as well. There's a lot of different photo editor tools just to shrink the image down. Now within WordPress, they have a few different like you can crop and scale and stuff. So you could do a little bit there. If you have a lot of images, it'd be a real pain to do it that way. But technically there's some tools built into WordPress as well. Now from there, the second step of yes ma'am, that's a whole technical conversation. Really depends on a lot of factors that you're after. Are you asking about like the screen resolution or just what you should be aiming for? So it really depends on what you're trying to put up. If you're putting up like icons and stuff like that, but 72 is good, get started. Couple, what's the high Mac? I wanna say they're higher. I wanna say it's like 150 or 300 or that high one. I don't know that number off the top of my head, I'm not. Yeah, but they're higher version. They have that really new high one. What is it, 300? Yeah, it's up there. So it really depends on what you're after and what you're trying to display. But that would be another factor as well. Now naturally, the higher the image sizes will correlate as well. Now, so to piggyback on quality on there then, the lower the quality is, the smaller the file. Now obviously you don't wanna upload an image that's like terrible looking. So I'm not saying like, oh, make it the worst quality ever, so save space, that's not what I'm saying. But when it comes to quality of file, and you can do this in a lot of photo editors or some photo editing tools online as well, and WordPress has a somewhat okay tool. So most visitors, if you look at most the conversion studies and studies that are done on this, most visitors can't even tell the difference on most images between 70% and 100% quality. Now those percentages are the percentage of quality, so 100% is like the normal image, and then decreasing the quality down by 30% would be that, where's that 70% number come from? And most visitors can't tell the difference on most images. So there's not reason and always to use 100%. Unless your focus is like, you need super high quality photos in a certain setting, then you might wanna only decrease a little bit or not at all, but in most cases, it would be better to decrease it a little bit and to save all that extra processing time and loading time. Does that make sense, a little bit? Yes sir? I was gonna know just about the quality. I was actually about to get to that. But yeah, if you have clients or you have end users, that would be a great suggestion that first thing we mentioned, because they will not listen to what you say. You can tell your client or your users, they're like, hey, aim for this, and you'll go on and it'll be like 50 megabyte images. So any tool that restricts them is always a good one to use, definitely. What was the name of the one you recommended? And we're almost out of time, so let's just get to the last couple of slides and then we'll regroup on that. So I just wanna mention, there's our tools that help with this optimization process. So WP Smush, it's now called Smush Image Compression and Optimization. It's a really long mouthful of a name because I don't remember, they just recently changed the name, I wanna say. But that was one of the tools, this is a plugin that you can use on your WordPress site. The caveat there with plugins, you're gonna find a lot of plugins that do this. The issue is that this is running on your WordPress site, so it's taking up resources and processing power. So if you have a lot of images or you're doing a lot of stuff, it could affect some of your performance of your website. So that'd be the caveat, the throw there. Now an external service is kraken.io. This one's not free, the first one's free, the second one's not free, so depending on what you're after. But kraken.io, it starts off at fairly cheap, I wanna say like $10 a month, 15 somewhere in there. And so what that'll do is when you upload the image, it gets sent to Kraken, they'll do all the processing and then they send it back. That way the processing's not happening on your WordPress site, slowing your site down. So that just depends on where you're at and what you're trying to do. That'd be two things that you wanna consider there. So since we're almost out of time, I'll just bring up a couple of these real fast. Optimizations, so when it comes to a lot of the caching stuff that I mentioned earlier, there's a few other things that kind of play in that. That could be a little bit technical, so I just wanna briefly touch on those. So the first, the main two is concatenation and minification. So when it comes to all the different things on your site, every plugin probably has its own styles. The theme has its own styles. They all have their own scripts and they're probably all over the place with file sizes and what's going on in them. So these two steps is the process of condensing those files down and sometimes combining them into much smaller versions of themselves. So that's not something, if you're not technical, it's not something you probably do yourself, but there's a lot of plugins that do this and even most of the caching plugins, the three I mentioned earlier, W3 Total Cache, Super Cache and Breeze, they both have an option that you can turn on to enable this process. The caveat there is that not all plugins and themes will work well with these processes. So it's something you would wanna test and make sure everything still works when you turn on and then if not, turn it back off. So it'd be a caveat to consider there. Now if you're not using a caching plugin, if you're using maybe their server cache, maybe your host doesn't want you to use caching plugins, you could use the auto-optimize plugin. There's only one O in there and I always say it wrong. I don't know how they actually say it, but that plugin does this set for you without all the actual caching process. So that'd be a plugin to consider. It's actually really good. That'd be a good one to use if you wanna use these and not the caching components. So last, we have about a minute left, so last slide. So this is the keep your site tidy. So if you log into your site and you look at maybe your comment section and you see there's about 70,000 spam comments, or you look at some of your other content and there's all this extra content all over the place, this isn't each one of those, doesn't massively slow down your site, but when you're talking about hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands, these are all in the database and how WordPress works is there's a database that stores all this data and when it goes to pull out this data, it has to go through this database to find the right data. So, and most of these are very fast transactions. We're talking about fragments of a millisecond, so it's not usually something to worry about, but when you have so much of something, it does have to go through all those to find the things it's after. So can inherently slow down your site? Not by much, this is probably something you do towards the end or just something you do over time, just keep it up, but it's something to consider if you have a massive amount of spam comments or a massive amount of anything in there, it is extra things it has to go through slowing your site down. Does that make sense? And so last I just wanna bring up a slide of all the tools I mentioned. The only one I didn't mention is WP Sweep. This is a really handy one that you install and then deactivate and get rid of. What this does is it goes through the database and finds things that were created by plugins or things you no longer use and tries to remove some of that content. So that's a nice plugin to toss in there as well. That one's called WP-Sweep. Can everyone see that okay? Is that, do I need to move out of the way? Okay. And I wanna say this on my last slide. So I don't think we have time for questions. I think we have like a minute. Frank, are you gonna be around? Yeah, I'll be around here. Tomorrow you're gonna be around. I'm here all weekend, so. Because you're all weekend, so if you have any specific questions, good job, very important to issue some of it. Thank you, everyone.