 Hello, good afternoon everybody Thank you for being awake and I hope you're enjoying the work. I'm so far. It's been great for me for sure My name is Chris Panjaroff. I work for SegRound for eight years and I'm managing mostly pretty much everything we do about WordPress in terms of services partnerships and transfers of bigger customers and performance and speed Has been probably my favorite topic because I think it's Really important to have a fast and very well optimized website Today I'll be talking mostly about what's new And the new stuff we are using but I'm still gonna mention some of all the well-established tools services When it comes to optimizing a WordPress website so I'd like to begin with Benchmarking which is really the first and most important thing in that process And every I think everybody should spend some of their time to do as many benchmarking as possible with their website and Run it through as many tools as possible. They have in order to find out Where the slow parts what can be optimized what can be improved and at the end of the day stream of some precious few seconds from their loading times The first thing I'm using when start working on a website and probably not many people are using it That way is firebug One of the most my probably my favorite tap here is the networking tap because it shows you right away Which resources are loaded and the sequence of them being quoted? So it's really nice way to figure out if there is something that takes too much time to load that can be a Image too big that can be a JavaScript to be an optimized A JavaScript that blocks you the rendering of your website And it's right there. It's right in your browser You don't have to install anything you don't have to use a third-party service for it So use your firebug when you when you start working on your websites and see how it loads See how much how much time it takes to locally load the website because for example if you're in Italy and Your customers are from here. That would be a pretty good check, right? When it comes to benchmarking GT metrics is my favorite tool when it comes to going through checklists of things That you have or have not done on a website It combines it actually combines two checks The first one is from Google page speed and the second one is yahoo's Weiselow so when you run your test through it you'll get basically two scores and Again a waterfall similar similar to the one In the firebug The the two different tests the Google page speed and then yahoo's Weiselow will show you Very big checklist of things that you have or haven't done on your website like enabling gzip compression minifying your CSS and JavaScript files having browser-level caching and so on It's really an eye and they have priority to those issues. So you'll see a number of red orange and hopefully mostly green Checks being made by the two different mechanisms Don't do any number chasing here Go for the end result. I have way too many people that say I can't get a 100 out of 100 in Google page It doesn't make any sense. No one will give you a piece of chocolate or something If your website loads in a third of a second, you have done your job perfectly well Okay, even if GT metric says you have 90 out of 100 Another very popular tool That's really useful is the ping dumps free tool. I use it mostly because it allows you By clicking on the settings Slightly different than the yellow background orange button. It allows you to choose From where you can make the checks. So basically You can see how the page loads from from the United States from Europe from Asia They have five different locations or something Which is really useful to see how how your scores is different in different places. Again, they show you number of checks and your result with another grade like 79 out of 100 That here is my personal unoptimized website, but it's okay because nobody reads it anyway Now a few new things out there that I found find particularly useful The first thing is a tool that's a curry recently launched is it's a curry performance And it basically use its own CDN network to make checks of how fast your website votes from a lot of different locations So for example again with my obsolete site It's hosted in a on a server in Amsterdam, but and As you can see it was perfectly well in the United States in Europe, but there's a problem in Tokyo and If you see that you have initial voting the website in a region Where you have customers visitors or readers in? Maybe you should do something about it Maybe figure figure figure out which CDN you should use if you if you're not or switch to a different one or figure out What's the problem there? So it's really good tool to see how your website loads across the world Blitz IO It's a paid service, but it provides a lot of things In addition to the checks similar to GT metrics ping-dome what we what what we've talked about so far They allow you to do stress tests on your website and they're pretty good at simulating career life usage of your pages they can Some or something they can create peaks of 200,000 visitors plus they use a lot of different IP addresses it's similar to low team packed if you're familiar with and On top of that they have a lot of different developer tools to do tests of your code on top of that but I am mostly using them for stress testing a page If you have the budget go check them out on That was about benchmarking and few things Server site that can be very good for your Pages loading times and performance in general And Ginex as a reverse proxy had great impact on the hosting industry overall It's probably the best caching mechanism out there A reverse proxy generally stores the complete HTML outcome of your website in the server's memory So when somebody loads your page on the second time and it should be served with the cache content It's been served before the request even reached the web the web server. So it's super fast it saves a lot of hosting resources and Generally minimizes the load to your entire website is causing on your machine so if you can implement and Utilize a reverse proxy on your on your server use it It's great. Unless you're serving cash content to people that shouldn't see cash content. It will have an amazing impact on your loading speeds varnish it's another reverse proxy mechanism basically and It does pretty much the same I Don't I don't use it a lot anymore Mostly because in their free version they do not support SSL connections and we'll talk about this later but that's That's a deal breaker for a lot of people but if you A can afford a paid version or B don't have an SSL certificate They don't care about it. You can still use it and great get great results out of varnish, too CDM providers another thing to boost the performance of your website There's constantly something new that CDM providers tend to add to their service. So it's a good idea to Track those and see what they're doing Because I think most of you know that by default a CDN should clone your content in their different host notes and They just serve it to your visitors from the closest location But on top of that people add things like caching They add another layer of protection from downtime to your site for example if your main server goes down they keep serving cash content to different host notes and Generally, it's a good idea to have a CDN Even if you're using even if your visitors are mostly local Just because you have another layer of protection between your server and your visitors HHVM was introduced What? Probably a couple of years ago, but it was it became recently very popular in the community and It's generally a virtual machine that stays on top of your PHP and Uses just in time compilation The thing is That it has huge effect. It's really nice When it comes to performance and loading speeds, but poorly written code may not work as well With it just because the tolerance for errors here is way lower What HHVM did when it was when it became popular and widely used is that it pushed forward In my opinion at least the development of PHP 7 which is awesome PHP 7 has a lot of new stuff implemented into it a lot of improvements. They skipped number six for that and If you have The ability to use it if your code supports it always try to To use PHP 7 it has internal upcode caching and generally if you if you open a WordPress backend Where the entire content is dynamic and there's not a lot of options to cache something can serve it faster You'll notice a huge difference if you switch from PHP 5.67 to 7 So if your code supports it use it, it's it's really huge performance boost HTTP 2 became a huge news and It's out there. It's happening and most of the hosting companies are supporting in down It's an upgrade to 11 year old protocol for transferring data It's 11 years from the latest update. I think It does a lot of things a lot of things have changed its binary now and so on but probably the most Important change a new feature is that it supports multiplexing Which generally changes the way your server and your visitor communicate when it comes to loading resources For example, you've all stumbled with I believe with pages that just used too many plugins too many JavaScript files CSS files and other resources and The entire loading of the page is being slowed because of that with HTTP 2 is much faster and The high number of resources you try to load doesn't have such a negative effect on loading a page now the thing is that Even though usage using SSL is not Forced by the HTTP to a Protocol itself There is not a single modern browser that will run HTTP 2 if the connection is unencrypted So you have to have an SSL certificate and you have to force an HTTPS connection if That used to be a problem because SSL certificates cost money and not a lot of people can afford them especially the Ev ones and more expensive ones, but now there's something called let's encrypt which is a really nice project and we're happy to support it since day zero and Basically, what's let's encrypt does it it allows everybody to have their own free SSL certificate a lot of hosting companies including us from say ground are starting doing Tools to easily install it on your account, but you can practically use it everywhere So take a look of it. If you if you don't have a big budget, but still want to get the benefits of HTTP 2 and better security Another service that I started to love in the recent months is elastic search Elastic search Provides a huge boost when it comes to database heavy websites I've used it heavily in the last months and and half with Very big customer of ours having a WooCommerce website and just to give you an example He has like a hundred thousand orders of his product and he has a WooCommerce with About ten additional plugins to that and so each order stores about 50 records in the post-mata table So if you multiply 100,000 by 50 that easily becomes five million Records in a single tape table now every time you he goes to his back end and he searches through his orders you have to query that table to get that data and We're talking about searches in the coupons and orders and including the front-end search Another customer sells ladies shoes and he obviously has like a hundred thousand different ladies shoes I didn't think that's impossible, but it is people can have hundred thousand different types of shoes obviously and multiply that number button by the number of rows each product has stores and at orders and you have a good 10 15 20 gigabytes of database and Searching in such a great amount of data isn't fast Even on a very powerful server. You can't cash a lot of that most of that content and Here comes elastic search It creates its own index. It's a service that runs on your server and It works way faster than the native search within WordPress or WooCommerce If you can't have it on your server They in they provide it as a service so you can offload some data to their site and Use their servers for for searches Now a bit more about the things I often use when it comes to comes to the WordPress app itself Double pure rocket. It's a paid plugin and it's one of my favorite plugins Double pure rocket. It's a nice paid plugin The thing is it provides a lot of things like caching JavaScript and CSS modification combination But they don't believe in having too many options. So it will either work for you great or will not work for you It's it's it's a good plugin But if you're looking into a lot of options and if you want to control each part of the optimization process It's not the thing for you But if you have pretty pretty much more of standard WordPress app and you just want to something that works It's it's great I'm I'm using another Plugin often soon, which is auto optimize Because I'm using engine access reverse proxy. I don't need to have any file caching Done by a WordPress plugin because serving content from the server's memories way faster than everything Plugin can do so once the caching is handled by reverse proxy. I just have to take care of the other parts and Big part big chunk of that is CSS and JavaScript files. So up to auto optimize does a great job when it comes to minifying those and It does just that it doesn't have a lot of options and it doesn't have one button optimize optimize all BG lazy vote is another plugin I'd recommend you to try out if you have that type of website It does lazy loading Which pretty much means that if you have a page Which is very image-intensive images Unload only the first and visible part of those images will be loaded and the second and the following images will start loading Right after the user's user starts scrolling down. So you don't have to load every single image of the page before you see it Advanced database cleaner God, it's a good plug-in again. It's gets updated very often supports It usually gets an update few days after a WordPress update It cleans stuff like old reviews of your posts and all that obsolete data that you don't need on your database and Even if that data is not queried on a daily basis, even if it if having a bigger Database with a lot of revisions in it will not slow down the Performance of your website directly it will blow to your database and everything like Optimizing the database back in it up restoring it and if you have to will become a Slower process. So it's a good idea to have something like that and regularly Clean the old and unused data from it WCOI is a tool that I use a lot and I really love If you're a plug-in developer, please start supporting WPC. Why be a good person Basically, it's a common-to-line interface for WordPress and the plugins that support it And one of the things it does it you can easily optimize your database with it It's like the same thing you could do with a regular MySQL query or pitch me my admin but the good thing is that you can script and You can set a cron job and do it like once every three days or include it into a broader script that does a lot of things and It's a good thing to take a look at Most of the WordPress hosts have it or you can have it upon the request So check whether you have access to WPC. Oh, I it's great for automation including updates and Regular database optimization Now feel more examples before we we come to the Q&A session About your content Imagify is a nice service unfortunately paid About optimizing your images they do the optimizations on their servers and you pay for each image that goes through that service and They're doing a really good job. And if you have the budget, I would recommend you doing this They do all sort of things like automatic resize optimization of the images and generally can Scheme off a lot of fun and necessary bites out of them Ah E triple w image optimizer does the same thing But it works on your server. It works It's a great plugin and now for example, I was doing the website of my interior designer Who is being blogging every day for the past two and a half years? Which produces something like a bit under a thousand posts and in each one of those posts he has like 20 to 35 to 40 images about different interior design thingies and Each of those images has like four or five different now some thumbnail sizes that's been generated So this totally accumulates to something like 200,000 images and with E triple w image optimizer Would manage to lower the size of those images by like 40 percent So a your visitors will get the content folded faster be your saving time on your Space on your hosting account and see things like backups that everybody does regularly, right? Will become faster So that was pretty much it and I'll be happy to answer if you have any questions Yes, sir You mentioned image optimizers have you tried Kraken.io compared to the one you mentioned and is there a difference? There's a lot coming out these days on image optimizers and they seem to be all using different compressions with different results When I when I do any sort of image optimization I Generally don't have the permission of the person. I'm working on their website to screw up the quality of their images so I do only lossless optimization and Just pray for the best when it comes to reducing the size So as long as it removes all the necessary data from the image like that the fact It was taken by an iPhone or whatever camera and GPS location of the image and it does the best possible compression Without losing any quality. I'm okay with it Seeing that my personal site is on the site ground. I optimize my images. You don't need to touch me People generally ask me before that so I don't just hang around and optimize our customers websites If they don't ask for it at least without telling them that would be creepy No one else. Oh nice You're all performance experts. Okay. I knew you'd have a question You were mentioning backup at the end Besides some like hosting level operations Do you know any good database backup plug-in solution for WordPress you could think of my SQL dump? Dash you username dash p password the name of the file No, sorry that symbol and the name of the file on a cron job Rather than that out, of course, I would say backup buddy. Voltpress. There are a couple of Free ones available Just just pick something that doesn't time out with your database But and double PC li is great for that too because it allows you to just just double be DB export and Name your file and you can link that to a cron job and do it weekly and it's it supports bash So you can add variable for time stamps and you can add it into a broader script to delete the fifth and the sixth copies because you will keep of course four of them at least and It's it's really a nice way to organize it without having to depend on on a plug-in Or on your hosting provider per se Anyone else? Okay Well, what are the first thing to look into when you have a high time to first bite? time Like the you showed the waterfall diagram What you have to look is where you're where is your hosting server? Are you using a CDM provider for that and what's and probably look at the DNS service too? So that that's pretty much it to check out the server. Usually. It's either a loaded server if you have slow first bite response time or It's a networking issue. Those are the two Usual suspects to blame anyone else Come on. Okay. Thank you very much