Have Questions About Speeding Up My Wordpress Site

May 24, 2017 9:00 AM

Hi all! I'm setting up a new Wordpress site and I have some questions about speeding it up. Details inside...

Assume for the sake of this conversation that I'm using all the latest versions and have limited my plugins to the minimum.

I've been trying out various combinations of caching plugins and CDNs.

I was using a combination of WP Rocket, Cloudflare and MaxCDN (following the instructions here), but I recently installed some other plugins that conflict with caching plugins, so I had to disable WP Rocket. (I *could* disable the other plugins and reinstall WP Rocket if absolutely necessary, but would prefer not to.)

I have been using Sucuri Security for its security functions and just realized that it also performed a caching function, after reading this very informative article: Testing the Impacts of Website Caching Tools.

Okay, my question is, in order to get the best speed possible out of my website, what combination of the following tools should I use?

Sucuri Firewall
WP Rocket
Cloudflare
MaxCDN

Can anyone here either advise me or direct me to somewhere online where I can find the answer to this question? I have tried Googling around but have not found any more specific info.

Thanks!

posted by jack.brodey to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

It's a little hard to know what to suggest without more specifics -- how much text, images, css, javascript, etc your pages have and is the page slow because it takes a long time to render or because it takes a long time to download from your server etc etc etc, but you can do testing.

Go over to Pingdom. Turn off all your speedup plugins run the test a few times, note the times. Turn on one of your plugins run the test a few times and make notes. Repeat with each of your plugins. Figure out which one speeds things up the most. Then leave that plugin enabled and run the test enabling the other plugins one at a time and repeat until you find a combination that gives you the minimum load time.

I have found that most of my website speedups have come not from using speedup plugins but from reducing image size, minimizing the number of things that get loaded, and following the directions on the several tools that tell you why your site is slow.

Run Google's PageSpeed Insight. Make the changes it suggests and then run the Pingdom test a few more times and make notes. Repeat but use YSlow.

Maybe you could put a link to the site in your profile?
posted by gregr at 9:41 AM on May 24, 2017 [3 favorites]

If the site is slow it's usually a combination of theme bloat and plugin bloat. Absolutely no plugin should be required to "speed up" a WP site unless you have a high-traffic site that benefits from explicit caching.

So, yeah: we're gonna need to see this site. Linking in your profile is a great suggestion.
posted by DarlingBri at 9:59 AM on May 24, 2017

Echoing the other commenters, but I also want to recommend http://www.webpagetest.org/ as a really good (if kinda ugly) tool for analysing remote connections.

If you're developing locally, and you have a build system with the wonderful BrowserSync, you might not know that it has a UI which allows you to spin up very realistic throttled servers. These can really illuminate how slow your site really is on say, a mobile connection. Large, slow images will quickly become apparent.

If that doesn't apply to you, you can use the Chrome Dev Tools to emulate a slow connection with mostly similar results.

In terms of a WP caching solution: I've personally had pretty good results with W3 Total Cache. It's very customisable but is quite complex and heavy. It used to be used very widely, but I've seen it less often recommended these days. I still get good results from it though.

I can't necessarily recommend any of the suggested CDN solutions, but I imagine any one of them would work well. I'd recommend against combining multiple solutions without further investigation and testing. You could just end up with a heavy pipeline, which would be totally unnecessary without the problem of genuinely heavy traffic. Keep it as simple as possible.
posted by Magnakai at 10:19 AM on May 24, 2017

I found W3 Total Cache to help my sluggish site a lot.

Also activate FastCGI if your server offers that.
posted by humboldt32 at 10:21 AM on May 24, 2017

Why are you so worried about speed?
What is the traffic of your site?

If you can live with some disadvantages and limitations then this will make your site incredibly fast and secure.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-plugin/
posted by yoyo_nyc at 12:45 PM on May 24, 2017

I have had a fair amount of difficulty with W3 Total Cache, and I usually prefer Super Cache. I was a little disappointed that Rocket didn't blow SuperCache away as much as I'd hoped for it to. But Rocker is (theoretically) the gold standard for WP caching plugins, so if you've already paid for it, I'd try debugging why it isn't working. There are a fair number of settings you can adjust, and you should be able to google WP Rocket + whatever plugin you have that's clashing with it and find some tips for debugging the issue. (My guess, without knowing anything else, is issues with minifying or enqueing JavaScript. You can turn that off in WPR and use its other features if that's the case.)

That said, when I have optimized WP sites, I have gone through and optimized images, external JS and CSS, set up caching for the page code itself, make sure everything is caching browser-side that can be-- and had the slowdown be external resources, such as Google fonts or icon sets. A surprisingly big slowdown, percentage-wise. If you discover that's the case for your site, there's not a huge amount you can do to optimize that is really convenient to do. You can reduce the number of web fonts that you use. You can repackage your icon set with the three icons you're using. Some people even host Google fonts locally so you have more control over how they're handled, but you lose any live updates-- I've never felt that motivated when optimizing, though I've come close.

Oh, one other thing to check: depending on what plugins you're using, if lots and lots of server-side logic is running for each page that is served, and if you can find a way to reduce that, that can help significantly. For instance, I've found that nested shortcodes or template fragments can add a pretty big chunk of processing time-- if you're using one of the fancier templates or page builders, you can do this inadvertently, and if you change how the page is put together, it can make a big difference. This is less true if you've got caching turned on, but perhaps still worth knowing about. If your slowness is happening on the server side, that's an indication this might be an issue.
posted by instamatic at 5:37 PM on May 25, 2017