Why Is My WordPress Site So Slow (and Tricks to Fix It)

Monica Pitts 0:03 Okey dokey. So I feel like we should start with why speed matters. I know I talked about it a little bit before, but we can get a little more technical on that. Then we're going to dig into how you can tell if your website is slow, because some people just have no clue. But I mean, if you're here on this podcast, let's be real, you probably know that your website is slow. So we're going to tell you different ways that you can start assessing what's slowing it down, and we're going to talk specifically about what's slowing it down, like the most common things that slow down WordPress websites, and how we would go about fixing it, like different ways that you can fix it, or have your web developer fix that website. So first up, why speed matters. And I I just talked about this, right? I said, because people are leaving your website and user experience is really important right now. Just remember that this is your first introduction to these humans. You want them to feel like they're meeting you for the first time. And if the first time that you're meeting someone. Let's say you walk into their office and you're waiting and waiting and waiting, and you ring the bell and you still don't have anybody up there. Yeah, that's not cool, is it? You're like, What is wrong with this business? How do they not have anybody to greet me at the store? And that is what's happening when you're making people wait for the website. The only difference is that it's a lot more complicated to walk out the door and get in your car and go to the next shop, and it's really easy to hit the back button and just go right back to the Google search results and pick the next one. So the second reason that it matters would be SEO, because Google does look at signals like how long people stay on your website and how people interact with your website when it ranks your site amongst your competitors. So just know that Google's kind of like running a popularity contest behind the scenes. And if you've got a slow loading site, you're not going to be Homecoming Queen. It's just not happening. You're basically, you know, hanging out some place else. I can't. I was like, Well, I guess you could be hanging out with the band, but that's actually a really cool place to be. So I can't draw that conclusion. Rebecca, you were, you were in Color Guard, so that's, I consider that with the band, that's a cool Tyler Ernst 2:16 place. Yeah, all the time. Yeah. Monica Pitts 2:19 So that that would be an optimized site hanging out with the band. You're still optimized, just in a different part of the football field. Okay, so then if it takes a really long time to load, like, conversions, sales, they're going to go down. And right now, we all know that, because we're all doing it, people are searching the internet differently. We're we're going to chat GPT, we're going to other like different AI apps, and we're searching the internet using them, and for the first time ever, as we predicted, Google's searches are going down. Yes, my friends. Mm, hmm. And so now people are reading about you and your services, like in this chat bot, not on your website. So it's really important that when they do get to your website, that you can convert that sale. And if it's floating too slow, it won't. And then, last but not least, we have our mobile users, and I think that people neglect this at any website that we look at has at least 25% mobile traffic, even in a business to business scenario. So your mobile site is super important, and if your site isn't optimized, it's going to be really slow on mobile, and that is even worse. I feel like, okay, so that's why speed matters. And now I am done beating that up, and we can move on to how to tell if your site is slow. Okay, so we all run reports on our favorite. This was my boyfriend for a long time before I met chat GPT and Claude, who's my boyfriend and my friends. Tyler Ernst 3:53 GT metrics, Monica Pitts 3:54 GT metrics. GT metrics, is that boyfriend? Um, and why do we love GT metrics? Rebecca Thomas 4:04 It has really helped in kind of narrowing down the exact spots in which our sites fail in terms of load speed and optimization, and gives you a pretty easy to read letter score, as well as a full list of like, hey, this image is super big, or this image doesn't have like, a size set to it, so it does not load in the way that you expect it to. Monica Pitts 4:30 Well, again, it's easy to see. Like, does that make sense? It's not nearly as complicated as some of the other systems and and it has a good user interface. Tyler Ernst 4:39 That was like, one of the the problems we were finding when we're first getting into really optimizing and really looking at what was causing things to slow down and all this stuff back in the day, is a lot of things at the time were just like, your site's slow. You need to fix it. Yeah. It's like, okay, thanks. Monica Pitts 4:57 Well, they were super simple. Yeah. And then there was, you know, Google's products like Page Speed Insights and lighthouse, and those are much more complex, like it doesn't lay out in the same way, with as simple of language in it. So I really started in GT metrics. And then once, I was like, Okay, now I have the vocabulary. Now I want to dig deeper. And then I would go into Page Speed Insights or lighthouse, and that's not to say that GT metrics doesn't actually use those products as it runs reports, because that those are some of the mechanisms that it uses, but reading the output from them is just much more detailed, and sometimes folks don't need all that Tyler Ernst 5:38 to start. Translates it into more human terms, Monica Pitts 5:40 yeah. And then if you're worried about your mobile site speed, I like to use the free up trends mobile speed test, because it looks at it specifically from a mobile perspective. And that's helpful, because sometimes I don't even know, like how Tyler and Rebecca have built a theme and what it's pulling when it's loading the mobile site versus a desktop site. And so I'll run the different reports, and I'll be like, Oh, okay, so it's not pulling that video. Good. Alright, cool. I don't have to worry about it, or maybe it is. And then I am worried about it, right? So definitely check out those tests. GT, they're all free. We actually didn't talk about anything that's not free. GT metrics does have a paid version that will give you more information, but you can run any of those tests for free, all right? So, Tyler Ernst 6:31 like, I start a free test on GT metrics, and then it's like, you need to pay now, Monica Pitts 6:36 yeah. Well, also, though, it gives you a certain amount of tests that you can do before you have to, like, just create a free account. Yeah, that too, but it's a free account, like, and they don't, like, email me stuff or anything. Tyler Ernst 6:49 But also you can, you can open any kind need a window, and it doesn't know that you already did that Monica Pitts 6:53 either. Okay, so there's a workaround to that. Okay, so what is slowing your site down. So okay, there are a ton of things that will slow your site down. And one of our hard learned lessons we we made it our mission. One year, we were like, we're going to make our websites load so much faster, we're going to rebuild our theme. We're going to like, this is what we're doing. And so I spent literally weeks with half of my workload just sitting there figuring out, like, how do I optimize this site, this site, this site, and really figuring it out. And once I got them totally optimized, everything we could do on our end, they still were sucking, and I couldn't like, what? And so I started digging in even further. And it was the hosting space that we were reselling, and that was the crappiest thing ever, because that meant eventually we had to move all of our websites, hundreds of them, over to a new hosting provider. And in the meantime, I was sending snippets of code to the lead techs the server admins, being like, Hey, can you put this in the server? I don't know where it goes or what it does, but I think it's what we need. That was really fun experience. Okay, so cheap and shared hosting. Cheap sucks for a reason. It's going to slow crap down. And we can talk a little bit more about why that is in a second. I want to stop talking now. So next, what's another thing? It's probably slowing your Tyler Ernst 8:26 website down. Too many plugins, lots and lots and lots of plugins. I can start on this one. Okay, so it's the problem is, when you keep adding on plugins, if each plugin has a style sheet. It has a functions file. It has whatever is telling it to work in the admin section, even if just has those three things. And you get 50 of those, think about you got 150 new files that you're loading. So that's where that comes in. Monica Pitts 8:56 And in most instances, the site loads every single one of them, because it's not told not to, right? Even if it doesn't need it on that page, like, even if there's not a contact form on that page, it's still loading everything that it needs. Tyler Ernst 9:09 You can tell really fast we get into a site that has way too many plugins, even when you get into the admin section, because if the admin section is slow, you're like, oh, something's messed up here. Rebecca Thomas 9:22 It doesn't help that you're also basically at the mercy of a developer that you probably are not in contact with, and so you are very reliant on hoping that they are up to date on the new code standards and the new security standards, and that they respond to any kind of threats. So you really do put yourself in a vulnerable position the more you rely on plugins. I'm not saying plugins are bad, but you do need to kind of cherry pick exactly what you need and weed out the rest. Monica Pitts 9:55 Yeah, and we'll talk about ways that we value. And choose whether or not to use a plugin in just a few seconds. Okay, Tyler, one thing that I'm always pushing on, which I don't know if you're thankful or not thankful of this, but I like being there, and I'll be like, woof, this is, this is too much like, it's taking too long to load. We gotta fix this. We gotta change this, and then you have to fix it, yeah. Tyler Ernst 10:23 So I guess, on that same note as the plugins, is like, if your theme is really bloated, too, if you're loading a whole bunch of stuff, like, one of the big optimizations that we did is minimizing all of our CSS into one spot for the whole theme, because that was one less thing to have to load. And once it loads, it's loads, it's done. But having a really bloated theme or that just does way too much stuff, it just, it just adds more load time. So keeping it as light when it's possible is definitely what you're shooting for. And if you're and that's hard to do if you don't know what you're looking at, but like, if you're looking at a pre made theme, there's usually some sort of review talking about, like, oh yeah, this thing is really bulky, or this thing's really lightweight. Lightweight is the keyword there, as you're looking for it's efficient, does the thing it's supposed to done Monica Pitts 11:16 well. And it could just be that you need to run it through a speed test, like, yeah. Run the naked theme through a speed test and just assume that it's going to not be as fast once you get all your stuff in it, it just, yeah, I do think too it, having, like, dealt with many other themes, because I find I get, like, these deaf children, and I have to go in and, like, mess with them and make them functional for a period of time before people rebuild their sites. And there are certain themes that allow you to turn stuff off and on, and I think that's a big thing to look for, like, if you don't need a shopping cart, but it comes with a shopping cart, and there's, like, a a toggle that you can turn it off. That's good. It means it's not going to load all the shopping cart stuff. I mean, it shouldn't, yeah, so, like, look for that. Okay, so one thing that I work back and forth with Tyler on and with Claire all the time is just unoptimized images and videos. We work really hard to keep those things optimized as we're building sites, and then our clients need to do the same, yeah, Mm hmm. They have to be like, the correct size, like the one that you're seeing on the screen. And what's crazy is that, like, if you right click and you view the image in a new tab, and it fills the entire screen. I'm not even surprised, like, I'm not even surprised when that happens. Like, it's like, all the time, but you want it to load in it, like, the right size, because it makes just things go so much faster. And there's a whole tab for that in GT metrics like that. You can look at your image sizes, and you can actually click on the link, and it'll open up that image and you can see how big it is, and then you can look over at the page and be like, well, is that the size it's supposed to be? Probably not. Probably not. Tyler Ernst 13:09 We get we get into more when we talk later about optimizing the theme and stuff like that. But there's tricks you can do in the theme to not let your website have huge images, at least not that it's actually loading. But there's only so much you can do. It's that's unless people are actually uploading the right images. Monica Pitts 13:28 Yeah, it's like your front end developer, like it's my, my role. I make the pages look pretty clear, makes, makes the pages look pretty so we can't be stupid. There you go. All there is to it. You gotta know what you're doing. DVD, right? You'll turtle it. Tyler Ernst 13:48 Then I think the next thing that slows things down a lot is loading external scripts. There's and then there's some stuff that you can't really get away from, like there's just necessary evils like loading your Google ads and your Google Analytics, those do take processing power to load, which, I mean, sucks, but is what it is. If you want to know that stuff, if you if you're really, really, really worried about it, you can not do it. And that's fine, I guess. But stuff like social media feeds, I always try to just to stray away from actually loading a feed on the page, because it falls in that same category as as having too many plugins, like you're really relying on a the feed to always work B, you're relying on another third party to actually load in your site and see you're relying on it to not be junk and actually load properly. So in my experience, I'd much rather just link out to the social media page, but yeah, those things will slow down too. Monica Pitts 14:47 I hate it when I run a report and it's like, one of the only things that's slowing the site down are external scripts. And I'm like, Yeah, but I can't control that, so just stop it. Like it just makes me mad. But I do notice on. Some sites where people use, like, lots of YouTube videos. Like YouTube will when you embed the video the normal way, it's going to pull the same stuff for every video. It's the same stuff that it needs to play every video, and it has to load every single one of them. So, like, when we have a video library or something like that for clients, then we need to work around that and only pull that script that it needs once, instead of 25 times on a page. Or else it's going to take a billion years to load, or you Tyler Ernst 15:31 do like a post section almost, and link out to a single post to avoid that. Monica Pitts 15:35 Yeah, that's a good plan to, like have a, like a cover image kind of thing instead of actually loading the video in Yeah, and Tyler and Rebecca do fancy things like make it look like there's a play button on the top of it, but actually it's just a picture with a play button on the top of it, and then you click it, and then it opens the video and plays it, so that way it doesn't have to load it All smart work around people. Work around Rebecca number six, Rebecca Thomas 16:02 yes, number six out of eight are actually all pretty interconnected, so I'm probably going to really lean into the three together. But one of the biggest things we're seeing right now, particularly noted for like ADA compliance even unoptimized databases. So think about the fact that you have all these plugins, and we talked about having too many. Well, say you deleted some, not all of the items get removed. So you've got these databases, these like spreadsheets in the back end, with all of the data that you had before, just in case you want to turn the plug in back on. Or if you've got like code that is relevant to like products or services that you provided really dependent on the client at this point, but those orphaned little items make your database space bigger, and so eventually you're going to get up to like two, three gigs, if you're a larger client with a Big user base, and that's going to slow you down, especially if you're not using it. You're just letting it sit there and it accumulates dust, quote, unquote, it's it's something that people don't think about often, because you think, Oh, I've deleted this. It's gone. It's not very few things are dead on the Internet. In terms of, like, removing things, it still exists. You just can't see it, Monica Pitts 17:25 like your socks in the sock drawer, like the sock drawer. But if, what if? What if the old socks were, like, invisible Rebecca Thomas 17:31 behind the drawer. You've put so many in there, they've just hidden themselves back there. Now you can't close that Monica Pitts 17:37 drawer. Yeah. Oh, that's a good point. Yes. Okay, so there you go. They're not invisible. They just fell behind the drawer, and that's what it's like. These are your Rebecca Thomas 17:45 socks. Guys take care of socks with that also not using a CDN or caching. So a CDN is a content delivery network. It is a type of caching to, yeah, serve things better. Yeah, it's all it's all caching. So how a CDN works, basically, is that it's taken a cache of your website and put it on different servers around the globe, and so if someone accesses the website, they get served the closest one to them. So it's faster not having a CDN can really kind of bog you down, so you don't have that same option. So say, you are here in the US, and someone in the UK is trying to get to your server, but your server is in the Midwest, and so now they have to go all this way through different channels to get their stuff, and it might be a little slower. Monica Pitts 18:39 Or say, sound takes time to travel. Rebecca Thomas 18:42 Even sound takes time to travel Exactly. And if you've got a bunch of images and you don't have those cached, well, then that's loaded every time they open a new page, instead of, you know, just having this cache of that data. Well, that takes a long time. If you've got projects with a bunch of pictures showing things, if you've got artwork, it just takes a lot of information to move through our tiny little cables. Monica Pitts 19:06 Think about it from like the hosting perspective. So yeah, aren't using a CDN, then every time that somebody looks at your website, your server that's hosting the website has to process that information and send it out, right? But if it's on a CDN, then it's not getting hit all the time. It's kind of like in this little protected universe, and it gets checked by the CDN, and then the CDN distributes it, and so your server load is far smaller. So that that's another reason that it speeds it up. Rebecca Thomas 19:38 It's also safer for your security to have a CDN. So I just usually recommend Monica Pitts 19:42 it. It's a thing. The the Tyler Ernst 19:44 like amount of love I have for CDN and caches, and the amount of hate Venn diagram is a circle. It's a circle because I love it for all those reasons. And then, as a developer, I hated my change anything. Rebecca Thomas 19:57 Yeah, it's like taking a picture. Yeah, and then you've got this picture saved, but if you want to change the picture, you're going to have to take a dual picture, Monica Pitts 20:06 yeah? Well, and we don't enable all that stuff until we're taking a website live, and so we're building it, and everything's good, great and wonderful. And then I go in to make an update after it's taken live, or the client goes in to make an update, Tyler Ernst 20:18 and we're like, like, Well, I'll see you tomorrow. It might be there. And you Monica Pitts 20:22 guys do the same thing with, like, a code update, and we're all like, and we're mad about it because it takes forever. It really does take a long time. But Tyler Ernst 20:31 yeah, like, if I make this update at nine o'clock this morning, I might see it at five, and we can check that it worked. Rebecca Thomas 20:38 Our website has a pretty strong CDN, which keeps us very safe and also make sure that our website is served to as many people as we can, safely and productively. But yeah, no changing the color of her. Ada updates was fun. Monica Pitts 20:55 You're like, I made one change, and three hours later, I'll go see if it happened. Tyler Ernst 20:59 Yep, the circle. That's what I'm telling you. The right thing Monica Pitts 21:03 we don't know. We like immediate gratification. Over here, people do immediate gratification. One thing that we really push our clients to do Tyler Tyler Ernst 21:14 is PHP updates. And this, it's a really hard one to quantify to people who don't understand how the internet works, which is fine, you don't need to understand it completely, but it's hard to say. Like, the the language that it's using, not the language we wrote, but the language it's reading, needs to be updated the library for that, yeah. Monica Pitts 21:37 But how would your phone work? Like if you never update your iOS for Apple Tyler Ernst 21:44 users, even then, I think that that's like another layer out, because iOS is kind of more or less like your Windows operating system that's reading the website, you know, like PHP, Monica Pitts 21:57 like buying a new phone. Tyler Ernst 21:59 I mean, PHP is like the library of the language that your site is reading, which sounds a lot bigger than it is, but point is outdated. PHP is less optimized, that's why they updated it, and it's also less secure, also why they updated it. So the less optimized versions of PHP cancel down your website because it's loading a less good version. That's all there is Rebecca Thomas 22:22 to it. It also means that if you're not updating your PHP, you're going to experience a lot of issues with your plugins, which, again, will bog down your website. And so making sure that you are up to date and that your plugins are up to date really will help you in the long run, like we said, not just with your turtling, but with your security as well, Tyler Ernst 22:45 and at a certain point too, with the PHP is outdated enough plug in authors this, again, it all ties together. It goes back to us talking about how you're relying on someone else's code and someone, some other developer, plug in authors are optimizing their code. If they're doing it right for the newest PHP they're testing it and moving up and up and up. And if you stay down here at 7.3 and they no longer are supporting 7.3 you're not gonna be able to update your plugin. And then you have another problem. Then you have a security hole, and you have unoptimized plugins, and yeah, and eventually Rebecca Thomas 23:17 it just might completely break. APIs, go out of existence or whatever, and it just does not load anymore. And then you have a broken site, and you're no longer serving your information to your consumers. Monica Pitts 23:29 And then you call someone like us, and Tyler Ernst 23:32 we go, Wow, you have 60 plugins on your website. Monica Pitts 23:36 I just had like, a call with somebody the other day. He wasn't even our client, and he's like, can you tell me, like, why I can't do this? And I was like, yeah, it was because your stuff is really old. It gets all really old. And he's like, ah. And I'm like, I'm sorry. Like, it. I wish I had a better answer for you, but I think my best answer for you right now is to create a Google form and link to it, because that's, that's how much capability you have on your website as it sits right now. It's like, it's like it was built in the 1800s or something like that. Rebecca Thomas 24:08 And I know that can be really frustrating for clients. If you have a website like, you kind of want to just have it work and be good, yeah, but it's like a car. You do have to service it, and eventually, one day, you do have to get a newer, nicer car, because the old one is a beater, and it's not going to get you from point A to point B, nor Monica Pitts 24:28 your kid turned 16. God, don't even get me scratched it started on it. I don't want my children to start driving. I'm already lamenting having to, like, give up my 10 year old car, Rebecca Thomas 24:40 just like, let them be me. I don't drive, and I'm 30. Monica Pitts 24:44 I don't think that's gonna fly for now, my Rebecca Thomas 24:49 home, it's fine. All my things are delivered, you know. Monica Pitts 24:52 Okay, so then we've talked like we've kind of brushed up against how you fix these things, but we would like to just kind of work our way through. So. So let me just really quickly recap the things that could possibly be broken. So here's the deal. You're going to run a report. You're going to go to GT metrics or to uptrends, go to PageSpeed Insights. It's going to give you a report of your site. It's going to give you a nice letter grade or a number grade. That's great. Then you're going to go into the details, and it's going to say things like, well, it doesn't actually say your hosting is too slow. It has a much more technical term for it, but it could be that you have a slow hosting service, too many plugins, heavy themes, unoptimized images or videos. You're like, pulling external scripts that are really big and take a long time to load. You could have an unoptimized database. You could not be using a CDN, no caching. PHP version outdated. Some of those things come right back in the report, and they're like, they're there. And they're like, hey, you need to, you need to utilize caching. So those are easy to spot, and others are a little, I don't know. I bet chat GPT could figure it out for you, though. Put them in a chat GPT if you have no idea what I'm talking about, and it'll let you know which one of these things it is, but it's one of these nine items. Okay, so then, how do we fix it? Rebecca, start us off with caching. If it says you need to cash, what do you need to do? So Rebecca Thomas 26:13 if you're just doing some basic caching, there are a lot of excellent free options that we've utilized. We currently primarily use WP Rocket. And we are also looking into w3 total cash, which was recommended by our server techs. And then we also use hummingbird in some cases, which is another family set that we have actually paid for. But all you have to do, for the most part, is add this plug in. I know we say not a lot of plugins, but this one is going to be necessary. This one's fine, and you'll go through and it will take some reading. You will need to read a few of the settings, and you'll have to play around a bit to find what works best for you, depending on your theme and what you're using on the website. But you'll need to turn on things like minimize your CSS, minimize your JavaScript, make sure that you've got lazy load happening if you've got a lot of images, and making sure that, oh, WP Rocket has the ability to remove orphan databases. Or if you've got a lot of revisions over time and that database is still there, you can remove this extra sort of cloying data that is bogging down your website on the back end. One size does not fit all. Everyone should really kind of consider what things you're turning on, and you might break your site a little. Not too bad. Open it in incognito, though, cannot tell you how many times our developers ourselves have gone in set everything up as we have a previous client. Glorious. We look at we're just like, yes, good. It looks good. It loads good. We're great. Tyler Ernst 27:56 It's because you logged in. Rebecca Thomas 28:00 It's fine. Also check on mobile, because sometimes it'll break your JavaScript and mobile is suddenly broken. But yeah, no, it is. It's something you really need to pay attention to while you're setting it up. It's not totally fun, but again, it's very important. If you don't want the turtle, Tyler Ernst 28:16 I want to I want to emphasize that part, look at your website as you're turning stuff on, and don't turn don't turn everything on at once, please. That's it even says WP rocket. There's a big warning when you turn on some things. It's like, hey, this might break stuff. Just so you know, make sure and look at it. There Monica Pitts 28:34 are also being a person who did this on a number of websites without your guys's level of knowledge. I There's videos at the bottom of many pages that will tell you what is happening and how to do it. Watch the videos. Rebecca Thomas 28:50 Do it it's nice. Monica Pitts 28:53 Watch the videos. I had to watch the videos. I'm not afraid to say it, you will feel way more in control if you just watch stupid video at the bottom of the page, Rebecca Thomas 29:02 or you could pay us to do it. We'd always Monica Pitts 29:04 watch a YouTube video like, don't do it blindly. You could, yeah, it's so fun to break things. So an easier thing, I think, than the caching plugin, is compressing your images. A lot of the times, what I do for a quick win is I go out to GT metrics, figure out which ones are way too big, and I just manually compress them and I re upload them, and I replace them completely, because as a non I don't consider myself a coding human being anymore, because I don't do it that's easy. And you just make it the right size and the right compression, and you upload it and boom, things load faster. But you can also use different like different websites to optimize things individually, and you can also install a plugin, like like smush to do it for you. But then two, one thing. That Tyler has been working on for me is when we upload, for example, background image having the theme automatically resize it and make it right for a background so that I don't have to individually format every single background image that we upload to the site. And if it's a post like, let's see, it's a blog post, and you're gonna have a featured image in your blog post. Well, the theme automatically when you upload that image, it resizes it and creates an image that is right for that blog post, featured image, and then it's always pulling the optimized image, and so I don't have to worry about it, which really speeds up my development time. So with the image compression. Obviously, you can do it by hand. You can do it with a plugin, and you can also build it into your theme. So I guess that's like small, medium and large, right? Tyler Ernst 30:52 We kind of touched on it with the unoptimized images of videos too. Is like in our theme, like Monica was just saying, you we have it to where it makes something else, but if you upload a 4k resolution image, that thumbnail is still going to be a 4k resolution, just tiny. So like, which sounds like oxymoron, but it's going to be super dense and tiny, which is still heavy, but it's still, like, not great. Like, it's still going to be a big image file for its size. So it starts at that individual step of uploading a you don't need a 300 DPI image, you need a 72 DPI image, and then it can crop down to a smaller size. And that's even better, like you're just continually building those good habits. Rebecca Thomas 31:38 If you're computer savvy, you might have a program on your computer, such as like Adobe Suite, line of programs. You can do it yourself there by putting it through Photoshop and making it a smaller image size. For some of us, we can even do it through like just the media Windows meet Tyler Ernst 31:59 windows, Media Player or media Rebecca Thomas 32:02 the photo. The photo one, Monica Pitts 32:04 yeah, and I do it a lot in Canva, and Canva does not compress things the way I really want it to, but I can a lot of the images are like a really similar size, and so I can set up like a 400 by 600 image and just plunk in a bunch of images I'm going to use in a page and then export them like optimized and compressed. And it's Tyler Ernst 32:25 too bad XD is going away, because it is actually really good. When you export at least JPEGs, you can tell it to be like 85% quality at that you can't visually see that much of a difference. I suppose you could if you really are really savvy and zoomed in, but like for your general use, you can't see that much of a difference, and it compresses it like crazy. Rebecca Thomas 32:47 You can also run it through things like we've mentioned, like smush and tiny PNG, and those will change it to, if you have, like the pro version of smush, or if you have taken the time to go through tiny PNG, or another one we use squoosh. It will change it to a web p file waste, while it is the same density, so same pixel looks excellent, it will cut it by like two thirds, I think, the size of the file and excellent. It's actually recommended by gt metrics to have these next gen formats, which is like web P and another one that starts with an A, to have these, because Google prefers them at this point. Monica Pitts 33:28 This is a fun intern activity. These are things that I delegate to our intern because I'm like, I have a photo gallery I'm having, especially like when you have a like, a services page, and you've got, like, more than one photo gallery on it. I mean, you have to be really cognizant of what you're doing here and make sure that all your settings are exactly right in these photo galleries, or else you're loading enormous images. And so I'm always like, okay, Ellie, here's all the pictures. I'm so sorry. Run them through and make them into web bids for me, so I can put them on this page because it is. It just, I don't want it. It's a sales page, yo, it's a sales page. It's gotta load. It's just takes time loading. Okay, we talked about plugins. So if we have too many plugins, what can we do? Tyler Ernst 34:20 So, like, one of our big mentalities with our theme is, if we can avoid plugin usage, we will that. And that sounds tether developers, I've said that before to other developers, they think it sounds a little pompous at first. It does sound like, Oh, we're better than plugins. But no, it's it's just like, if a plugin does it better. We're going to do that like, ACF is perfect. ACF is my favorite child, Monica Pitts 34:46 advanced custom fields. Anybody who doesn't know what that is, Rebecca Thomas 34:49 or the cadence block plugin, I do like that. I like the cadence blocks, Tyler Ernst 34:53 right? But it's, it's like formidable for middle we've been using literally as long as I've been at mayecreate. I. Over a decade. We've been using it so long that our license is grandfathered in, and we'd have unlimited field or sites, but you can't get anymore. So Monica Pitts 35:09 that's our form building plugin, in case anybody needs to know that. Tyler Ernst 35:13 So like, if a plugin does it better than you're going to do it, then that's, that's one thing you know that's fine. If it's it's a really advanced thing that you don't know how to do, then that's fine, too, but you don't need a Monica Pitts 35:24 shopping cart. Oh my gosh, do not. Yeah, don't build that on your own Tyler Ernst 35:28 learning management systems, all messes, sure, but you don't need a plugin that does one thing. If you have a plugin that says, What have I ran into? I ran into so many that it's like, this plugin. Oh, here's a recent one. It's a plugin that was basically a maintenance mode plugin, but it was called force login. It had no settings, and all it did was made your entire site user only, and it just sits there. If it's active, it's active, and if it's not, it's not, it's not, it's like, you don't need that. It's, it's, we like to weigh the plugins with, all right? Is this a single line and formidable codec so we can just put it in the functions file and it just does it. You don't need a plugin for that. Is it an entire learning LMS or shopping cart, probably a plugin for that. So just weighing those things, and then, like Rebecca was saying earlier about when we were talking about vetting plugins, weighing, do you need it and is it well built? Those are the two things. Rebecca Thomas 36:37 You can also look at the star rating and you would like more you are when you are looking at a rating for a plugin, it is the same as looking at a rating for like an Amazon product. You are more likely to get a better product if you have, like, a four star with like 4000 reviews than a five star with two reviews, and the more uploads or downloads to a website, that means that that's an actively used plugin that is probably well developed and updated reliably. So I mean that you take your chances, but you can take your chances closer to shooting the arrow at the bulls. Tyler Ernst 37:20 Yeah. Educated chances, Rebecca Thomas 37:21 Educated chances. Monica Pitts 37:23 Well, you can look at how many, how how frequently it's updated. And when I say how frequently, really, I mean like, it tells you when the last update was and if it was a year ago. But you know that WordPress has changed, like, can, it can changes considerably over the course of a year. So that's when I would look at it and be like, well, how complicated is this thing? Is it? Like, super not complicated. And maybe it doesn't use any of the updates that, maybe it doesn't interact with any of the updates that WordPress has made in the last year. But a lot of the times, I want to see something that's updated, like, at least every few months, like touched at least, you know, like Rebecca Thomas 38:00 when you are downloading a plugin, specifically from the admin section of your WordPress website. It is really neat that you can actually see the last time that it was updated, whether or not has been tested with your version of WordPress, what the star rating is, how many people have it downloaded. And it will also show you what PHP version, the minimum amount may be and if Monica Pitts 38:23 you're experimenting and you just installed something to see if you like it or not, that's cool, then delete it when you decide you don't like it. Yes, that's that's a pretty easy one to roll. Okay, so speaking of the not using as many plugins, because we really do build a lot of those features into our theme. Like a quick win would be to optimize your theme, but I mean, like, is that really quick? Because this is, like, an investment, right? I feel like I don't know. I think it's in the wrong Tyler Ernst 38:55 category. I think this actually falls more into intermediate fixes, Monica Pitts 38:59 yeah, or advanced. That's a Tyler Ernst 39:01 lot of work. I Yeah. Rebecca Thomas 39:05 So, yeah, Tyler Ernst 39:07 we, we can come back to that when we talk about the the other ones, Monica Pitts 39:11 I would say that I like, I don't know if I would call this a quick win, but this is like a beginner level move. So if you're using a page builder, like Beaver Builder, or Elementor or Divi, it slows down your load time on your site. It just does it's loading extra stuff in so if you can not use a page builder, your site will load faster and it will break less. In my experience, and also so if you're using a page builder, you can decide not to use one anymore, or in your next site, or every page moving forward on your site, like just because you used Elementor on one page or on 17 pages, doesn't mean the 18th page has to use Elementor to be built. It is. Might not look the same, man, I'm such a naysayer over here, and the other thing that I've learned from experience is like block libraries. Don't install a whole block library just because you want one fun timeline block this is not a good plan, because you're getting way more code to load in this website than you need. Some block libraries are really cool. You can turn on and off blocks, and in that way, limit your load time and what you're asking it to pull. But I mean, you don't just just pick one that you really like that as most of the stuff. And then if you need a cool timeline block, just just install a timeline block plugin that only loads on the page that has the timeline block. Read my Yeah, consolidate, clean the closet. We go. Tyler Ernst 40:53 We kind of are like, it feels like we're a little back and forth on plugins, because we're like, just install plugin to do it. But again, it comes down to that educated Monica Pitts 41:03 vetting of it. Yeah, and I mean, with timeline plugins, there's a lot of times where I build them manually, because I can make them look really pretty. I can animate them. They're going to look great. They're going to optimize. They're going to look better on mobile when I do it that way. But then there's other times where a client's like, No, I wanted to be this way. And I'm like, Okay, well, yeah, that's going to require me to, like, have some extra funky stuff in there that isn't just living in my block library. And so then I do have to use a very specific plugin to do that feature for them. But there you go, yep, intermediate fixes. Rebecca talked about this earlier. No, is this really an intermediate fix? Though? Everything that from this point on, I would say, is an advanced fix. Probably you guys agree. Okay, there you go. We have no intermediate fixes. I'm sorry, we just covered those with your quick wins. Rebecca Thomas 42:03 So I Yeah, the following fixes are probably something that either you need to have a little bit of knowledge about, or something that you need to do some research on, or hire someone with more knowledge than you. And that's not about I don't know anything about concrete. I hire our clients for concrete, they hire me for security, coexistence, but for our first fix, we talked about it, I kind of went a little bit more on length, and I'm going to try and keep this a little bit shorter. Use a CDN. The CDN, like I said, basically takes a picture of your website, puts it in multiple places around the globe, and then when someone accesses your website, they'll get served that picture closer to them, so it's served faster, more efficient, and they have much less load times. This is probably more helpful for things, for websites that are serving to maybe rural areas, that way you're not serving from mid Iowa down to Texas. I mean, if you're in rural Texas, I you get what I mean. Monica Pitts 43:10 Also, companies have this in, they provide this. But then there's other services, like, when we remember, when we heard about CloudFlare, it was at Kansas City word camp, and we were like, what what Tyler Ernst 43:24 is this? What is this magic? What are you talking Monica Pitts 43:27 that? I was like, yes, so exciting. Rebecca Thomas 43:32 Out really quick about it. CloudFlare, not only does an excellent job at keeping your website served and up and running for other people. Fun fact, their security is actually very good, because their codes are made with lava lamps. Tyler Ernst 43:51 Their security codes a picture Rebecca Thomas 43:53 or a camera watches the lava lamps and creates these codes based on where in the lava lamp the little gooey bit is and so it's completely randomized, and your website actually is kept safe from things like DDoS attacks, which is basically of just and it's so fun. What a creative way to like keep your website served and safe. Monica Pitts 44:19 I had no idea about this lava lamp business, I feel like I should go buy a lava lamp just to celebrate their use of lava lamps. Lava Lamp security, yeah, a lava lamps. We're a lava lamp based security company. I mean that, if that's not a conversation starter, I don't know what is right. So yeah. Tyler Ernst 44:42 So the next fix that's a little more involved would be like we were talking about with plugins, getting rid of those plugins you don't actually need. This is a little more involved, because the odds, if you're especially coming into a website that you don't know anything about, for how it's built, the odds you bring. Something are pretty high, because you just turn something off and suddenly holds the whole site white screens. You know, that's not great, but which is a little scary. But same time, if you start with the easy ones and you just move on to the more, like, I don't know what that one does, that might be important. It's kind of like taking out walls. You don't want to take out the load bearing ones, you know. Monica Pitts 45:22 Yeah, that's a great way to put it, Rebecca Thomas 45:24 something you might consider when you're doing these optimizations, particularly with things like removing orphan databases. Take a backup of your website, whether you are going to talk to your server to go get that done, or if you use a plugin to take a backup, have a backup of your website, because if you mess up in a way that you know makes you panic, Monica Pitts 45:45 you want to have that. Just roll it back, baby. Roll Tyler Ernst 45:48 there, yeah, eventually you do Stop panicking about white screen sites you do Rebecca Thomas 45:55 up. The first time I did it Monica Pitts 45:57 not. Rebecca, Rebecca Thomas 46:00 it was a very big site Monica, Monica Pitts 46:02 oh, you needed a ninja turtle in your office. Rebecca Thomas 46:06 I had a Voltron Monica Pitts 46:09 and a lava lamp. You get a love lamp in there, and everybody's getting one for Christmas. And Tyler's talking about getting rid of plugins as a way to, like, optimize your database, because your website could be loading slow because your database is bogged down. One thing that we do often is we just assess a website before we rebuild it, and we're like, should we re theme it? Put the theme in the current hosting space, use the current database, roll that way, or should we literally just establish a new hosting space, establish a new database, reinstall the plugins and import anything that we need. After we clean it all up, it's like, it's the ultimate spring cleaning. It's like we're going deep here. We got into the attic, we took out grandma's old like Bram, it's a thing we're doing it. Sometimes Tyler Ernst 47:06 it's not an option, like, sometimes we do need to start from the database, just for sheer amount of stuff that they do use that's there. But my personal opinion, I like starting from the database, because then you don't run into that, yeah, export and import the things you need. Monica Pitts 47:21 Yeah, what's the next thing? Tyler Ernst 47:26 So that also runs into the minifying CSS and JavaScript. This is something that also ties into optimizing your theme and that we like. We do this in our own theme, we minimize our CSS that we use on anything into one spot, and that also means like taking out all the extra spaces and all the extra line breaks. But you can do the same thing with WP Rocket, like Rebecca was mentioning earlier, installing caching plugin. But again, it's kind of in both quick wins and intermediate, because, like we said, then you can really break stuff and not realize it at first when you minimize all JavaScript, because some JavaScript does actually, on a more technical level, some line breaks and stuff does matter to JavaScript, depending on what order things are read in. So therefore, when you, when you minimize everything into one file, sometimes your site gets real bad, like you don't she don't want that. Monica Pitts 48:23 Open it in an incognito window and load it every time you change a setting important. Okay, so Rebecca there is going like, if they're running a report, one of the things that I will see is lazy load images and videos. What does that mean to normal human beings? Rebecca Thomas 48:45 So lazy load, essentially is, in our case, a setting in like smush or WP Rocket that tells the website to load images by priority. So at the top of the page, we've got our header image. That's probably gonna be the first one you load. Background images on top of the page gonna load first anything below the fold, which is what we call anything you have to scroll further down to see, will be loaded as a later priority. So you it's a hierarchy of needs sort of thing, and it is actually relatively important. So say you're serving to someone over with a rule type internet, they're not going to have high speeds and they're not going to have enough data bandwidth to be able to load in 20 pictures at one go. So they're sitting there spinning wheel of death trying to get to your page, and eventually they're going to leave, which you don't want we've got people watching reels like they've got 15 second attention Monica Pitts 49:46 spans they're going Rebecca Thomas 49:49 so, I mean, it's really important to make sure that you get top priority information loaded first, and that includes making sure if the video is at the bottom of. Page. It does not need to be loaded first. Doesn't Monica Pitts 50:03 well and, man, those videos at the top of the pages, I they're like, killing me right now. I like, clients are so into it. They're like, I want to have a five minute drone video. And I'm like, Okay, can we have a five second drone video? Like, that's like, I want less than 30 seconds worth of video at the top of your page. Can we work that out? Because it is, it really slows stuff down. And then two, I'll go to websites where, while the video is loading, it's just a big white screen up there, and everything is kind of just like bonking. And I in those instances, it's like, man, could you not have loaded anything like a gray background or something with a texture, or like some image, and then load in the I mean, it's just like, anyway, so it's it's tricky. There is a plugin that I've used on keyword like on specific websites that have a ton of stuff on them that will allow you to select which items you want to load on a page, and that will dramatically increase load time on your pages, because, like Tyler was explaining earlier, every plugin that you install, every block library, your page builders, they load on every page, whether you're using them or not. And so what you can do with this plugin is you can be like, don't load this block library because I don't need it ever, except for on this one page, for this one timeline plugin, back to my timeline example, or don't load forms except for on like, let's say you never have an email form on a blog post, so just tell it not to load that stuff, and then it will load faster by, you know, default, because it doesn't have as much stuff. But it takes time, obviously, and you gotta know what's going on. But it really helped on these websites, like, really helped speed them up well as one Tyler Ernst 51:52 of those things when we're when we're vetting a website and, like, seeing what's up with it and giving them an estimate. I open, I just control you to see the just output code of the page, and it's like the first what, how 50 lines are just import, import, import. Monica Pitts 52:11 You're like, Oh, fun Rebecca Thomas 52:15 fact about formidable you can now set it to only load on the pages it had to form on. Monica Pitts 52:22 That is awesome. I didn't know that, Rebecca Thomas 52:24 so a good developer should be thinking about these things, which is a really excellent move for, I think, the future of website services. Monica Pitts 52:33 Yeah, I love it. Rebecca Thomas 52:38 I did add this one in here because we've mentioned it a couple of times, but we didn't really have a dedicated section for it at the beginning of the talk, but I think it needed to be added, especially since we were mentioning that a lot of our traffic now that we're seeing is unfortunately less human and more bot, which is not ideal. We would like more humans interacting with our websites, because that's how we get things sold. But the thing is, not every bot is made equally. Some of them are, like our chat GPT bots that are going to come in and they're going to scrape our stuff so they can serve, like someone's asked a question, and now they can get this link served to them to our website, which would be really, really great. That's like the top of the Google search. Now at this point, not always ideal, but very useful for some people who just need that information very quickly. There are other bots that we have experienced recently, particularly in our own sector, with our websites, that are going to start really bogging down your load time because they're going and they're scraping everything, and they're trying to get in there they want in your website, whether it is malicious or if it is like perplexity, we have had to block perplexity on three separate websites recently because they triggered our auto Scale, which costs our clients money, but essentially, it was scraping the website so hard that the number of instances in which the PHP requests were triggered made the server overload to a certain extent, so they had to advance how much space was allowed for that website and so you really focus, and this is going to be intermediate to advanced. Really focus on your security of your website. Block what you don't need accessing your website. You don't need all these bots scraping you. If you've got a good Google presence, if you've got a good Google My Business, if you make sure your site map is in there, you're going to get served well, Monica Pitts 54:43 and you don't on your product too, because there are, like, with perplexity, or with chat GPT, like people are starting to use those to buy products now. Yeah. So I. Do feel like it's important that you have your website set up correctly so that it can serve well in, you know, yes, a search in that way. And I that's probably a whole different episode. But if you are a builder, a home builder, for example, you probably don't need to have perplexity scraping your website on repeat, because those people are going to search differently when they need your service, right? They're going to be like, home builder near me, home builder Saint Louis, Missouri, you know, like the Ozarks, whatever it is, and so in that instance, like that bot traffic probably yielding new business. But if you're looking for like, soccer shoes with the most support, and you're having a conversation with chat GPT about it, and it's pulling in soccer shoes. Then I wouldn't turn it off, because you need it. It's going to send people to your website to make conversion. So you can also look at that in your Google Analytics. It will tell you what the traffic is doing when it's there, and if the traffic isn't yielding business for you, then you know, by all means, block it, yeah. But it could be worth it to pay for the up, like the upgraded hosting package, if, if you're getting business and perplexity is sending you referrals, if that makes sense, Rebecca Thomas 56:18 yeah. And the good thing is, you can really sort of fine tune what you want blocked. There are ones that you don't need, perplexity some people will need, yeah, some people won't. There are other ones that are purely marketing, things that are not relevant to searches. It is just a business that sells that data. I don't remember their name specifically, or, like, we have a go to List, yeah, we just, we have a go to list that we automatically block because they are not necessary. And if you are having problems with perplexity overloading website, you can block that individually, or you don't have to at all. Like I said, it is case by case basis, because Monica Pitts 56:56 it could be a good investment to, like, move up a hosting package and get that traffic from perplexity. If you're getting referral traffic from perplexity, that's what would have to happen. It can't just be bot traffic as to be referral traffic like, it will tell you that perplexity sent people back to your site. It's in the list so that they have to, like, they have to balance out. Rebecca Thomas 57:17 Mm, hmm. There's a lot of data you really need to take into account with these sort of changes, yeah, but security is still, like, first and foremost, like, make, make sure you, you're good. Monica Pitts 57:26 We are really geeks. It's okay. We're really geeks. Okay. So I mentioned this before, but, and we actually just said it, so your hosting plan, the cheapest plan is, is the cheapest plan? For a reason, your site is not going to load quickly when it's sharing. Go into resources with other websites. If one of those websites is under a bot attack, like Rebecca was just describing it's pulling the resources from the server, and then your website loads slower. Yeah. And then when your website goes down, they don't a they don't tell you, and they do not tell you when it's going to go back up, and you can just sit and wait, and eventually it will go back up, and then you can be happy about it. And that is how that service works. Ask me how I know so it's not awesome. Yes, Rebecca Thomas 58:16 if you are seeing like your website going down periodically, let's say five to 10 minutes at a time, maybe 30 minutes, like we have, our websites actually hooked up to an uptime monitor, so we see when things go down. We had one site consistently going down about once a week for about an hour, which was very odd, 15 minutes. Normal happens occasionally, just because servers get updated. But an hour was really weird. We actually found out that a server was being shared which it's a cloud server that is going to happen on some hosting platforms. Our hosting platform had a separate client, not related to us, having a website that was in development and not being used, constantly being attacked, constantly being attacked, and it would take down our client's website, and it took us a while to figure that out. So if you are seeing drops in service, maybe consider moving to a different hosting plan, or asking your developer if you can move to a different server, and that might resolve it. Monica Pitts 59:24 So other things that you can do, you can enable object caching, which is complicated, and Rebecca would need to do that for you. Yeah. You can optimize your theme, which is also complicated. And we talked about it a little bit earlier, and we've talked about it kind of sprinkled in throughout Tyler. Do you have anything else that you'd like to add on? Like, theme optimization? It's kind of tricky because they they can't do it themselves. It's Tyler Ernst 59:51 definitely a case by case thing. I think it's, I just making sure that you're, like, looking out for, oh, the theme loads. I. Four dependencies, or four or five dependencies every single page and their entire libraries, like, like, again, some of that's unavoidable. Like, we load a couple here and there, but just making sure that your theme is as lightweight and as flexible and streamlined as possible, that's always our goal. And Monica Pitts 1:00:19 unfortunately, code changes over time. And so what was lightweight five years ago is now not light anymore. It's just not and it changes all the time. We also talked about upgrading your PHP to the latest version, and Tyler mentioned that earlier, so I know that there's some hosting companies that are behind man, you should get on them. Or, hey, wait, switch hosting companies. There you go. There's another answer, Rebecca Thomas 1:00:52 sometimes necessary but painful. Monica Pitts 1:00:54 And then another complicated answer is you could consider static site generation or headless WordPress, which is, like, if you don't know what those words are, find a developer who does and because that might be the answer. And it all depends. And like, like we were talking about with the plugins, your hosting package has to match what your site's going to do. So if you're going to run an LMS, if you're going to run a website that has a shopping cart in it, you need a hosting plan that's equipped to handle that, and the server that's set up to be able to handle that. It's there. It's not one size fits all like and and along the same lines as PHP and the themes and everything, it's not one size fits all friends. Okay? So, yeah, there you have it. You're very windy road map from turtle speed to lightning vest. Yeah, that was pretty windy. I Hey, guess what? Though there's a blog post and I'm going to, like, dissect all this stuff and, like, put it in a really streamlined answer for you. But if you're an audio learner, I hope you enjoyed our banter today. And we get it like this, stuff can feel really overwhelming when we run up against a new thing and we can't figure out what it is like. Rebecca said a site going down like over and over again, it just doesn't make sense. We are at we we're just as baffled as you are. And it's like a daily thing and and we've been doing this like, I've been doing it for over 20 years, Tyler and Rebecca been doing it for 10 I mean, it's not like we're new it's just like, always a new thing, right? So the challenge is, though, is that speed really isn't optional, and your visitors expect it. Google literally demands it, and your bottom line depends on it. So start with some of those quick wins that we talked about, the caching, plug in, the image, compression, your plug in cleanup. And if you can knock those out one day and double check your site every single time make sure that you didn't break something, then you can like work through those intermediate fixes or or task them to a developer. And if you get like, like, if you get halfway through that list and you're like, I cannot do this, then you should delegate the whole mass to somebody who likes to do it, someone like Rebecca or Tyler. Okay, so next up in our next episode, we're going to tackle something that might make your eyes glaze over, even faster than website speed advice, which is how to make an ADA compliant PDF. And why? Because, apparently, making these documents accessible is rocket science, right? Actually, no, no, it is totally not. It is not rocket science, my friends. It is just a few clicks. It's just people don't know what to click. They That's it. I'm, like, amazed at how easy it is, and with the ADA compliance mandates coming down from the Department of Justice with a deadline of April 2024 and April 2025 depending upon who you serve. And we did a whole podcast about that, my friends. So just hop back a few episodes we explain all of the mandates that came down from the Department of Justice. But ultimately, what it says is ADA compliant. PDFs on your site isn't just a nice to have thing anymore. It's like it's a must have thing that you have to have to be compliant. And so I'm going to explain just how to do it for our clients so they can keep these websites. The Rebecca is making completely ADA compliant, still ADA compliant in one year, there's nothing sadder than what they blow it up. So stay tuned for that joy ride, um, and until then, go back run a report on your website, and, you know, make it run fast enough to impress your new millennial audience with like zero patience and the attention span of a goldfish who may or may not know even what their favorite ninja turtle is. So thank you so much for hanging out with us, and until next time, go forth and market with purpose. Transcribed by https://otter.ai