Optimizing Your Site for Holiday Traffic

Is Your Website Ready?

#wpeholidays

Your Presenters

Terell Moore Operations Engineer, WP Engine

❖ Native Austinite

❖ Site Speed Guru

❖ Wannabe Tennis Champion

Taylor DondichVP Engineering, MaxCDN

❖ Obsessed With Speed

❖ Wordpress Performance Hacker

❖ Semi-Pro Rock Band Rockstar

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What you’ll learn:

❖ Why speed matters❖ Best practices for keeping your site scalable for

peak traffic❖ How CDN can take a load off your server and

increase speed❖ Actionable tips and tricks to optimize your site

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Why Speed Matters

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Why Speed Matters

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Why Speed Matters

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How to Prep Your Site for the Holidays

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1. Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

2. Balance the Workload3. Updates

1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

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What is a server request?❖ Each asset loaded on your site

➢ Images, CSS, Javascript

1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

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Why is improving your site’s server requests important?❖ Browsers have a max parallel

requests limit❖ More requests = more time

1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

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❖ Minification & Concatenation❖ Cache❖ Image Compression❖ CDN

1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

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What is minification?❖ Removal of unneeded data or

whitespace in text files (CSS, Javascript, HTML, etc)

What is concatenation?❖ Combines multiple text-based files

into one for more efficient loading

1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

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How can you minify?❖ WordPress plugins

➢ Better WordPress Minify ➢ Autoptimize

1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

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What is cache?❖ Storing previously generated data

for faster subsequent loading

1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

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How can you cache?❖ WordPress plugins (not needed on

WP Engine)➢ W3 Total Cache➢ WP Super Cache

1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

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What is image compression?❖ Removing unneeded bytes from

image files➢ Lossy : Degrades image quality➢ Lossless : Does not degrade

quality

1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

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How to compress your images?❖ WordPress Plugins

➢ WP Smush➢ EWWW Optimizer Cloud

❖ Through your photo editor

1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

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What is a CDN?❖ Distributed servers to balance web

requests

1. How to Improve Your Site’s Server Requests

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How to enable CDN?❖ WordPress Plugins (not needed on

WP Engine)➢ W3 Total Cache

2. How to Balance Your Site’s Workload

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❖ Balance your workload using dedicated services ➢ CDN for images, CSS, Javascript➢ Video host (i.e. YouTube, Vimeo,

etc)➢ Comments (Disqus)➢ Popular posts (Jetpack)

3. Updates

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❖ Why are updates important to speed / stability?➢ Updates are usually bug-fixes to

address performance or stability

Why CDN Matters

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Taylor DondichVP Engineering,

MaxCDN

❖ Previously @ Yahoo

❖ A constant tinkerer

❖ Obsessed with your site’s speed

About MaxCDN’s Network

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❖ WP Engine users already benefit from their partnership with MaxCDN➢ Smarter technology for faster

routing➢ 19 global “PoPs” (Points of

Presence) for shorter routes➢ Servers built for speed

About MaxCDN’s Network

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Review Of Previous Tips

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❖ Smaller requests❖ Minification (review)❖ Concat CSS and JS files (review)❖ Smaller images (review)

Additional Tips

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❖ Optimize your theme➢ Less reliance on images➢ Less widgets/helpers

❖ Reduce 3rd party Javascript libraries➢ Async vs. sync libraries

❖ Visit MaxCDN One for more WP tips

I Feel The Need. The Need For Speed.

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❖ Test your speed➢ PageSpeed Insights (Google)

■ See overall page speed■ Mobile vs. desktop■ Offers actionable suggestions

PageSpeed Example

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Getting Into The Details

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❖ Test your performance➢ WebPagetest

■ Waterfall detailed graphs■ Tests from global locations■ Test different browsers

Getting Into The Details

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Getting Into The Details

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Always Be Testing

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❖ New changes can skew your performance

❖ Always test after plugin updates!❖ Do you need that new Geewhiz?

Resources

#wpeholidays

❖ Infographic: How Website Speed Impacts Performance http://wpengine.com/blog/site-speed-infographic/

❖ In-depth 3-part Webinar Series: How to Handle Peak Capacity & Speed Up WordPress Siteshttp://wpengine.com/speed-up-wordpress/

❖ Prepare for Holiday Traffic Tips/Links from MaxCDNhttps://www.maxcdn.com/wpengine-webinar-holiday-traffic/

More info:WP Engine MaxCDNCall Lizzie Villarreal at Live chat with

Support 512-827-3585 x3431, or Team at maxcdn.com

Chat with a rep at wpengine.com

Want to follow today’s speakers? Terell - @tee_rail

Taylor - @TDondich

Q&A

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