Site Speed HacksThat will make you money

Average Site Speed

6.7 seconds on desktop10.2 seconds on mobile

* source

Google Recommends:

1 second on all devices….

While [Google] noted at the time that...a small percentage of sites would see a significant change in ranking or traffic due to page speed factors, I find it likely that the emphasis will increase over time…. ...Having given webmasters fair notice...it’s reasonable to expect them to phase in greater emphasis until they feel that most of their top results deliver a high level of performance.

- Roger Dooley ….

Site Speed Boosts Conversion• Amazon saw 1% drop for every

100 ms increase in load time

• For Walmart, conversions doubled from 3 second load time to 1 second

• Google saw 20% decrease in search traffic with ½ second increase in load time

• Shopzilla saw 12% increase in conversions between faster and slower pages

• Mozilla saw 15.4% increase in Firefox downloads in an A/B test with speed as the only variant

• Microsoft saw .7% increase in traffic after enabling progressive rendering on Bing search pages

1. Choose an Appropriate Web Host• Avoid shared hosting if you can• Nginx performs better than Apache out of the box• Hosts running newer versions of PHP are usually faster• Dedicated host for your CMS• Most dedicated hosts have built-in redundancies for traffic spikes,

CDN and caching• VPS generally rocks!

I JUST CANNAE DO IT!I DINNAE HAVE THE POWER!

2. Combine AND Minify all the code

• Javascript• CSS• HTML

3. Remove query strings from *static* resources

4. Cache & CDN• Server cache• Leverage user’s browser cache

5. Minimize slow or heavy scripts & plugins• Avoid Flash and Silverlight at all costs

• Minimize reliance on Javascript

I DO NOT SUPPOSE YOU COULD SPEED THINGS UP?!

6. Minimize use of external content• Embedded external content• Videos• Social feeds• Ads

• Google Fonts (not all created equal)

• NEVER use image files loading from another site (hotlinking)

7. Optimize how the page renders (DOM)• CSS in the header

• Javascript in the footer

• If your site has a lot of images, use Lazy Load (JS)

I THOUGHT YOU SAID THIS SHIP WAS FAST?!

8. Image Compression• Proper file type choice

• Minimize use of .gif

• Use “Save for Web” in Photoshop, Illustrator, or the “Save for Web” extension for GIMP

Some Automatic Compression Tools• TinyPng• Compressnow• Compressor.io• JPEG-Optimizer• Image Optimizer

If you’re adventurous…• jpegtran• gifsicle• optipng• pngquant• webp

Truly Automatic Compression Tools• WP Smushit (WPMU Dev premium)

• EWWW Image Optimizer

The Best Image Compression Option:

• Manual compression in Photoshop, Illustrator, or GIMP

What’s the difference?• 5-30% file size savings with automated tools

• Usually 50-80% savings with manual tools

• That could mean the difference of SECONDS in load time

3.1 MB

182 KB

Don’t make your site visitors into this guy

Now Let’s Look at Some Real Stuff!

Feel Free to Ask Questions Later Toodustin@eightyandeight.com

@dustinnay