WordPress can be the best content management system for your site.
But as your site starts to get bigger and traffic increases and the amount of content you’re producing grows, you need to start thinking about tuning your site for page load time.
To that point, we get asked quite often “What WordPress plugin do you use to speed up page load time?”
The answer, as you may have guessed, isn’t so straight forward.
The two big ones are WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.
For what it’s worth, we generally go with W3 Total Cache and have seen the best gaines from it, mainly because of its integration with CloudFront and S3 (both Amazon Web Service features).
However, we want to take a step back here.
You’d better know what you’re doing if you’re going to use these Plugins and get the most of out them.
If you’re not careful, you may end up breaking your site. You need someone we Web Development knowledge who can set this up and manage it for you.
But, let’s point out something else here. Both the Plugins speed up your site by adding caching, expirations, minification and CDN Hosting.
They take the strain off your servers.
If you have a crappy server, you’re putting a Bandaid on a bullet wound. And adding WordPress Plugins can actually make the problem worse as they add processing overhead.
We’re in the process of evaluating two new alternatives that would differ the point where we need to start caching the heck out of our applications.
Page.ly
Launched in 2009 as the first of a growing field of Managed WordPress Hosting service page.ly continues to lead the field with thousands of paid clients including SimpleGeo, GetSatisfaction, Viddler, Twilio, and causes.com.
Page.ly basically tells you “don’t worry about a thing. We’ll make sure your app performs.”
PHP Fog
It’s really called App Fog now, but PHP Fog was the “Heroku for PHP apps.” With great WordPress support and professional, customized architecture, PHP Fog is a very attractive offering.
The point is, page load time is huge.
Studies have shown that if visitors don’t have some sort of visual indication that your site is working within two seconds, they’ll bail. If it’s not fully loaded in eight seconds? Gone.
Google, too, has started incorporating page load time in it’s rankings.
So it’s not something you can take lightly and don’t rely just on Plugins to do everything for you.
Do your due diligence. Hire an expert. This isn’t something you want to go cheap on.
About Cody Swann
Cody Swann is an entrepreneur, developer, strategist, banged up ex-football walk-on, retired body builder and former journalist born and raised in South Florida. He currently splits his time between his hometown of Stuart, FL and Los Angeles, CA. Cody founded Gunner Technology, a highly sought after digital agency, specializing in helping companies maximize profits through custom web development, technology efficiencies, social media strategy and search engine marketing.
As a manager and developer at ESPN for nearly six years, Cody led development and vision for two of ESPN’s most popular online features: Sports Scoreboards and GameCasts. Additionally Cody oversaw all aspects of MyESPN and ESPN’s social network, ESPN Fan Profiles. Cody worked with Technology, Editorial, Sales, Marketing and relevant business stakeholders to mold ESPN’s social media strategy, develop custom applications for it and execute it. Under his direction, ESPN successfully ported large portions of its core product from a proprietary Java stack to an open source Ruby on Rails stack, capable of standing up and performing under the tremendous load world's most popular sports site delivers.
Cody began forging his technological knowledge more than 10 years ago, developing and designing websites in college. His development work has included web development, web design, content writing, digital photography and digital video production for award-winning sites like Gainesville.com, GatorSports.com and ESPN.com. He has helped set digital strategy and direction for companies in the New York Times Regional Newspaper group, ESPN, ABC and Disney.
He is a recognized expert in web development, social media strategy, search engine optimization, conversion optimization, analytics tracking and business planning. He has worked with large interactive media companies to small and medium sized businesses. Cody motivates and inspires creative teams to deliver superb, polished work under tight deadlines.
View all posts by Cody Swann →
What WordPress plugin do you use to speed up page load time?
What WordPress plugin do you use to speed up page load time?
Commentary
WordPress can be the best content management system for your site.
But as your site starts to get bigger and traffic increases and the amount of content you’re producing grows, you need to start thinking about tuning your site for page load time.
To that point, we get asked quite often “What WordPress plugin do you use to speed up page load time?”
The answer, as you may have guessed, isn’t so straight forward.
The two big ones are WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.
For what it’s worth, we generally go with W3 Total Cache and have seen the best gaines from it, mainly because of its integration with CloudFront and S3 (both Amazon Web Service features).
However, we want to take a step back here.
You’d better know what you’re doing if you’re going to use these Plugins and get the most of out them.
If you’re not careful, you may end up breaking your site. You need someone we Web Development knowledge who can set this up and manage it for you.
But, let’s point out something else here. Both the Plugins speed up your site by adding caching, expirations, minification and CDN Hosting.
They take the strain off your servers.
If you have a crappy server, you’re putting a Bandaid on a bullet wound. And adding WordPress Plugins can actually make the problem worse as they add processing overhead.
We’re in the process of evaluating two new alternatives that would differ the point where we need to start caching the heck out of our applications.
Page.ly
Launched in 2009 as the first of a growing field of Managed WordPress Hosting service page.ly continues to lead the field with thousands of paid clients including SimpleGeo, GetSatisfaction, Viddler, Twilio, and causes.com.
Page.ly basically tells you “don’t worry about a thing. We’ll make sure your app performs.”
PHP Fog
It’s really called App Fog now, but PHP Fog was the “Heroku for PHP apps.” With great WordPress support and professional, customized architecture, PHP Fog is a very attractive offering.
The point is, page load time is huge.
Studies have shown that if visitors don’t have some sort of visual indication that your site is working within two seconds, they’ll bail. If it’s not fully loaded in eight seconds? Gone.
Google, too, has started incorporating page load time in it’s rankings.
So it’s not something you can take lightly and don’t rely just on Plugins to do everything for you.
Do your due diligence. Hire an expert. This isn’t something you want to go cheap on.
About Cody Swann
Cody Swann is an entrepreneur, developer, strategist, banged up ex-football walk-on, retired body builder and former journalist born and raised in South Florida. He currently splits his time between his hometown of Stuart, FL and Los Angeles, CA. Cody founded Gunner Technology, a highly sought after digital agency, specializing in helping companies maximize profits through custom web development, technology efficiencies, social media strategy and search engine marketing.
As a manager and developer at ESPN for nearly six years, Cody led development and vision for two of ESPN’s most popular online features: Sports Scoreboards and GameCasts. Additionally Cody oversaw all aspects of MyESPN and ESPN’s social network, ESPN Fan Profiles. Cody worked with Technology, Editorial, Sales, Marketing and relevant business stakeholders to mold ESPN’s social media strategy, develop custom applications for it and execute it. Under his direction, ESPN successfully ported large portions of its core product from a proprietary Java stack to an open source Ruby on Rails stack, capable of standing up and performing under the tremendous load world's most popular sports site delivers.
Cody began forging his technological knowledge more than 10 years ago, developing and designing websites in college. His development work has included web development, web design, content writing, digital photography and digital video production for award-winning sites like Gainesville.com, GatorSports.com and ESPN.com. He has helped set digital strategy and direction for companies in the New York Times Regional Newspaper group, ESPN, ABC and Disney.
He is a recognized expert in web development, social media strategy, search engine optimization, conversion optimization, analytics tracking and business planning. He has worked with large interactive media companies to small and medium sized businesses. Cody motivates and inspires creative teams to deliver superb, polished work under tight deadlines.
View all posts by Cody Swann →