WordPress Speed Optimization Service

For your Cloudflare migration, we’ll need a WordPress administrator password, FTP or Cpanel access, and a domain registrar logon.

We can send you the DNS servers to direct your domain at once we’re ready to transfer over to Cloudflare if you don’t want to share your domain registrar login (which is completely understandable).

We’ll usually require access to Google Tag Manager as well, because we frequently migrate third-party embed codes to GTM. If you already have a Cloudflare account, we’ll need access to it to check your settings and make any necessary adjustments.

We have about 90 steps, therefore it’s impractical to explain everything.

Consult Service is recommended for big, mission-critical sites. We assess the site, build an action plan, and then help you implement it. This service details our changes.

First, we discover the issues slowing down your site, repair them, and then implement best practises. We’ll explain these difficulties and why they’re problematic, and present before-and-after speed reports.

What we do broadly:

Optimizing WordPress Best Practices

Most sites we work on have setup faults or problems since many individuals have worked on them. We check your site and hosting configuration for best practises.

Tuning browser and page caching

Caching boosts WordPress site speed. Installing a caching plugin and turning everything on isn’t enough.

Each website needs tailored caching. Moreover, cache settings are often counterintuitive, and on some hosts, enabling Database Caching will slow down your site.

Many of the adjustments that online performance test tools offer, including eliminating query strings from static items, can cause difficulties.

Database optimization/cleanup

If your site is old, database junk may be slowing it down. Expiring transients on Woocommerce sites and using MyISAM for database tables can be a concern

We clean and optimise your database as part of our service.

Object Cache Redis or Memcached (where possible)

Object caching speeds up the WordPress backend, Woocommerce checkout, and anything else in WordPress that relies on CPU or database lookups. Not all hosts enable object caching, so we’ll install Memcached or Redis and setup it.

Cloudflare Edge Caching

Edge caching caches pages on CDN edge nodes. This decreases hosting demand and eliminates geography’s impact on site speed. Cloudflare APO Edge Caching is recommended for all compatible sites. Cloudflare’s $5/month service speeds up sites significantly.

Optimizing HTAccess

HTAccess is a critical web server configuration file that often contains problematic code. We ensure your HTAccess configuration follows best standards.

404/Bad Request Repair

Spelling problems in code or other issues can cause broken pictures or faulty server requests. We check all site parts for timing out or 404 errors.

Review, pruning plugins

Duplicated and obsolete plugins slow WordPress. Multiple SEO plugins are terrible for speed and Google rankings.

We check all your plugins to make sure they’re essential, being used, and not duplicating functionality or causing site issues.

Optimizing server compression

Many server defaults don’t enable compression. We optimise server compression settings.

After-Action Reports

We capture before-and-after performance snapshots to show you site speed improvements.

NextGen Image Optimization

By using lossless compression, we can minimise the size of your image files without sacrificing quality.

We losslessly compress and resize your photographs.

Setup CDN (optional, powered by Cloudflare)

We propose Cloudflare.com to all customers (even the free service will give you a significant speed boost).

Cloudflare speeds up DNS hosting (often ignored) and provides a CDN and other acceleration features no other provider or plugin offers.

HTTPS-conversion If you’re not using HTTPS, start!

It’s excellent that the web is transitioning to HTTPS. HTTPS encrypts all website-visitor data.

When your site is HTTPS, web browsers will use HTTP2, which requires fewer server connections and improves render and load time.

Google says HTTPS sites will get a minor ranking boost as well as speed up.

Update PHP7 (if compatible)

PHP7 is 2-3x faster than PHP5.X, which your website undoubtedly uses (there’s no PHP6). This means a 0.5-second faster load time, which helps reach under 1 second.

Each consecutive PHP version is 10-20% quicker than the last, thus running the highest version will offer you the fastest speed.

Not always, but sometimes. It is dependent on the number of sites in your network. Each site on your network is treated as a separate entity, so you’ll need to purchase a Speed Fix service for each one. Some of the modifications we make as part of our performance improvements will affect your entire network (a positive impact).

We’ve tried Pingdom and GTMetrix in the past, and while they’re both solid tools, their suggestions left a lot to be desired. GTMetrix servers can be slow and display load times that are lower than they should be.

Google Pagespeed Insights and Google Lighthouse are two tools we employ.

In most cases, we concentrate on enhancing Core Web Vitals metrics and associated speed timings.

It depends, but most of the time you will. For about 30% of our customers, we move their hosting.

If you’re currently using Bluehost, Godaddy, Hostgator, A Small Orange, or any other EIG-owned company, you’ll most likely need to migrate.

It loads quite quickly. The only way for low-cost hosting firms to earn money on those $3/month plans is to stack 10,000 other websites on the same server.

server, and make it work as hard as it can.

We’ve found that we can get sites running on these services to load in as little as 3-5 seconds, but the site will struggle to manage more than a few simultaneous visitors.

When it comes to hosting, you get what you pay for – it’s illogical to expect high-quality service when you pay more for a cup of coffee than you do for a month of hosting or a couple of clicks on your Adwords or Facebook ads.

Yes!

Almost half of the sites we work on are Woocommerce stores that are slow to load.

If you’re using Bluehost, Godaddy, Hostgator, A Small Orange, or any other EIG-owned hosting firm, you’ll most likely need to upgrade.

Consistently rapid speeds, particularly in the areas of checkout, cart, and My Account, as well as features like the Add to Cart tool.

Yes, there are times when we are unable to repair a site. Usually, one of the concerns stated below is present on the site. In many circumstances, we can work with you to find a solution. Most of the time, the problem is caused by the site’s hosting, and in that case, we can advise you on what needs to be done to remedy the issue and even migrate the site for you.

If we hit a severe hurdle after you order that prevents us from speeding up your site, we’ll gladly refund your money.

It is installed on a Windows server.

While WordPress can work on Windows, it was built to run on a Linux or LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) system, so a Windows server will never perform as well as a LAMP setup. If performance is important to you, your site should not be hosted on a Windows server.

It’s powered by a multisite WordPress installation.

WordPress Multisite isn’t the fastest when it comes to performance, especially if you’re using a Multisite setup with a lot of plugins or a lot of sites. Multisite is frequently more convenient, but it comes at the expense of flexibility and, in some cases, performance.

The site is hosted on a VPS, which is experiencing problems.

Repairing VPS and server issues is not something we do. The speed of your WordPress site is determined by how effectively the server is configured, and most low-cost VPS installations are inadequate. A managed WordPress host is frequently a better alternative than a VPS unless you have a specific reason to utilise one. This is because the server has been configured and adjusted specifically for WordPress.

The hosting package is substandard.

If you’re on a low-cost hosting plan, your website will suffer. There’s no getting around it: low-cost hosting is low-quality; you get what you pay for. We can move you to a higher-quality host as part of our service.

Your hosting plan can’t handle the amount of traffic you have.

Your hosting plan should be well-matched to the amount of traffic your website receives. If your site has 5000 daily hits, you’ll require a higher-tier hosting package than a site that receives 50 daily visits. For high-traffic sites, solutions like Cloudflare can drastically boost performance, but your site’s speed is ultimately limited by the performance cap on your hosting. In situations like this, the most common option is to upgrade to a higher-level hosting plan.

The IT department wishes to host the site on its own servers.

IT departments aren’t often economically motivated or focused on what’s best for company – after all, if everything runs smoothly, they won’t have anything to do, and if they don’t have anything to do, they won’t have a job. Rather than employing a dedicated WordPress host that can do a significantly better job, an internal IT department may frequently opt to host the site inside. We may be limited in our ability to assist if your site is housed on internal IT infrastructure.

Your website has had bespoke development work done on it, or it is using an obscure or low-quality plugin.

Occasionally, we come across a site that has had poor custom development work done, or is running a WordPress plugin that is incompatible with other plugins, or is just plain bad. Most of the time, the plugin or development work is attempting to achieve something that WordPress was not built to do, and as a result, the site is broken or has performance issues.