We have over 100 steps in our process, so it’s impractical to give you finite detail on everything we do.
Generally, the first step in our process is to identify the key problems slowing your site down, fix them, and then work on general best practices. We’ll explain what these concerns are and give you an explanation of why they’re problematic, as well as provide before and after speed reports.
More broadly, here are the things we do:
- WordPress Best Practices Review & Optimization
Most sites we work on have configuration errors or issues simply because several people have worked on the sites over time. We review your entire site and hosting configuration and ensure it’s configured in a best practices fashion.
- Browser & Page Caching Configuration & Tuning
Caching is one of the biggest improvements you can make to your WordPress site speed. Caching setup is more complex than simply installing a caching plugin and turning everything on.
Each site is different, so caching needs to be customized specifically to each site. On top of that, often, caching settings are counterintuitive, and on some hosts turning on things like Database Caching will actually slow your site down.
You’ll also find that many of the improvements that speed test tools on the web recommend, such as removing query strings from static elements, can actually create problems.
- Database Optimization & Cleanup
If your site has been around for a while, there may be garbage in the database, slowing it down. For example, expired transients on WooCommerce sites can be a huge issue.
As part of our service, we clean up and optimize your database to ensure it’s running as fast as possible.
- Anti-Heartbeat Setup
Especially for larger sites or sites where many users are logged in at once, the WordPress Heartbeat can create difficulties. We reconfigure your heartbeat settings to ensure that your site doesn’t become a concern.
- HTAccess File Optimization
HTAccess is one of your web server’s key configuration files, and it often contains code that is slowing you down or causing concerns in some way. We review your HTAccess configuration and ensure it’s configured in a best-practices format.
- 404 & Bad Request Review & Repair
It’s not unusual to find spelling errors in code or some other issue causing images or breaks or bad requests to your server. We review all your site loads elements to ensure they’re not timing out or resulting in a 404 error.
- Plugin Review & Pruning
Duplicated and outdated plugins are a huge problem for WordPress speed. Typically, this is something as simple as having multiple SEO plugins installed, which is bad for both speed AND your Google rankings.
We review all your plugins to make sure they’re actually all required or used, that none are providing duplicate functionality or causing conflicts somewhere in your site.
- Server Compression Tuning
Many website servers don’t have compression turned on by default. We make sure your server compression settings are tuned for maximum performance.
Before and After Reports
We take all the work we do before and after speed snapshots to show you exactly what improvements to site speed have been achieved.
- Post Speed Fix Site Backup Provided
Once we’re finished, we give you a full backup of your site via Dropbox. After working with 1000s of customers, we’ve found that most don’t actually have a backup of their site at all!
Many of our changes are to the site configuration itself, so you must have an updated backup copy of your site stored somewhere.
We use Blogvault to back up our customer websites and take daily backups of your site while we’re working on it.
- Image Optimization & Compression
Images are usually the largest component of your website. Using lossless compression, we can often significantly reduce the size of your image files without any difference in the quality.
We listlessly compress all images on your site and resize images where appropriate.
- Content Delivery Network Setup (optional, powered by Cloudflare)
Cloudflare.com is a fantastic service, and we recommend it to all customers (the free service is all you need).
Cloudflare speeds up your DNS hosting (very commonly overlooked when it comes to speed) provides a content delivery network and several other acceleration features that no other provider or plugin offers.
- HTTPS – on our Business service
The entire web is moving to HTTPS, and it’s a good thing too. HTTPS ensures all data transmitted between your website and your visitors is encrypted.
When your site runs in HTTPS, web browsers will use the newer HTTP2 protocol, which requires fewer connections to the server and improves the render and load speed of your site.
As well as speed up your site, Google has stated that encrypted sites running in HTTPS will get slight rankings to boost.
- PHP7 upgrade (if compatible)
PHP7 is the latest version of PHP and is 2-3x faster than PHP5. X, which is the version of PHP your website is probably running (there’s no PHP6). This translates to approximately 0.5 seconds faster load time, which is great for getting under that 1-second total load.
Not all web hosts offer PHP7 yet, and not all website themes and plugins support it.
As part of our service, we run a PHP7 compatibility check and upgrade your hosting environment to PHP7 if your site and site support it.
