I had two clients requiring WPO (Website Performance Optimization) this month and wanted to show you the before and after, as well as some explanations. I have removed the client domain for privacy reasons.
I really enjoy tuning websites but it can be challenging especially if it is using tons of plugins/themes. More code more bloat in general.
Case Study 1
There are couple points to note
- The loaded time is from Canada, and the client has a website hosted in South Africa and targeted at locals. Therefore, it will load quicker locally.
- In South Africa data costs are a factor, so the page size is nicely down and http requests halved
- I would really like to improve the speed but the theme and no CDN does not help the situation, the former requires re-working the site and the latter requires more cost which the client chose to not take
Case Study 2
Points to note
- This website has the same hosting and target as the above website.
- The site cannot be improved much and the owner should as soon as possible redo the website or rework with later themes.
- Using out dated themes/plugins in WordPress poses a security risk and also chance of them causes issues on later versions of Php
- The scores do not look great, but consider the speed was brought down almost entirely in a non-invasive manner (not touching design) from 42 seconds down to 7 seconds.
- Almost half the page size and request
- Note, this site is using wooCommerce, which is known to pack on the page size and requests!
Unfortunately here the client needs to redo the website with a faster loading theme and less plugins. The current theme is the usual issues, code bloat from a multi purpose premium theme
Nathmie.com
This is my own website, note I have a number of images on my front page, using FontAwesome, Google Analytics. The speed could be reduced to sub-second with a little bit more work but way faster than average speeds. This was taken without any server caching!
