Local Search: Improving Wordpress Site Speed on Local Sites

[Linda Buquet]

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The Pros at the Local Search Pros Community are having a lively discussion about ways to improve Wordpress site speed for their client's sites.

TONS of great tips are being shared and I'm sure it's an issue many of you deal with so wanted to share here as well. Joy kicks it off and below that are just a couple of the replies...

Joy Hawkins

Most of my clients' websites are built on Wordpress and I'm noticing that loading speed is pretty slow for most of them. Some of them have a LOT of plugins. Is there anything you've found that helps a lot with loading speed for a Wordpress site? If they have plugins installed but not activated, can those contribute to loading speed at all?

Chris McCreery

Hey +Joy Hawkins I typically disable and remove plugins that aren't active as you can easily install them again. I've also noticed that WooThemes helper plugin can kill a site some times. Another plugin you might want to investigate is WooCommerce if any of their sites are running it. It tends to load a ton of scripts and css on all pages, even those not requiring WooCommerce functionality. ( I have some links to customize the loading if you want them)

W3C Total Cache is a great plugin (test the various caching features one at a time as it can break your theme as well as some functionality) Check with other plugins you're running as some require that you exclude specific checkout pages or product pages from the cache for them to function properly.

Smush.it is great as well for optimizing images on the fly to speed up the load times.

Website speed test can help you diagnose some of the speed issues when loading the site as can the usage of the Google Chrome developer tools and look at the network and resource requests. As well this is a handy plugin for Chrome (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights_extensions)

Are all your sites hosted with the same company? Could be a load issue, especially if it's shared hosting.

Michael Borgelt

In the last 4 months this has been a huge point of optimization for us and now we will not launch a website that is not in the 90's on Google Page Test or under 2 seconds load time on webpagetest.org (or as close as possible).

I sometimes will use w3total cache for page and browser caching and then use other plugins for minify and combining js.

Also compressing images is very important and can immediately increase site speed. There are a number of tools for this also - as mentioned about - smush.it and there are other paid services that we use to really get the images to be the most optimized as possible

If you want to see which one of your plugins are using the most resources you should use P3 plugin profiler. This is a way to quickly see what is eating up your resources.

Another reason you could be having a slow site is the number of saved revisions you have for each page or post. This can take up database resources while trying to load the page. You can clean out old revisions that you will never revert back to.

Optimizing a site is something that can take a lot of work to get dialed in but in my experience it has a lot to do with the theme and all the extra code that is being loaded by themes with features you are not necessarily using.

Wordpress speed optimization is not something I can speak to. But these Pros sure know their stuff!

And that wisdom is just 2 out of the 26 great comments in the thread.

Head over to read the rest! Local Search Pros Community
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[Jonathan Hatton]

Facebook likebox's and Sharing plugins can kill your website load speed! I would only use if absolutely necessary.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Jonathan!

Semi related new post at the Pro Community.

Dino Maiolo

Does anyone use the Yoast SEO Local plugin? I use the free plugin right now, but wondering if it is advantageous to purchase both the Local and Pro SEO versions.

7 replies so far...

(Trying my best to cross pollinate all the info but it's hard because there is so much great info being shared at both communities!)