1. How To Take Your Site From
Lethargic To Blazingly Fast

2. Why A Fast(er) Website Matters
• Search engines reward speed
• Customer service
– Better visitor experience
– Better shopping experience
– Better learning/membership experience
• Make more sales
• Reduce advertising waste
• Increase your productivity

3. Before You Do Anything
• Find Current Load Time
• Tools
– Pingdom Tools
– Yslow (Firebug required)
– Google Page Speed Insights

4. What You Can Do Today

5. Optimize Images
• Compress
– Smush.It
– Save for web (Photoshop)
• Avoid Scaled Images
– Using HTML or CSS to resize
– <img src=“logo.jpg” width=“150”
height=“200”>
• Specify Dimensions
– width=“150” height=“200”

6. Check Plugins
• Multiple Plugins Doing Same Job
• Adding unnecessary Javascript/CSS to
every page
• Remove old plugins
• Tweak plugins (be careful!)

7. Reduce File Sizes
• Minimize
– What
• Javascript
• CSS
– Tool
• Jscompressor.com (Javascript and CSS)
• GZIP Compress

8. Reduce HTML
• Avoid Unnecessary HTML
• Clean Up
– Empty images
• <img src=“”>
– Empty paragraphs
• <p></p> or <p>&nbsp;</p>
– Empty DIVs
• <div></div>
– Unnecessary nested DIVs or Tables
• Avoid Inline Styles
– <p style=“font-weight: bold;”>

9. Javscripts and CSS
• Load CSS at the top
• Load JS at the bottom
• Combine where possible
• Limit use of fancy fonts

10. Limit 3rd Party Tools
• Use HTML instead of JS subscription
forms
• Traffic/stats trackers
• Facebook Integration
• Social network buttons

11. Use Content Delivery Network
• Huge impact
• What is it
– Offloading heavy objects
– Served based on geographical location
• Services
– Amazon Cloudfront
– MaxCDN
– Cloudflare
• WordPress
– W3 Total Cache

12. VATrainingSite.com
• Technical training courses
• Step-by-step checklists
• Troubleshooting how-to
• Code snippets
• Weekly open office hour

13. Claim Your Free Preview Account
• Backing up and restoring a WordPress
Site
• How to capture affiliate ID in email system
• Mark newest posts with icon in WordPress
• And more

14. Thank You So Much!