Your business depends on your site’s speed. Do you know how to optimize WordPress and WooCommerce for top performance? Can your web host scale up to meet spikes in customer demand? Patrick Rauland knows the essential steps to speed up your WordPress and WooCommerce website.
Your business depends on your site’s speed and your host’s ability to scale up to meet spikes in customer demand.
Patrick joined Commerce Journey webinar host Cory Miller to discuss this vital topic: WooCommerce optimization. Every eCommerce business needs to deliver a fast, secure, painless online experience to customers. Watch the replay to learn why speeding up your WooCommerce website’s performance is the key to sales success.
We interviewed Patrick previously. He knows all about building cost-effective WooCommerce sites — now learn from his WooCommerce optimization and web hosting expertise. What is your site’s optimal performance — and how do you ensure you consistently deliver it to your customers?
About Patrick Rauland
Patrick Rauland previously worked as the Product Marketing Manager for managed WooCommerce at Nexcess. Before that, he was the product manager for WooCommerce at WooThemes and Automattic.
Parick has done everything from creating custom PHP and MySQL applications to building client sites with WordPress and developing commercial WordPress plugins. Hailing from Denver, Colorado, when he isn’t engrossed in a podcast or audiobook he likes to run, hike, or go rock climbing.
You can find Patrick on Twitter, LinkedIn or on his websites: speakinginbytes.com and laidback.games.
Links Discussed in the Webinar
Machine Generated Transcript
Cory Miller: Everybody welcome back to another Commerce Journey webinar. I’ve got my friend Patrick, WooCommerce expert love being in Patrick cause we’re friends and I’ve got them on a Slack chat, several sites, channels, I think and saying, Hey Patrick, what about this? What about that? We’ve had him on a Commerce Journey webinar before, but today we’re going to be talking about WooCommerce site speed.
[00:00:22] And that’s such a critical thing because we’re eCommerce. Awesome. It’s so far, is that far the dominant more software on the planet. But it’s also a beast, a little bit of a beast and being is so critical eCommerce and making sells. And I think this is a vital subject. Welcome back, Patrick.
[00:00:41] Patrick Rauland: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:42] I’m super excited and right off the gate. I just want to say speed is important for all WordPress sites, but it’s extra important for commerce sites, because if your site slow, they’re definitely not going to check out. So that’s why it’s like it’s speed is always important, super important for eCommerce sites.
[00:00:59] Cory Miller: So true. I’m glad
[00:01:00] you made that point and we love WordPress Viva WordPress. But. This whole thing about site speed is important for SEO, for user experience, all those things. So, so I’m glad you pointed it out. Absolutely. Okay. So when I’m running my WooCommerce Oh, well first let me ask, tell us a little bit more about yourself and you have long time experience with WooCommerce on the WooCommerce team led the project and everything.
[00:01:29] You also have a LinkedIn course, but could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
[00:01:33] Patrick Rauland: Yeah. So, so my name is Patrick Rauland. I’ve worked for WooThemes for a long time. Then we were acquired by automatic. I was a support Ninja, a developer, a product manager. In that time I created a whole bunch of courses on LinkedIn learning.
[00:01:47] And then for a little over a year, I was at a Nexcess as the product marketing manager. And we talked at Nexcess, we talked a lot about hosting and we also had a management. WooCommerce hosting product there. So, doing a lot of stuff there. And then just in the last couple of months, I’ve been finishing, creating and recording a speeding up WordPress course for LinkedIn learning.
[00:02:06] So I’ve gotten really into the numbers and the details the last two months.
[00:02:10] Cory Miller: Yeah. So you are the person. I have several projects, commerce sharing being one of my know you’re going to talk about that and speeding is one of those things that feels like a black box to me.
[00:02:20] Sometimes I’m like, okay, get a CloudFlare account, make sure you have some, you know, CDN on front of you, but beyond the tip of it, I’m really eager. And so okay. To run where we’ll cover two and with your game. Okay. Right.
[00:02:36]Patrick Rauland: Yes. Sorry. A little bit of lag, but yes, I also run a store called laid back games where I sell my little game called fry thief there, which is what I optimize in the course.
[00:02:45] So I go through my own site unoptimized and optimize it. And I think just to give you an example of what we can talk about, I think initially my site loaded in like four to five seconds, and then we got it down to like a one less than one second load. So there’s some cool stuff you could do.
[00:03:01] Cory Miller: Well, and keep telling me if there’s lag, my web has been… But yeah, that is four seconds to one particularly. So let’s dive in. When you think about WooCommerce site speed, what are some of the foundational elements? To start to speed that
[00:03:17] Patrick Rauland: Yes. So there’s lots of stuff about speeding up your WordPress site.
[00:03:20] And, you know, I did this whole course on it and it’s probably four or five chapters and some things are going to be huge and some things are going to be small and every site is different. Let me just start with that. Some sites, you’re going to see a huge improvement by optimizing your images. And some sites are going to see a huge improvement by getting better hosting and on some sites you’re gonna see a huge improvement by getting a better CDN.
[00:03:40] But the thing I actually want to start with is I would actually start by testing because that’ll give you an idea of where the biggest problem is. So if you go to a GT metrics.com and there’s other ones, there’s key CDN and there’s other speed tests out there they’re free. I actually just ran a GT metrics of your site’s commerce journey.
[00:03:58] And you know how you said it speed is a black box. Well, you got an, a grade. On GT metrics and your LCP, your largest Contentful paint. That’s sort of like the biggest image loads in less than a second. So that’s pretty good. And your time to interactivity, meaning all the important scripts that need to load have loaded in just under three seconds, which is the rule of thumb.
[00:04:20] So Cory despite the fact that you think speed is a black box, you have invested in people hosting partners CDNs image optimizers the stuff that you have is. Good enough to get a pretty darn fast site. So one thing I want to point out here, your TTF be your time to first bite is 130 milliseconds.
[00:04:40] That’s pretty good. So think of that, like how much time it takes WordPress to use PHP to put a page together and then send it back to you. So that’s your time to first bite? That’s pretty good. If that number is really high, let’s say your time to first byte is like a half a second or a second, or God forbid more than that, then WordPress is it’s.
[00:04:58] It’s probably just on like a slow server. And anything you do to optimize your images. Won’t matter if your time to first bite is very high. So because your time to first bite us I’m guessing you have pretty good hosting and now you can look at other things. So then you can look at things like let’s optimize our images.
[00:05:16] Let’s use the CDN let’s load all these other assets quickly to make sure the site loads quickly. The other thing that you did well here… so your first contentful paint and largest contentful paint is pretty quick. So that means you’re loading items in the right order. Like you don’t want to load a giant image at the very end, so you’re loading it early.
[00:05:34] So that way people think something’s happening and they, people will basically stay on your site longer if they see progress. So you have already, you’ve got hosting you’ve other good defaults, your site loads pretty good off right off the bat.
[00:05:49] Cory Miller: Way to go Pagely.
[00:05:52] Patrick Rauland: There we go.
[00:05:54] Cory Miller: I don’t think we’ve done much of anything past that, you know?
[00:05:58]Because I felt like it’s been kind of a black box and I don’t think we’ve got like, even CloudFlare on the print front and you know, one of my, most of my eCommerce sites, this is not. Versus how it yet, however, the Vida Bars that come up, put into GT metrics and I’m getting a B, but I want to scroll back for a second.
[00:06:15] Say time to first bite was critical. That was the first thing you talked about. Like, and you said something to the effect of if time to first buy. Is slow. The other stuff is going to be tough because like, that’s our starting point. Okay.
[00:06:32] Patrick Rauland: You have thing that your time to first bite could be, sorry. I’m hoping I’m answering your question, not just cutting you off. The other thing your time to first bite could be, is like, if you have a ton of plugins running, just like lots of. Processing stuff like it may not be your host. It could be that you have a ton of plugins that are running crazy queries and it takes them a whole second to get the data out of the database so that it can process it.
[00:06:55] So it can create a PHP page, send it WordPress assembles that and returns it to you. So there’s this whole process there it’s likely hosting or plugins, maybe your theme. I don’t probably think it’d be your theme, but it also could be that. So. That time to first bite is a good indicator that something processing database plugins wise or hosting wise is slow and sort of everything after that won’t matter.
[00:07:19]So that the time to first bite is a good place to start. And if you want to experiment this at home, what’s great is GT metrics. GT metrics is free. A lot of speed testing tools are free. I, for this course tested four different themes. And I got wildly different results with four different themes.
[00:07:34] So I think, you know, in one with one of them, my time to first bite was, I don’t remember. It was a hundred milliseconds with a different one was 200 milliseconds, not not game breaking it. Doesn’t, won’t break the internet being a little bit slower, but. Five to choose between two themes that are almost equal.
[00:07:50] I’m going to go with the faster one and you can just, you know, turn off a bunch of plugins, run another speed test and see what happens.
[00:07:56] Cory Miller: Good. So right there, everybody you’ve got here, your time investment for the entire hour on that, because when you talk about plugins to o is that because there’s so many plugins and WordPress, there’s a tendency to go, I’ll activate plugins for all these separate things.
[00:08:12] And if it’s like my site, my personal site, which I wouldn’t want to even put on the speed test it gets the it’s the priority. No. Oh, I probably get it kind of plugins. I don’t even use that are still live. And then probably things that are not even active, but still on my side, which could be potentially a security risk too.
[00:08:31] So really minimizing down. I hear that loud and clear men and Val minimizing, the ELs have to do in the backend of WordPress to get it all served up to the web. And then second, would you talk about hosting a little bit? Cause that’s so Joan, you spent a lot of time. Companies and also in companies, here’s some thoughts around that.
[00:08:52] How hosting can affect speed.
[00:08:54] Patrick Rauland: Yeah, let me talk about plugins quickly. Because this is one where I want to give Luke Kavanaugh from Nexcess, a lot of credit. So he does a lot of optimizations. We had this awesome performance optimization 15-day trial thing, and he did a lot of good stuff. One of the things that he noticed is so many WordPress users have like Ninja forms and contact form seven and gravity forms and another form plugin all on their site.
[00:09:18] Doing basically the same thing. And you do not, you don’t want plugins with basically the exact same functionality doing the same thing, like on your contact form page, don’t use contact form seven and then use Ninja forms on a career resume uploader, and then use gravity forms as a WooCommerce product builder.
[00:09:38] People do that all the time. So like people don’t realize how often plugins have duplicate functionality. So you can really consolidate the list of plugins on your sites. Cory, the worst offender is some people have multiple caching plugins. We can talk about caching plugins in a minimum in a minutes, but.
[00:09:56] It’s like don’t use multiple plugins that do the exact same thing on top of one another, because they’re just adding extra load time for your users. So if you can stricter contact form plugins down to one, just have one SEO plugin, one contact form plugin, one caching, plugin. That way they will help you and definitely always update them and then delete ones that you don’t use.
[00:10:16]I O in my brain, I always go, I’ll use it next week. I don’t want to delete it. No, just delete it. If you need to use it. You can, re-install it. It’s free and easy. Hosting. So we actually tried a couple of different hosts in this course, and we did some, just some testing to see like, here’s the exact same site.
[00:10:32] Let’s put it on this host and see what happens. And there are hosting benchmarks in the WordPress world. So if you really want to see. How this host compares to this host, they will tell you how many PHP processes and how quickly it loaded and all sorts of cool technical stuff.
[00:10:48] I think the most important thing is that you have a managed WordPress host. Honestly, all of those managed WordPress hosts are just head and shoulders above everyone out there. Just so much better. Then than all the other regular hosting companies that don’t do this manage stuff for you.
[00:11:03] So just a couple of examples of what managed hosts will do for you. A lot of them do page caching, which is where once the first person visits your site, WordPress cashes, the page, and the next time someone visits that page. They already have it assembled that keeps that time to first bite down quite low, and they just return that to someone.
[00:11:21] So page caching is huge. Lots of really good hosts will do all sorts of extra fancy dynamic caching. You can do database caching. So with WooCommerce, you didn’t might not be able to catch the cart page, but maybe you can cash certain database queries. And use those to speed things up WordPress hosts.
[00:11:38] Do a lot of that stuff built in for you, which I really like. I don’t really want to recommend a specific one or say to not use a specific one, but any managed WordPress host is just way better than a generic WordPress host.
[00:11:50] Cory Miller: That’s really good and really good information. And when you’re talking about managed hosting, absolutely people that don’t just say, or excuse me, I just say. It’s okay. Just you didn’t slap a name on anything. There’s a Tommy boy reference in here somewhere. That’s true but the. The point is someone that takes time and care and skill to make sure their host and environment is wound up. Pagely’s awesome. Kinsta is awesome, Nexcess like you mentioned is awesome.
[00:12:18] WP Engine is awesome and you can compare those also. Thanks for that. That mentioned. Okay. So we’ve really dove in on time to first bot talked about plugin plugins, hosting theme, anywhere you can get in, it’s just like a formula one racing team. We’re going to do it. Okay, so now I pull this back on that, but what’s your next Oh you hit on caching, which is good, but what’s your next thought here?
[00:12:40] Patrick Rauland: So the next one is optimizing your images. And I know that sounds very simple. And Isaac web person, since forever, I’ve always optimized images in Photoshop and then uploaded them. And then, and so I don’t install image optimization, plugins cause I’m like, Oh, I can just export them myself, but guess what?
[00:12:58] There’s always a random day. Where I don’t export an image out of Photoshop. And then my blog post header image is two megabytes when it could be 400 kilobytes or 200 kilobytes. So installing an image optimization plugin that’s. Optimizes every image you upload is hugely important because eventually you will forget top.
[00:13:18] I always forget to optimize an image of myself at some point. And you just want to have software that does it for you. You can like images if, for people who don’t know this, like you can upload a 2MB image and it can easily compress down to 200kb and still look almost exactly the same.
[00:13:35] Like there you can compute, you can compress JPEG images. And I’m an astonishing amount. A web P is a new image format that you can upload a JPEG or a PNG, and then your image optimizing tool might convert it to web P, which you might’ve seen on some webpage webpages. If you try to download an image, but that’s a new format and it’s even more efficient than PNG and JPEG under certain conditions.
[00:13:58]And your tool might just convert it for you automatically, which is pretty cool. Excellent.
[00:14:02] Cory Miller: I’m going to have to, I didn’t know that. That’s awesome. Yeah. What P okay. Yeah. So. Image optimization because, you know, I remember my mom’s site when she was using WordPress and I love word press, because, you know, anyone can use WordPress.
[00:14:17] And she was like my site’s really slow so well looked on her site and she was uploading pictures from her iPhone which was huge.
[00:14:24] And I know I’m guilty of this too, but this is just like table stakes. Like I’m saying your observations here are so awesome, but it should be for most of us is, you know, the thing that we do, it’s just not always the thing where it would do.
[00:14:38] And there’s great services out there to do this type of image optimization.
[00:14:45] Patrick Rauland: Yeah, and they let me just talk on that for a second, because they are services, but most of them have a free plan for like, I want to say a hundred images a month. I’m pretty sure almost all of them have, which should be fine for most WordPress sites.
[00:14:57]So just go ahead and set it up and unless you’re load loading more than a hundred images a month, it’s a free service for most of these. There’s a bunch of, you can Google and find. But they’re fantastic.
[00:15:07] Cory Miller: The ones I think about Patrick, just to bounce off U2 or Imagify , I think.
[00:15:12] Patrick Rauland: Yeah.
[00:15:12] Cory Miller: That’s how you pronounce it. And then also the tiny PNG people give you Google type PNG, which Nexcess uses, or did use it some at some point I still have sites on Nexcess for that kind of stuff built in. So, any others that you can think of that you might throw out there?
[00:15:30] Patrick Rauland: Well, I found a lifetime deal for one called short pixel.
[00:15:33]So I’ve been using that one on my personal sites, just cause I have a lifetime deal, which I’m S I’m a sucker for Cory there probably. I am. I’m a sucker for it. If you give me a lifetime deal on anything, I will buy it.
[00:15:44] Cory Miller: Okay. Anybody else? Listen to this, if you know that somebody does that, he’s absolutely right.
[00:15:51] I’m going to put into the chat too, even though we don’t know if the lifetime thing, especially on image compression. That’s incredible. So I can put short pixel into the chat here. Okay. Anything else on image optimization?
[00:16:07]Patrick Rauland: Just use CDNs CDNs apply for images, but also for static assets like CSS and JavaScript files, but using a CDN is sort of like always having a web server for at least your images and you’re at your static assets, images, CSS, and JavaScript nearby. So I, you know, selling my game, fry thief, I have a lot of people that know me in the States, but I have people who visit my site in Europe and in, in Asia. And so it’s nice to have CDN locations closer to them.
[00:16:33]I did some testing. And w when I download, when I browse my site from a location close to the site, it’s takes like a second. When I browse my site from a place in like Tokyo, it takes like two seconds. So your time might be doubled around the world. If you have CDN locations for at least all those static assets, those will load much, quickly, much, much more fast for those people who are farther away from wherever your web servers located.
[00:16:59] So I think that’s huge. A lot of good. So this is where managed hosting becomes important. Again, a lot of managed hosts have this built in and have it turned on for you. And if you don’t you can pay for it. And one of the better ones is CloudFare, and if you can’t afford it, then Jetpack has a free CDN built into it.
[00:17:18] So there’s managed hosts, tablets or CloudFlare or Jetpack. Just, I don’t care, which one you use? Just use one it’ll speed up your site.
[00:17:28]Cory Miller: Yeah, I love how you presented these very unbiased. CloudFlare, I’ll say from my own experiences free, there’s still a free play and you have to kind of scroll all the way down and click the free plan.
[00:17:38]A great way to manage this too if you change hosts, like we just did with the Vida Bars you can just quickly change it. And puff layer is a new site and switch it over and be pretty dang fast. But they include CDNs. I love that you mentioned Jetpack to a jet pack by automatic. You mentioned earlier and yeah, their CDN is probably one of the less, I think, advertised because it is free and it’s not just free to run a service like a CDN.
[00:18:06]Patrick Rauland: Yeah. I will say Jetpack has been, it’s harder to find the free accounts button. You have to like install Jetpack and then scroll way down to the bottom of the page to select the free option. But it is there.
[00:18:17] Cory Miller: Yeah, it is there. Just go hunting for it, just like at CloudFlare. Yeah. Okay. So we’ve talked about hand for spot and how the importance of the processing serving up all that. data, image optimization. What what do you want to talk about?
[00:18:32] Patrick Rauland: So, so we talked about plugins and themes a little bit, I would say plugins and themes are you have to put in a lot of effort to get a little bit of reward back. If that makes sense that you have to put in a lot of effort to see speed gains.
[00:18:44]But they’re there. So the last step, so I want you to do everything we just talked about first because it’s, there’s a method to this. The last step is to install some sort of. Caching plugin on your site. And the reason this is the last step is because once you actually have caching, it’s a whole extra layer to test anything.
[00:19:01] And if something breaks you have to like, sort of take off the caching layer to test it and make sure to figure out what broken w, why something isn’t working. So it’s the last thing I recommend adding, but actually I’ve seen some massive speed boosts from it. I’ve always used the free caching plugins w three total cache.
[00:19:18] WP, super cache. Those are on wordpress.org. And actually recently for the first time I installed WP rocket, which is a paid plugin. I think it’s 50 bucks a year. And. It’s very nice. All of them are really great, but WP rocket, like very nice user interface, you click a couple buttons. They’ve really good smart defaults.
[00:19:35]And they will, they do a lot of things. They help with all sorts of cashing that we’ve talked about. They also do things like they can cat Nate and minify scripts. So. Instead of like, when I used to build websites 10 years ago, I would have a main dot CSS, a contact dot CSS, a header dot CSS, a footer dot CSS, a sidebar dot CSS.
[00:19:54] That was how I organized my CSS files. That’s no longer the best case. That’s not how you should send files because each file has a little bit of overhead to it. So if you can combine all your CSS files into one file and send them one bigger file, it’s actually more efficient. And the way WordPress saves CSS files that can’t do that.
[00:20:13] But caching plugins can, so caching plugins can take all your CSS files, con it’s called concatenation. They can concatenate them together and send it over. They can also Jesus them. So that basically means they’re concatenating it and it also zipping it and then sending it to the browser, which can unzip it faster than it takes to download a bigger file.
[00:20:32] That makes sense. So that’s a lot of cool stuff that. They just have some smart defaults, the free plugins and wordpress.org are good, but they’re just the user interface just isn’t quite as easy. Right. So I love all that about it. I’m trying to think of other features in WP rocket that I just loved.
[00:20:46]But those are the big ones. But again, I just want to say if you ever. My, the reason I always say, install a caching plugin. Last is you install a plugin. You can, catenate all your files. Then you uninstall a contact form plugin. You still might have something stuck in your cache. So you might be sending some older files.
[00:21:03] So just, you have to be very good to know there’s buttons and all these plugins to like clear the cache. Whenever you install a plugin or delete a plugin or add a theme file, delete, delete a file. Just clear your cache. In a couple of different places. Not that should take care of it for you, but caching, plugins. Incredible.
[00:21:20] Cory Miller: I love how you laid this out. So if you’ve been listening to Patrick, he’s given you steps and he’s putting this last inner third intentionally because of some of the issues I’ve personally ran into that will maybe change you go to the front end and you’re trying to look at what happened and it’s not.
[00:21:34] And that’s typically, as she said, I love that you say for the last two. And that’d be for rocket, I’ll say too. I think there’s one site, but now I need to go back and really look at the offering because the problem with a lot of cash issue is you don’t know if it’s working or not. And a lot of that is what you alluded to the user interface.
[00:21:54] Now I noticed that the managed host we talked about, particularly with WooCommerce have hidden their boxes and their setups. For WooCommerce, but there are server level caching stuff. I don’t know if you want to put that, but I know I’ve, we’ve run into that before where maybe a host has some of like really like caching stuff for obvious reasons with WordPress and everything, but could affect your WooCommerce function.
[00:22:19] Or do you even see that today? Is that even a worry with some of these managed hosts
[00:22:22] Patrick Rauland: So I would say most WordPress developers don’t need to talk about server configuration, but having said that, like one of the things I love about Nexcess and one of the reasons I joined them is because they focus so much on WooCommerce.
[00:22:35] So there’s a couple extra things a host could do. Let me give you an example on the Nexcess plan on the very top plan they have fully integrated the still alpha, a WooCommerce orders table. Plugin, which is on GitHub right now. So you can Google that it’s under the liquid web get hub user. But it’s like WooCommerce custom order table.
[00:22:54] I think it’s what it is, what it’s called. And it does some extra cool things. So instead of saving all WooCommerce orders as a custom post type, which has like 56 rows or 70 rows of PostNet information, it just, it fills up your. Posting your post-money table very quickly, all of your orders. And if you can save that information in a table that has a longer table, that has more fields in it, it’s more efficient to store information and to retrieve information.
[00:23:22] So that’d be an example of a host. Who’s, they’re going to extra lengths to you to configure this alpha plugin for you on your WooCommerce site. And that will really help you when you get start getting. Orders multiple orders per second. So there’s really cool service stuff you can do, but I would say for the average person, you don’t need to go there until you start getting into probably like hundreds of orders a day.
[00:23:44]That’s when you want to start thinking about like the really specific server configurations for your host there, there’s lots of cool stuff, but that’s also just not where I’ve spent my time.
[00:23:53] Cory Miller: Oh, that’s good. Thank you for that. Okay, so we’ve covered the big three here, which to me, excellent information is stuff that we can all do. There’s tools out there that make it easy to do versus some simple practice as you’ve given this G team that’s about. WooCommerce in particular. Now the plugin, you just mentioned that liquid web’s put on github fantastic. There’s always optimization with WordPress software itself, plugins, themes. You talked about, but specifically WooCommerce. Is there anything on that? On that plugin specific realm that you could do that helps with site speed and there may not, but I thought I’d ask them,
[00:24:29] Patrick Rauland: Well, you know what? I think you can reach out to your host about this. So like now most hosts I would say almost every managed WordPress host knows how to do this, but for awhile I was working at WooThemes when WP engine didn’t know how to cache the cart page and the checkout page. And I think it just took a while for WooCommerce and WP engine to figure out how to like work together in that way. And now they know, Oh, you don’t cash these pages and we instead do X, Y, or Z to improve these pages. There, there are other things you can do. You know, there’s WooCommerce disabled cart fragments.
[00:25:01] So if you don’t need to load the cart on every page, You can actually turn there’s plugins. You can install to disable this admin Ajax functionality, which is basically you load a page and WooCommerce goes, Oh yeah, they have a, t-shirt a pair of jeans and a coffee cup in their cart, but not every site needs that.
[00:25:17] And then if you can take out that request that saves some processing time and saves it for other people So there, there are little optimizations like that, and certain hosts managed WordPress hosts will install that for you automatically, which is really cool. I would just say, make sure that your host isn’t caching really important pages.
[00:25:35]That’s probably the biggest thing that you can do. And again, I think most managed WordPress hosts. Now I have this down.
[00:25:41] Cory Miller: Okay. Yep. Yep. See. What’s the issue. I remember that. Yeah. Specifically Eric, because we had a long time, you probably remember a eCommerce plugin. We put out into the world and we’re having specific issues too, but now those days it’s been long gone since that.
[00:25:56] And obviously the WP engine knows their stuff. So what’s the, I mean, just focusing on that, you talked about. Performance checking your GT metrics. I was going to say too, this is coming bottle too, because giggles rolling out their core bottles algorithm in the next couple of months and starts a user issue for Google and anybody on the web. But anything else that you want to talk about or mention?
[00:26:20] Patrick Rauland: Yeah, so I’m going to say two more things. Number one, GT metrics lets you have so with your account you can set up a weekly or a recurring daily, weekly, monthly, whatever you want. I have weekly speed updates and I love that.
[00:26:33] Because even though I try really hard to keep my site efficient. I experiment with plugins. I install this plugin and I think it’s no big deal. And then next week on Monday, I get an email that says your site speed slowed down to six seconds. So I’m like, Oh, I forgot to check. So install a weekly or monthly recurring speed test.
[00:26:53] And they just email it to you. And then when you do silly stuff, like I do like, Oh, I’ll just install this plugin real quick. It’ll be fine. Oh, that plugin is a performance problem. I it’ll help you catch problems. So that they’re only on your site for a couple of days or like a week before you catch these big speed performance hogs.
[00:27:12] I would definitely set up a weekly email. The other thing is I think when you’re going through this, do a speed test before and after everything you try. Keep in mind. Every speed test is not, they’re not like perfectly scientific. Sometimes certain things take a lot longer to load. Sometimes data gets lost.
[00:27:29] Go ahead. And if you see a weird result, do two or three speed tests and take the load results. They’re not perfect, but they’re just a good. There are good guide. So do two or three speed tests, take the lowest results. Do and then go ahead and optimize your theme and then take two or three speed tests and see how much it improved.
[00:27:45]I’m a big fan of nowhere, you know, know what the 80 20 is with your website. Once you find a good theme, probably don’t need to test it again. You’re just probably stick with it.
[00:27:55]Cory Miller: Yeah. That’s so good. I didn’t even think about this because site speed is just so critical that you should have something that’s kind of doing some kind of audit. So that’s something I’m going to have to go back to the Vida Bars and put on my site. So I’ve been talked a lot, but when I speed, I think about even though in the Western world, you know, cellular site speed continues to get faster and faster, but that’s not the case for every place and even the United States.
[00:28:22] What are your thoughts about mobile speed?
[00:28:25] Patrick Rauland: Yeah, so I would so it depends on the speed tools are used, but I try to use the mobile view because more and more people are using mobile for more and more things. I basically only pull up my computer when I’m doing like an interview or when I need to like type up a whole Google doc.
[00:28:40] If I don’t need to type up a whole Google doc, I’m gonna use my iPad. I’m gonna use my phone. There’s smaller view ports. And then a lot of times people are on 3g here in the States, not on 5g or 4g they’re on 3g. And then there are some places in the States and abroad where you get like two G speeds.
[00:28:58] And so if you’re downloading a two megabyte image, have fun waiting 30 minutes. So you really want to be aware of how fast your site is on mobile all the time. It’s essential. So I would say always use mobile if you can.
[00:29:18] You did freeze for a moment, but I think you’re coming back.
[00:29:28] Yeah. All right. Looks like I have to take over the show. I guess I will appoint myself King.
[00:29:37] Cory Miller: Yeah. Okay. I think I’m back. That’s right. This has been a phenomenally helpful because I’m having more problems. We’ll go ahead and shut her down. Patrick, tell us where we can find more about you and your work and even on LinkedIn. I know you can go on LinkedIn learning, just search your name. And find your courses on these and other really amazing stuff.
[00:30:05] Patrick Rauland: Yeah. So let me talk about this course for just a second. This will be on LinkedIn learning and probably a month and a half. It kind of depends on how long post-production takes, but probably in a month and a half, there’ll be a whole course on speeding up your WordPress site on LinkedIn learning, just Google, WordPress, and speed.
[00:30:20] And I’m sure it’ll come up. And I go through optimizing one of my own sites step-by-step and there are some things that I thought would be incredibly. Efficient. And we’re like, Oh, they only sped it up by 10 milliseconds. That’s nothing. And some things that I didn’t think would be efficient and they were incredible.
[00:30:36] So check out the course. It’ll be cool. I also write a lot on speaking in bites.com. That’s B Y T E S like computer bites. So speaking in bites.com, I write there about WordPress. I use, I actually have a lot about speed in the last. A couple months. So if you go back through my site in the last couple months, we see a lot about speed and CDNs and server locations and minifying scripts and all that fun stuff.
[00:30:58]And I, yeah, I think, Oh, and then if you want to check out my eCommerce sites laidback.games. So I think that’s me.
[00:31:05] Cory Miller: Okay. I’ll put those in the link in the chat and we’ll have those in the show notes. Thanks everybody for being here today. And Patrick, again, appreciate you. And I can’t wait to have you on again, your energy and your knowledge. Thanks my friend.
[00:31:19] Patrick Rauland: Thank you so much.
[00:31:20] Cory Miller: Okay. See you.