How was the talk "Optimize your website: Web Performance Optimization in WordPress"

The numbers

Aimed at the talk: 42 people.
Assistants: 26 people.
It was held on July 16th, 2018.

Important: As discussed in the talk, we will resume the tool Slack, specifically the channel #wpalicante Slack WordPress Spain to organize better and to share the management of meetup. To sign up for the slack follow the instructions on the following page-> http://wp-es.es/slack/

The talk

This time we have the chance to count for the meetup with a first class guest: Antonio Torres https://antonio-torres.es/, Director of support specialized in professional Hosting https://www.profesionalhosting.com/ , consultant and web Developer. In a talk as dense as interesting has told us all the ins and outs about the performance of the web made with WordPress, so that we optimize it and thus not only that the users want us more but also that the searchers better position us. In English it is known as "Web Performance optimization" or WPO.

We share the Presentation prepared by our rapporteur With the summary of everything he explained.

We include below some additional notes that we find interesting and can be worth in some concepts as a summary and others as clarification:

For the satisfaction of the user is very important the speed of loading of the web.
Google penalizes slow webs, which will get worse positioning in your browser.
% Conversion: It is the success in the objective that we have for our page (that the user makes a purchase, that stays reading...).
The speed of the page to load also improves the SEO.
To improve the speed we have to review both the server where we host the web and the programming of it.

Server:

Beware of free hosts because they are usually very slow.
Better if the processor is high performance, Intel better than AMD to be more stable, Intel I5 for example, with processor speed of 2, 5GH or higher.
Better if the hard drive is SSD Raid.
Data Center in Spain (or where we have our potential market) because if it is out the connection latency is higher and that makes the user experience worse.
Latency— time it takes to communicate your local connection to the server.
Data center quality and stability: better be TIER III or IV. If it is inferior it can fall more times throughout the year.
Tier levels: There are four categories established by the uptime Institute for data centers, which correspond to guarantees on the material used to ensure that the system will not fall under the worst circumstances by also having more or less redundancy of Components.
Special server configuration for WordPress. If the company has servers specialized in WordPress better.
PHP7 and MySQL 5.6 compatibility. If you can switch between PHP7 and PHP5 better than better.
RAM-based cache systems.

Web page to measure speed and performance

In the end the important thing is to always measure with the same tool to see the progress that we make if we are making improvements. If we jump from one tool to another we will not be able to compare. The following are reviewed:

PageSpeed Insights: It is the worst although to be Google's we want to make a little case without obsessing. As it is done from the U.S. will measure greater latency than we are really going to have with our customers. Between 60 and 80% is already acceptable.
Pingdom.com: It's better than the previous one.
Webpage Test: It's the best. You can tell him where the server is and he performs three Tests.
GtMetrix: It can also be acceptable because you can choose origin (although not within the country, at least you can approach the continent) and performs several different measurements.

Interesting concepts:

First Byte: First load. It's the time it takes for a Web site to send the first byte. It is decreased using cache or improving the code.
Speed Index: o speed index. How long it takes to load the visible part of the Web. It is a complex formula that we don't need to understand, but we do know that the lower the better and that it should be less than 3500.

Programming:

For programming, be careful to install too many plugins or choose a very heavy subject.

If you have problems with plugins, we can use another (plugin, of course) to know which is causing us problems:

P3 (Performance Profiler Plugin): Careful because it is not maintained since three years, ie since 2015, so although it is good and still worth it may start to fail to be tested with the latest updates from WP. It analyzes all the plugins installed and gives information of each one to find which is giving us problems.

Another thing you can do is to minimize or even disable the number of post reviews. The presentation shows you how to do it.

Other interesting plugins to optimize:

WP-Optimize: Plugin to clean BDD. It can be programmed to do it periodically. You have to take care with the options in red letters.
WP Rocket: Cache Plugin. It is the best but it is of payment. Another good free option is W3 Total cache Although it is more complex to configure.
Autoptimize: Plugin to automate optimization. It helps a lot.

Other Concepts and tools:

Lazy Load: A form of loading of the web where only the part of the page that is in view is loaded. When you scroll is when you load the rest, so you get higher load speed.
Mod PageSpeed Google: Google tool very good for web optimization. It is not local but it is installed at the server level and the active. You have to go and look for the cpanel of the server. An icon named PageSpeed should appear. You have to be careful because it takes more space on the part at least the images you have loaded on your website as one of the things that makes this tool is saved copies optimized on the server, which will occupy more space than you currently have.
CDN: It is very useful if we have users in countries other than where the server is. It is advisable to use this protocol if you have more than 20% of traffic outside the country of origin. What is done is to replicate all the static information on machines in different countries so that the latency is reduced.
HTTP/2: It is advisable to have active on the server because it substantially improves the speed. On the internet there are HTTP2 test webs to find out if our website is using this protocol. If it is not, you have to talk to our hosting to activate it. If we have this active no longer need to have active keep-Alive that is tested on many websites that measure performance.
AMP Cache: It is a CDN on specific machines. Google has one. The webs that use it are identified by a ray with blue background when looking at Google. . The problem to keep in mind is that it is stored on your servers (in addition to yours on which you have control) and that usually does not like.
HTTPS: It is the "new" Secure protocol for Web pages because it adds an encryption layer to the HTTP protocol that was used so far. To get our website to use HTTPS it is necessary to obtain a certificate signed by a third entity that verifies the identity of the Web site. So far you had to pay but now there is a way to get it for free thanks to Letsencrypt. This is to be installed on the server so you have to provide the hosting.