The WP Business Club Website has been live the website has been live for a week and I now wish to make sure that it is running efficiently.
This report has been written retrospectively after we carried out the tests that we are going to cover. A video of that process was created and can be viewed here, or you can continue and read my report on the process.
The first thing we are going to do is to investigate the efficiency of the plug-ins that are running within WordPress site. We wish to make sure that they are working properly, and that none of them are taking too many resources. To do this we install a plug-in called the P-3 profiler which was produced by go daddy. go daddy this is the best thing you have done.
From the admin dashboard you can go to plug-ins add new and then search for P-3 profiler the plug-in is in the main were pressed repository and therefore is easy to find once you have located it you need to install it and activate the plug-in. Once the plug-in is installed you will find it under the tools menu. Go to the plugin and choose start scan I suggest used to automate scan and let the plug-in do all the work for you. When it is finished you will have a number reports the most important one is to check the pie chart and make sure that there is no plug-in that is hogging all the limelight and taking too much of the pie you also want to check the plug-in load time statistic at the top of the report. If your plug-in load time is in excess of one second or if one of your plug-ins is taking more than 50% of the power then I would consider that to be an issue to be looked into. In our case, when we first tried to run this plug-in, we found that one of the install plug-ins was causing an error. Fortunately, this membership plug-in is not currently being used on the site and therefore we have deactivated it.
We then reran the scan and found that our total plug-in load time was .6 seconds which is quite adequate for our site at present. It should be noted that we are not using a premium were pressed hosted service costing 50 or $100. We are using a standard WordPress multi account service from one-on-one Internet, so this should be similar to most of our customers’ set-ups.
Now we are happy that the plug-ins are performing well, we need to see what the outside world thinks of us. To do this we are going to use the website pinged.com which will create a website speed test from their servers to assess how quickly ours reacts.
I remember that IBM told me that any response under one second was instant. I do not expect us to be able to achieve a one second responsible website with our current setup, but I will not be happy if the site is taking for five or more seconds to load. I suspect that it currently is.
On the first running of the pinged test, we have informants grade of C, which is quite good. However, the page load speed is 4.25 seconds which is not acceptable. I said at the beginning of this process I didn’t want anything around five seconds and currently, that is what I have.
So, let’s firstly deal with this C grade and see if it can be improved. There are two errors which I am seeing from performance insights. The first is a minimize the quest size, which I cannot see a quick answer and so I will leave that one for now. The second issue is to remove query strings from static resources. Many stylesheets and JavaScript codes like to announce to their providers which version numbers they are using. This is a problem because many cash applications will take this as a parameter and will then not cash the files properly. This is why the issue needs to be addressed. Fortunately, there is a number plug-in which we can install onto the site which will remove these extra parameters.
The Plugin is called “Remove query strings from static resources”.
This plug-in did successfully remove ?ver= statements from JavaScript and CSS. This, therefore, fixed the issue and ping them gave us an improved b score.
We then return to finding improvements in the page load speed.
Next action is to install the W3 super cache plug-in which will optimise content and improve site speed. The standard installation brought some improvements that we then went in and chose more settings in the general settings tab we enabled page cache with. The creation of content. We enabled minified which will compress files like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, removing all comments and extra whitespace. We enabled database cash, an object cash and browser cache.
The last action we took was to set up a cloud of her account and redirect our DNS through club player, so they could cash content outside our own server.
When you are constantly working to improve your site, you need to alway balance adding new features with the impact on response. This means you add code or plugins to add features and then look at ways to make the system to work without them later. The biggest outstanding issue is that our speed is acceptable for the UK where our server is hosted but is too slow for the USA and this is where you start looking for a distributed service to deploy your content network across multiple sites. This is a significant cost and needs to be balanced with the impact this couuld have on the business. THe other option is to moce hosting to the largest market and not worry so much about elsewhere. it was for this reason we started in tye UK in the first place.
