WordPress Site Performance Optimization

For the first meetup of 2016, we're talking site speed improvement!

Site speed is important, considering your users can quickly get tired of having to wait and will move on. Search engines recognize this user behavior, and use site speed as part of their ranking algorithms. Learn a bit about how you can speed up your website, and why it matters.

Irina Blumenfeld - Improve Your Website Performance

Nobody likes waiting for a slow site. You have less than 5 seconds to engage your customer before they leave. With users increasingly on the go and having mobile connections of varying speeds, page-delivery performance has become more critical.

In this presentation we'll go over tips and techniques that can dramatically increase your site performance. We'll also go over some examples of before and after site optimization.

In detail we'll cover:

• Why speed matters - why should you care about website performance

• How you can measure it - a variety of tools to measure your page load time, page size, and any bottlenecks.

• Ways to improve it - several ways to improve your speed score

We'll also discuss new HTTP/2 protocol and how it can benefit your business.

Demian Seiler - Plugin TLC

Best practices to help keep your site fast, secure, and problem free by showing your plugin inventory a bit of TLC.

Perhaps the greatest thing about WordPress is at it’s core there is a powerful yet very focused set of functionality. To take WordPress to the next level, we can use plugins made to work with the WordPress core to add even more power. But with this power comes a responsibility to curate these plugins.

This discussion will be a call to action for all to regularly curate their plugin inventory for the following reasons:

Security - Attackers have a special place in their hearts for un-patched systems.

Performance - Every line of code in a plugin adds to the time it takes to load your page so choose wisely.

Functionality - New plugins are created daily. What worked best yesterday, may not be the best choice for today.