Our process involves over 150 steps, so it’s impractical to provide detailed specifics for everything we do. If you have a mission-critical large site, we recommend looking into our consulting service. Through this service, we first audit the site, create a detailed action plan, and then work with you to implement it. This service provides the most detailed information on the changes we make. Generally, the first step in our process is to identify key issues slowing down the website, fix them, and then adopt general best practices.

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We will explain what these issues are, why they occur, and provide before-and-after speed reports. Broadly, we do the following: Review and optimize WordPress best practices. Most of the sites we work on have configuration errors or issues simply because they have been worked on by multiple people over time. We will review your entire site and hosting configuration to ensure it is configured according to best practices. Browser and page cache configuration and adjustment: Caching is one of the biggest improvements you can make to WordPress site speed. Cache settings are much more complex than simply installing a caching plugin and turning everything on.

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Each site is different and requires tailored caching. Most importantly, cache settings are often counterintuitive; on some hosts, enabling database caching, for example, can actually slow down your site. You will also find many improvements suggested by speed testing tools on the web (such as removing query strings from static elements) can actually cause problems. Database optimization and cleanup: If your site has been around for a while, the database may have accumulated junk that slows down the site.

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For example, expired transients on Woocommerce sites and the use of the outdated MyISAM storage engine on database tables can be big issues. As part of our service, we will clean and optimize your database to ensure it runs as fast as possible. Redis or Memcached object cache configuration (if possible): Object caching is a type of database caching that speeds up the WordPress backend, Woocommerce checkout, and any area in WordPress heavily reliant on CPU or database lookups. Not all hosts support object caching, but where possible, we will install Memcached or Redis and configure object caching.

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Using Cloudflare for Edge Caching Configuration: Edge caching is a form of page caching where the site or page is cached at CDN edge nodes. This significantly reduces the load on the host and largely eliminates the impact of geographic location on site speed. We highly recommend all compatible sites use Cloudflare APO edge caching service. It costs $5/month (purchased from Cloudflare) but has a major impact on site speed.

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HTAccess or Nginx File Optimization: HTAccess is one of the key configuration files for web servers and often contains code that slows down the site or causes issues. We will review your HTAccess configuration and ensure it is set according to best practices. 404 and error request review and repair: It is not uncommon to find typos in code or other issues causing images or server interruptions or error requests. We will review all elements loading on your site to ensure they don’t time out or cause 404 errors.

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Plugin Review and Trimming: Redundant and outdated plugins: This is a big issue for WordPress speed. Often, it's as simple as installing multiple SEO plugins, which is bad for both speed and Google ranking. We will review all your plugins to ensure they are actually necessary or in use, and that no plugin provides duplicate functionality or causes conflicts somewhere on your site. Server compression adjustments: Many site servers do not have compression enabled by default. We ensure your server compression settings are tuned for optimal performance. Before-and-after reports: All work we do includes before-and-after speed snapshots so we can show you exactly how site speed has improved.

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Image Optimization and Compression and Next-Gen Image Optimization: Images are often the largest component of your site, and using lossless compression, we can usually significantly reduce the file size of images without impacting quality. We will losslessly compress all images on your site and resize them where appropriate. Content Delivery Network Configuration (optional, supported by Cloudflare): Cloudflare.com is an excellent service we recommend to all clients (even the free service will bring significant speed improvements). Cloudflare speeds up your DNS hosting (often overlooked in speed terms) and provides content delivery networks and several other speed improvements that other providers or plugins cannot.

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HTTPS Conversion: If you haven’t implemented HTTPS yet (you should!), the entire web is moving to HTTPS, and it’s a good thing. HTTPS ensures that all data transmitted between your site and visitors is encrypted. When your site runs on HTTPS, web browsers use the newer HTTP2 protocol, which requires fewer server connections and generally improves site rendering and loading speeds. In addition to speeding up your site, Google has stated that encrypted sites running on HTTPS will receive a slight ranking boost.

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PHP7 Upgrade (if compatible): PHP7 is the latest version of PHP and is 2-3 times faster than PHP5.X, which your site is likely running (there is no PHP6). This means load times are sped up by about 0.5 seconds, which is very useful for total loads below 1 second. Each subsequent PHP version is faster than the previous one, so v7.1 is 10-20% faster than 7.0, v7.2 is 10-20% faster than 7.1, etc., so running the highest possible PHP version will give you the fastest possible speeds.

You are asking the wrong question! A score of 100 in Pagespeed Insights is not what you should be aiming for. Instead, Google Core Web Vitals metrics are what you should focus on. These are the times Google uses in its algorithms and are displayed in Google Search Console and the “live data” section at the top of Pagespeed Insights tests.

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Most people looking at Pagespeed Insights scores only look at the homepage (actually, all pages are important), and only test once from one location. Pagespeed Insights scores are not fixed; they vary with each test. The score is derived from the loading time score during testing. Ideally, we want our speed timings to look like this to get a "good" score in Core Web Vitals: TTFB 0.1-0.2 seconds (within the hosting country, internationally 0.2-0.5 seconds), FCP equal to or less than 1.5 seconds, LCP less than 2.5 seconds but ideally as close to LCP as possible, typically within 1 second of LCP is fast - load time 1.5-2.5 - full load time can vary greatly depending on the third-party code used.

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Generally, we expect to see it 1-2 seconds higher than load time, but this largely depends on the type of website, e.g., for Woocommerce sites, it can easily be 3-5 seconds higher depending on the marketing code used. The Pagespeed Insights mobile test is conducted on a slow device using a 1.6mb/s connection (very slow), meaning unless your page size is 0.5mb or less, you won’t score above about 60 in this test (out of 100).

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In our Advanced Speedfix, we focus on the size of all pages on the site and specifically look at Pagespeed scores. We cannot guarantee a score of 100, as mentioned above, the score largely depends on the size of the test page. Anyone promising you a score of 100 is either lying or expects you to remove all content from the page.

It depends on the situation, but often you will. We migrate hosting for about 30% of our clients. If you are using Bluehost, Godaddy, Hostgator, A Small Orange, or any other EIG-owned company, you may need to move to get your site to load super fast.

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Cheap companies make money by offering $3/month hosting plans by stacking 10,000 other websites on the same server and running it as hard as possible. We find that we can get sites running on these services to load times down to a passable 3-5 seconds, but the site will struggle to handle multiple concurrent users. In hosting, you get what you pay for—when you pay less for a month of hosting than you do for a cup of coffee or 1-2 clicks on AdWords or Facebook ads, it’s unreasonable to expect high-quality service.

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Usually, we recommend AWS/GCP/Azure or Cloudways to clients on poor quality hosting, but any host on our fastest WordPress hosts list will get your site loading fast. Using a content delivery network like Cloudflare will help greatly, as it compensates for the massive latency brought by hosting, and using their $5/month APO edge caching service will take this to the next level. If you cannot move your hosting provider for some reason, this may be the next best option.

Yes, sometimes we encounter sites that cannot be fixed. Typically the site has one of the following issues. In many cases, we can work with you to resolve the issue. Most often, the issue is related to the hosting of the site, in which case we can recommend what actions need to be taken to resolve the issue and can migrate the site for you. If we encounter a significant obstacle after you order, meaning we cannot speed up your site, we will gladly refund our service.

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It runs on a Windows server. While WordPress can run on Windows, it is designed to run on Linux or LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) systems, meaning performance on a Windows server will never be as good as on a LAMP setup. If site speed is important to you, the site should not run on a Windows server. It runs on a complex WordPress Multisite setup. WordPress Multisite performance is not the best, especially when running a multisite setup with many plugins or many sites. Multisite is often more convenient but requires a trade-off in flexibility and sometimes performance.

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The site runs on a VPS, and the VPS has issues fixing VPS and server issues is beyond our scope. WordPress site speed is limited by server configuration, and most cheap VPS setups are poorly configured. Unless you have a specific reason to use VPS, managed WordPress hosting is usually a better option as the servers are specifically configured and tuned for WordPress. Poor quality hosting plans: If you are using cheap basement hosting, your site will not run well. There is no way to fix this problem; cheap hosting is poor quality, and ultimately you get what you pay for. As part of our service, we can migrate you to better quality hosting. Your hosting plan traffic is too high: Your hosting plan needs to match the traffic level your site receives well. If you get 5000 visits a day, you will need a higher level of hosting plan than a site that gets 50 visits a day.

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Using tools like Cloudflare will significantly improve the performance of high-traffic sites, but ultimately your site speed will be limited by the hosting performance cap. In this case, the solution is often to upgrade to the next tier of the hosting plan. The IT department wants to host the site internally. IT departments often do not have the commercial motivation and are not focused on what is best for the business—after all, if things go smoothly, they have nothing to do, and if they have nothing to do, they have no job.

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Usually, internal IT departments want to host the site internally rather than use specialized WordPress hosting that can do a better job. If your site is hosted on internal IT infrastructure, the assistance we can offer may be limited. Your site has custom development work or is running obscure or poor-quality plugins: Sometimes, we encounter a site that has been developed by poor-quality outsourced engineers or is running WordPress plugins that conflict with other plugins or are simply bad plugins.

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Most often, in these cases, the plugin or development work attempts to do things WordPress was not designed to do, breaking the site or causing performance issues.