What’s Making Our Websites Slow? We Are!

This is the blog post that accompanies a talk I gave at WordCamp Seattle in 2019. You can see the slides here.

Additionally, the HTTP Archive Web Almanac was published around the same time so I’ve also interspersed some of the insights from that report since they dovetail really nicely.

Providing excellent context for this post, the CMS chapter shows how sites built with a Content Management System (and WordPress sites comprise almost 75% of those in the report) tend to:

  • be more bloated with heavier page weights
  • use more 3rd party resources
  • use heavier images

Additionally it reported that WordPress sites tend to have slower performance metrics.

Now this is not really the fault of WordPress itself, it’s really due to what we site owners have done.

While it’s possible to build bloated pages and use techniques to make them seem fast, that shouldn’t be the goal. Let’s just build lighter pages to begin with!

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How to Update Old Content on Your WordPress Site

Maintaining a steady flow of traffic to your WordPress site isn’t only dependent on constantly producing brand new content. Updating old content is a great practice to keep benefitting from the posts you’ve already worked on. It’s possible to take advantage of Google’s freshness algorithm and generate a new burst of traffic for the updated content, as well as provide a better user experience for visitors to your site ensuring they never find old or irrelevant information. 

In this post I’ll cover:

  • The easiest way to update existing posts in WordPress
  • How to push your content to the top of your blog feed again
  • How to let Google know your content has been updated without pushing it to the top of your blog feed again
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Google PageSpeed Insights – A Guide for WordPress Users

Google PageSpeed Insights Guide for WordPress Users

Listen, let’s keep it real, PageSpeed Insights is a tool best used by developers. Its intentions are good but it’s not targeted at the average WordPress site owner. Even with the recent introduction of some WordPress-specific messaging, many aspects of the report are too technical to be clearly actionable.

In this guide I’ll try to translate what PageSpeed is talking about and let you know which factors you can control, as a WordPress site owner, and which you can’t.

The basic principles that PageSpeed Insights is trying to communicate are:

  • Keep your pages light and simple.
  • Avoid unnecessary fanciness.
  • Consider mobile users, particularly those who pay for every byte of data.

These are solid principles but PageSpeed communicates them in somewhat obscure ways.

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How to improve the Time To First Byte (TTFB) of your WordPress site

The Time To First Byte (TTFB), or server response time, of your WordPress site can be an important indicator of performance. It doesn’t represent the whole picture, but a very specific part in the process.

Time to First Byte is a measure of how fast your server responds when someone tries to visit a page on your site. Specifically, it’s measuring how long it takes from the time the browser asks the server for the page, to when the browser receives the first piece of data from the server.

Visitors want sites to feel fast, so the sooner some meaningful content is displayed on the screen, the better. TTFB can influence this – the faster the server responds, the faster content can get to the user.

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Help! My WordPress Site Looks Different! And other tales of upgrading to 5+

WordPress - new block editor

In the past few weeks, several people have emailed me in various stages of panic about the new look of their WordPress admin area. They had updated to WordPress 5+, which features the brand new Block Editor AKA Gutenberg, and were flummoxed by the new changes.

The new editor transforms the post editing screen from this:

WordPress Classic Editor

To this:

WordPress Block Editor - Gutenberg

If you’re not expecting it, or if you’ve learned to do certain tasks on your site a specific way, this could be really confusing and stop you in your tracks.

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How to create a member directory on your MemberPress site

Create a member directory on your MemberPress site

MemberPress is one of my go-to plugins for easily protecting and charging for access to your content. I appreciate the fact that they stay focused on this core goal and don’t overload it with extraneous features. So it does not have a member directory feature built-in, but by using an additional free plugin you can add this capability.

In this use-case the requirements of the directory are simple: a front-end listing of site members, that other users can browse.

When people register for your MemberPress offerings, they are added to the existing user system within WordPress.  That means that any plugin which taps into that to display WordPress users should work fine with MemberPress. You don’t have to look for anything that is MemberPress-specific.

There are several fully-featured and fairly complex directory plugins available on the WordPress repo, but they are generally aimed at being all-in-one solutions for creating and monetizing the directory. They aren’t really designed to be used in conjunction with an existing membership site.

There are fewer plugins that take a simpler approach, and even fewer that do a good job.

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