The purpose of this page is to show what the performance of a fast WordPress powered site looks like. Speedy and efficient WordPress sites are not always easy to achieve but the right techniques can pay dividends in page load times. This page also serves as an outline of how you can benchmark your WordPress site and some metrics to compare against in the event you find that your site is slower than it should be.
My homepage loads quite a few external resources from Instagram, Pinterest, Pocket, and YouTube so the load speed for that page is dependent on the responses from 3rd party services and is not a good representation of the performance of my site’s technical infrastructure. This page (the one you are reading) has none of that and simply has some text and optimized images to test caching, CDN, AMP, and other services.
The following is what I have found to be the ultimate balance of convenience and performance for a Fast WordPress powered site.
My Prefered Host
WPEngine (20% off new accounts)
- Settings:
- All Caching Enabled
- CDN Enabled
- All other WPEngine “Tricks” turned ON
My DNS Of Choice
Cloudflare (Free Account is Fine)
Important Plugins
- Hummingbird Pro (Paid Version by WPMUDEV)
- WP Smush Pro (Paid Version by WPMUDEV)
- Yoast SEO
- Jetpack by WordPress
- Lazy Load Images ON
- Infinite Scroll ON
- Google Tag Manager
- Cloudflare Plugin
Latest Results (As of 8/20/2018)
Tools:
- Page Speed Test:
- GTmetrix (1.6 Sec)
- WebPageTest.org (1.78 Sec)
- Pingdom Website Speed Test (2.77 Sec)
- Google PageSpeed Insights (Not Very Useful)
- HTML Validation:
- W3 Validator (12 Errors, 43 Warnings)
Screenshot of Test Results
GTmetrix Results 8-21-2018:
WebPageTest.org Results 8-21-2018:
Pingdom Test Results 8-21-2018:
W3 Validator Results 8-21-2018:
