How we improved the load speed of our client’s website
Today, using a combination of premium caching and image optimisation, plus MaxCDN/Stackpath CDN, we managed to shave 2 seconds off the load time of an already quick website for one of our clients. That’s just the load time if their visitors are in the UK. For the 50% of their visitors that come from elsewhere in the World, the improvement is even greater (due to the introduction of the CDN).
We wrote about the importance of website load speeds a couple of years ago. Given the trend for even heavier pages, and search engines moving towards favouring faster-loading sites, it’s even more important than ever to create snappy websites.
It’s not difficult to do either and it’s generally less expensive than finding a more powerful hosting solution.
What our performance package includes
We installed and configured the Rocket WP plugin and the Imagify.io plugin (setting optimisation levels to ‘Ultra’), and then added the site to our MaxCDN (now Stackpath) content delivery network account as an additional zone. This delivers the website content to edge servers on 3 continents. Additional edge locations are available, but at a higher price. We’d only recommend this if the client was genuinely selling into the other locations.
Result of adding caching, image optimisation, and CDN to WordPress website
The result of this work was that the load times for London visitors dropped from 3.46 seconds to 1.52 seconds; San Francisco visitors saw their load times drop from 5.89 seconds to 3.25 seconds; Sydney visitors saw their load times fall from 8.39 seconds to 5.6 seconds.
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