David Coveney

Getting Quicker

One of the most important things that gets forgotten about when running a WP site is that performance is important.  We see many sites with page load times way in excess of 2,000ms per page.  Often the site just gets progressively slower over time and the change isn’t really noticed.  That had happened with mine, though I’d made tweaks in the past to help, I still wasn’t happy.

This is bad, especially now that Google rewards speedy load times with higher rankings.

So I knew that the increasingly sluggish performance of my site was an issue.  The crud had built up, and in rebooting I hoped to dramatically improve responsiveness.

And I did:

It’ll be interesting to see the impact of this over time, but I’m pleased with the results so far.

An interesting graph of site performance over the past few years:

As you can see – the performance early last year got particularly bad.

It’s worth noting that I don’t run any caching or CDN on this site – it’s never that busy to be worth the work.

I’m hoping that I can now keep responsiveness down to <700ms average.

One lesson I hope you do take away from this is the importance of continuously monitoring your site’s responsiveness by using a service such as Pingdom.com.

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