Dear WordPress Aficionado,
Building websites is much like having an orgasm: It’s very pleasurable, time flies, and it’s fantastic every single time. It also shares some of the challenges related to orgasms:
It’s hard to get laid, and there’s many trial & errors before you know what you do so that in the end, everybody involved is happy.
But:
Some Tricky Parts Are Never Fully Handled
For example, take your website’s performance:
If websites were meant to be used on our devices like desktop or mobile apps, it would be relatively easy to create them with performance in mind. Not that tough decisions wouldn’t exist, but that’s why I said “relatively.”
Unfortunately, websites run on devices called “servers” that are located elsewhere, and the content we want is “served” to our laptop or smartphone with the help of a “network.”
So when visiting a page, we’re making a “request” that travels through the network to a server. That server generates an “HTML document” and sends it back to us as a “response.”
And if there’s a big storm, it can damage the network or the data center, bringing down all the sites hosted in the area.
Or if the user comes from an area with a slow Internet and our site pages are “heavy,” meaning that they offer too much text, images, and JavaScript code, then they will load considerably slower.
There are many such “What Ifs”:
What if the data center is too far away?
What if the servers are not well-configured?
What if the user’s device isn’t so good?
What if there are too many plugins?
What if there are too many users at the moment?
All these and more can negatively affect the loading speed of a page or a website. Sometimes we don’t have control over the thing that causes us trouble.
Sometimes we don’t have a choice, like when we’ve installed a bad plugin ages ago, and now it’s tightly coupled with our WordPress and database in a way that we can’t just remove it.
So achieving “perfect scores” is causa perduta (not possible), and trying to do it will cost us unreasonable amounts of time and cash.
But if we’re reasonable in our demands for higher performance, we can achieve pretty good results with the help of good plugins and some third-party services.
What’s more important…
We can achieve these results at a lower price, so our ROI from the technical optimization will be even bigger because there are no considerable one-time or yearly expenses.
As we’ve discussed this “tricky matter,” we’re finally ready for the nitty-gritty stuff. The next time I will give you a list with a bunch of strategies, plugins, and services that will make your website faster.
And in the following days, I will elaborate more on each item from that list so you can get all the knowledge you need to apply the stuff we’ve talked about.
Cheers,
Sashe Vuchkov
PS. Yeah, I have one more confession: I’m not coding at all in the last two days. I decided to rest for a while from BuhalBu’s Kit and do other stuff like revamping my Twitter account.
