WordPress plugin specialist
At the WordPress Cambridge meetup on 10th May 2021 I gave a slightly longer version of the Show & Tell talk I’d prepared for WPChelt in April. “Does my site run slow with this?” reports on attempts to measure WordPress server response, and the plugins used to visualise the results.
These are the slides for the talk.
An update on my long running endeavour to visualise the effect on server performance of changes to my WordPress websites.
Since 2015 I’ve been developing a routine to compare the effect on server response times of the top 12 WordPress plugins. I’m just about ready to publish some results.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tells me I can improve the performance of my website’s loading by taking the opportunity to Properly size images. For the home page on oik-plugins.com it reckons it can save 1.2 seconds on mobile, and 0.16 seconds on desktop, were I to serve images that are appropriately-sized to save cellular data and improve load time.
For the oik-types banner image ( which it sees at 74.5KiB ) it suggests there’s a potential saving of 48.8 KiB. ie. It could be reduced to 25.7 KiB.
We’ve tried a range of qualities using Photoshop and GIMP. According to the chart below, using GIMP, I can achieve the image file size reduction by saving the image with a quality of 55%. But it looks like I could get away with 45%.
On oik-plugins.co.uk, where I’d already reduced the image to 70% quality (30 KiB), it reckons I can still save 22.7 KiB on Mobile. I assume that’s if I serve a file that’s already no wider than the user’s device.
It also suggests, Serve images in next-gen formats.
Loads of spurious requests to my content are using up valuable server time. So how am I supposed to deal with them? [Read more…]
Having spent some time taking performance measurements with PHP 5 I’ve decided to try PHP 7 and run the suite of tests all over again. [Read more…]
A couple of days ago I received a message from my hosting company saying my bandwidth usage was 80%.
Yesterday I received the Error 509 Bandwidth limit exceeded message.
I increased my allowance then tried to track down the cause of the problem.
It turned out that a site had been hotlinking one of my images… stealing bandwidth.
You know who you are. Don’t do it!
Analysing the performance of your website(s) can take an inordinate amount of time. It often involves many distractions. But at the end of the day, you have to come to some conclusions, which may involve taking some actions.
I’m not quite at the conclusion stage yet. But I do have some preliminary results on my comparison of different hosting solutions; Tentahost (original choice) versus WP Engine and SiteGround.
