Fast-loading pages improve the user experience, increasing your pageviews, and helps with your site’s Google ranking. Site speed is particularly important for healthcare providers who need access to patient information immediately. We share the most useful WordPress speed optimization tips to boost WordPress performance and speed up your website.
Transcript:
Adam
Hello and welcome to the HIPAA Vault podcast, where we discuss all things HIPA and WordPress. My name is Adam Zeineddine, and I’m joined by the CTO and founder of HIPAA Vault, Gil Vidals. Hey, Gil.
Gil
Hey, Adam. Hello, everybody.
Adam
So last week we talked about WordPress plugin compatibility. This week we’re going to talk a little bit about optimizing WordPress for performance. Does that sound good, Gil?
Gil
Yeah, performance is very important. I’m looking forward to it, Adam.
Adam
Okay, great. So the question that came up from one of our listeners this week is my WordPress site is running slowly and my host says it isn’t an issue on their end. How can I speed up my site? Just to give a little bit of background on the issue that’s being brought up here. Fast loading pages improve the user experience. They increase page views, and they help with Google’s ranking of your site and SEO. Site speed is particularly important for healthcare providers as well, which is what we focus on. They need to access patient information immediately, so site speed is critical. We are going to share today some of the most useful WordPress speed optimization tips to boost WordPress performance and speed for your website.
Adam
So, Gil, could you talk a little bit about the main reasons for the slowness of website and how we could potentially troubleshoot?
Gil
Sure, sure, Adam. I do want to echo what you said earlier, though. First, that Google really looks at performance much more than they did just a few years ago, where performance was always important but content was king. And these days, performance has really moved up a lot. So if the site isn’t giving the experience that Google expects, then your rankings are going to be limited. In other words, you may never get to page one because you’re bottlenecked by your performance. So that’s a very important reason to be concerned about your performance. So resources is the first place that you want to review. So resources means the computer you’re on, a server somewhere, some hosting provider, and they have different plans. You may have chosen a middle plan, beginning plan, or the Ferrari plan.
Gil
So I think a simple thing to do is just look at the plan you’re on sometimes, and we’re all on a budget, but if you chose the very bottom plan for $5 a month, maybe not the best plan for you, especially if you want performance. So just evaluate the plan you’re on. That’s a very simple thing. You’re a business woman or businessman, and that’s something you can do. You don’t have to be into technology to do that. The other thing you can do is a very simple test. You just load the site yourself and you can go to sites that show you can just google it my site speed. And just put your URL in there and see what the site speed looks like. You can also go to Google’s performance page and then look at it. So just look at it yourself.
Gil
You don’t need to go to your technical guy, your engineer. These are all things you can do. And you look at that and look at your score. And if it’s not fast enough, you’ve got to do something about that. And again, resources, CPU and Ram is one area you can consider. But I do want to finish by saying that in technology, engineers are always having to balance throwing hardware at a problem. So a lot of problems of technology could be solved by just upgrading and spending a lot of money. However the pocketbook suffers. So the problems a lot of times are not related to the hardware, to the resources, they’re related to something else. Like the database is not optimized, so you make up for it by throwing a faster CPU.
Gil
But if you had known how to optimize the database, you could have saved the money from upgrading the plan. And that is a typical situation. So you have to be a detective here. You have to figure out what is the problem and just throwing money at it and upgrading will help, but it’s not going to be the best thing to do because you’re spending a lot of money and maybe it doesn’t fix the problem 100%.
Adam
Okay, so in other words, you can put a jet engine onto a tiny car and it will fly. But how long is it going to fly and how streamlined is it?
Gil
Yeah.
Adam
Okay, what are a few key things that we would look at in our day to day management for websites and WordPress websites?
Gil
Okay, so a good place to start are the plugins. And the plugins are growing in number. By growing, I mean that your average website could use anywhere from a half a dozen to two dozen plugins. It’s not unusual for me to look at a site, a healthcare site that may have upwards of 15 to 20 plugins. And you have to be careful. They’re plugin bloat, where you have overcrowded plugins and they’re kind of competing for resources, these plugins, and sometimes they battle with each other. So here’s a simple test you can do again. I like these tests because you don’t have to go to your DevOps guy, your designer. This is you as a businesswoman businessman. You can do this yourself. You can log into your back end where you see all your plugins and you can disable them one by one.
Gil
It doesn’t hurt anything. I mean, maybe do it off business hours, maybe on an evening, just disable all of them and then time the site, reload it, just load it yourself. Just see what happened. You go, oh my gosh, it’s obviously much faster. You’re not even timing it on your watch. You just can tell, man, this thing is fast. And then you turn on all the plugins again and then load the site and go, oh my gosh, it’s so slow now. Well, you’ve got a problem there. You’ve got a problem with it could be too many plugins or it could be a particular plugin. So let me back up again. So what you can do is disable the plugins. You know it’s fast. So start enabling one plugin, reload the site, still fast, add the other one.
Gil
And then what can happen is you may have one plugin that’s particularly the particular issue, the culprit. And so you’ve identified this plugin is causing most of the slows, not all of it, but most of it. So then you have to pause there. Maybe you enable all of them except for that one. And then you say, hey, this guy right here is causing my site to load a second and a half slower. Right? And remember, with Google Optimization, a second and a half slower may not seem like a lot to you, but to Google, that’s an eternity. So now you’ve got to look at that plugin. Now you could go to your engineer, now you can go to your DevOps or your designer and say, hey look, this plugin is a problem, please look at it. And what are they going to do?
Gil
Well, they may replace it. They may say, hey, there’s another ten plugins. Do the same thing, let’s try a different one.
Adam
Interesting. Yeah, I like that. It’s a very forensic approach. So you start off not knowing very much about where the cause is, and then you go through your checklist. What is it resources? Is it plugins? Or is it something more specific? But most of the time I think it’s probably something to do with the plugins, right?
Gil
Would that be well, I think we should back up. I think I skipped a fundamental step. So we talked about resources, CPU and Ram, we talked about not being on the smallest plan. That’s probably not a good idea, but I forgot an important step. And that is first thing you want to do is check to make sure that the WordPress core is up to date. Now, when I say up to date, it doesn’t have to be on the very cutting edge like the very last one that they released yesterday, but you want to be within the last couple of months, like say they have version 1203, you want to be right in there. And so that’s one of the first things I do because besides security updates, they do some performance enhancements. So make sure you’re not on an old one.
Gil
Some people’s sites that we’ve seen are on a year old WordPress core and it’s going to be slow because they just are behind. Also the plugins. Make sure the plugins aren’t ancient. I can tell you I’ve been on many sites and it’s like, oh, my gosh, this plugin has never been updated. They installed it, forgot about it, and they never, ever updated it. So first thing is make sure things are updated, and that’s good practice. So I think that’s where you want to start. And then, as we said, check your plugins one by one and see what’s happening there.
Adam
And to add to that, there’s potential for malware being installed on the server. If you’re not updating the front end plugins, right, there could be back end hacks that have happened that are slowing.
Gil
The site that has happened. And we have seen that before. So what you’re referring to is if somebody has, let’s say, a year old plugin, and so the bad actors, man, these people are really sly. They’re very smart. They see an old plugin that has a known vulnerability, and they sneak in through that plugin and they are doing all sorts of stuff on the site behind the scenes. And sure, in one case, we saw the bad actor got in through the plugin, and they were sending spam mail from that person’s server that they’re on, and they were sending a lot of spam email. And so that caused the server to slow down. Right. So now you’ve got performance issues because the spam is going out, it’s causing the server to slow down.
Gil
So plugins are the notorious place where the bad actors love to spend time looking at that, because some people will think, hey, my core is up to date. My WordPress. Core is secure. It’s up to date. And then they forget about all these plugins. And those plugins are all like Swiss cheese. They’re all holes into your core. Unless those plugins have been written well and tested and secure, which is like we mentioned last week, Adam, if you remember, pick mature plugins. You want to choose ones that are rated well and they’re mature. They’ve been around for a while, and then you’re probably fine.
Adam
So, Gil, that’s really important information, I think, when it comes to breakfix on a WordPress site. Could we talk a little bit about optimizing the site as well?
Gil
Sure. Optimizing is first. Let’s establish what that really means. So optimization is different than what we’ve been discussing. For example, the plugins that’s not quite breakfix, but it really almost is. Like, if you have a plugin that’s quote unquote, bad and slow and all that, then you replace it with the better one. So you’ve improved your site, but now let’s assume that you’ve reviewed your plan resources. The plan looks good, you reviewed the plugins, all seems good. But yet when you look at your Google speed score, you’re still not in the green, you’re still orange, or you’re a little low. You’re like, well, what do I do now? Well, the next step is called optimization. You want to make a race car go faster. So one of the things that you can do is install a caching plugin.
Gil
A caching plugin will cache certain pages that are reviewed often so that they load faster. And you can also use something called a content network like cloud CDN is a popular cloudflare. There are others, but anyway, that’s something that’s technical. But you can talk to your hosting provider and say, hey, I’d like to use a caching content management. It costs a little bit of money, but it’s not that expensive and that could better. And I think those are probably a good place to start. Now I know we’re talking a little tech talk here, but caching plugins are very common and when you type in caching in the WordPress plugin directory, you’re going to see a whole bunch of them. And I don’t want to give a recommendation here, but frankly, they’re not hard to test.
Gil
You install one and test your speed know, uninstall it. If you don’t like it, test another one until you find one that seems to really help the speed out. So that’s something you can do, Adam, to make the site faster once you’ve adjusted for the other things we talked about. And Adam, I do want to say one last thing. You don’t want to do optimization first. That’s a big mistake. There are many people that think they’re going to just go in and start making the site faster. Optimizing it. That’s equivalent to taking a race car that has a flat tire and the oil’s old and you’re trying to put in a super good engine. It’s like, well, why don’t you fix the stuff that’s broken, get new tires, change the oil, do the basic worthy first.
Gil
Yeah, make it so that it’s robust first and then you optimize. Same thing with the website. No, different fix all the things that you know are misbehaving or negative, like the core that’s outdated, all things we talked about. Then once all of that’s done, you have a thorough review of your site. Now you go to the next level and say, hey, now let’s make this thing sing a good song and go faster. We can paste the link down below of the Google Page speed website where you can go put in your website. It’s easy to do. You just put in your URL, hit a button and then watch. Now, you may not understand all the output, but it gives you a score that you’ll understand all the details below.
Gil
You can send that to your engineer, your DevOps guy, your designer, and then say, hey, look, I need all this stuff fixed here. And then when they say they fixed it, don’t just say oh good and move on. No, run it again. Now you have keep the old score, run it again. And if you don’t get a good score, you got to go back to the engineers, back to the designer and say, hey, this is still not fast enough. So it’s an iterative process. Don’t expect them to fix everything the first time. Go back. You may have to go three or four times back and forth with them until and I say back and forth. They may say, well, this plugin is going to change. Or we want to redesign the banner. The banner is too fat and heavy.
Gil
All these things are going to do. So that process can take a while.
Adam
So that’s all for this episode. I’d like to remind our listeners and viewers if they have any questions related to HIPAA or WordPress, please reach out to us at podcast@hipaavault.com. Be sure to also, like, share and subscribe to the channel. It really helps us. And until next time, thanks for stopping by.