How I Built a Low-Budget WordPress Site that is Fully Loaded in 1.7s

Great progress, you can improve on this to service it under 200ms in a few steps.

• Use varnish or an other reverse proxy to be able to serve cached pages, so you won't hit the super slow WP engine, (Rocket already reduces this), or even PHP.
• Serve cached pages to logged in users, and load the authenticated parts via ajax.
• I pulled out the authentication code into a separate file, to serve these ajax requests super fast, without hitting the WP engine.
• To force WP to generate generic pages to logged in users, varnish can strip the login cookie from the requests.
• To optimize the Engine, Theme and Plugin combination we used https://github.com/jokkedk/webgrind, in production. This adds a significant performance overhead, but after you've implemented the above steps, this is not a problem anymore. We only stored logs on requests that where super slow, like 1.5 seconds and above, in the beginning, to filter out stupid mistakes.

Once we did this, we had no problem serving millions of pages per month, from a small machine. We only went offline a couple of times, because an editor linked the original huge image in the article, instead of the CDN scaled image. This maxed out our upstream.

A couple tips,

• One we got from Mashable in the early days, make sure to put Http Basic Auth on your wp-admin folder. This mitigates virtually any attack due to security exploits.
• Plugins should not call an external API on every request, this will take you down, when their API is down.
• Variable scoping in the WP engine is a mess. To make sure you don't a accidentally override a WP native variable, prefix your plugin vars.

Try to push the assets closer to the edge by using a CDN. I would not consider 1.7s to be as good as you make it sound.

The cover photo is genius.

Also, great job.

Wow, thank you 🙏🏿

Here are my 5 cents about it:

• Please don't make optimizing your website the most essential part of the project - personally when I opened "fatstacksblog" I thought my internet provider is blocking some CDN providers and I don't see half of the CSS/ JS
• When I tried opening "finmods" I had some issues:
  1. Loading "font-awesome" for only 5 icons is a bit wastefully - if we talk about speed
  2. 8 different services were also loaded with the website, one didn't even load - it is too much - and not talking about GDPR stuff

The speed and responsiveness of a website are always hard to manage. They are important but not as important as UX and etc.

Personally, I love websites that "aren't too much", but if it looks like 2000 I'm just going to look at something else.

Generate press is an awesome theme. And I just think a CDN would do wonders Peter.

Also, I have found Optimole for images works better.

One request, if possible would you please share a generatepress pro lisence key with me, that would be great.

I am trying to use it in my niche blog.

Thanks in Advance

The benchmark for a fast-loading website is about 2-3 seconds. After this period, you lose about 40% of visitors.

Yea, this is certainly true, and underrated. People never think to optimize their site and accept slow speeds, but Google ranks sites on speed as well as quality, and if you can do both your going to feel the benfits of the algorithim, as it looks like you have.

Hey Peter. Thanks for taking a moment to share your findings creating a speedy Wordpress setup.

I’d like a key to try the Generate Press theme. Please send a key to [email protected].

We’re just launching CoreMark homes.com on a Wordpress platform and I haven’t done any optimization for performance.

I’ve only had experience w magento sites so any performance optimization in Wordpress are are appreciated. Clicking around in the dark

Can you give me a premium version of GeneratePress? My current website shop.ufaja.com claims to be headless, but the mobile Google score is only 50. I don't know if the premium version of GeneratePress is suitable for e-commerce sites. If it is fast, I want to migrate to wordpress

Congrats. I'm always trying to find ways to make my site faster. If you have a suggestion, my site is https://3das.com

Have you looked into serverless / static web site architecture? I believe there are ways to covert WordPress sites (mostly brochure-based) to static sites.

What do you think of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)?