So how do you speed up your site? Short answer: Awesome Hardware + Caching. Long Answer see below.
Our WordPress website (simplexstudios.com) used to average between 6-9 seconds of load time. On busier days we were looking at up to 12 secs of load time which had to be addressed, immediately.
With a recent move to Firehost and the addition of MaxCDN we were able to cut our load time in half! We opted for a basic setup with Firehost itself and we are only using very basic caching within our WordPress setup.
Simplex Studios WordPress Stats:
- 28 Plugins installed
- Homepage size 1.1MB
- WordPress 3.3.1
- W3 Total Cache Plugin
Hardware & Tools Used:
- Apache/MySQL
- PHP5
- MaxCDN
- Firehost
- W3 Total Cache
Location testing: A great tool to check your times is http://tools.pingdom.com/ See our full Pingdom test here
- Dallas, Texas – Load time 1.89 secs (World Record!)
- Amsterdam, Netherlands – 3.29 secs
- New York, New York – 2.24 secs
Google Pagespeed Stats
Our next steps will be to reduce our images and optimize them more, build a responsive theme and see if its possible to but more time off our load.
