Shave 3 seconds off our WordPress website load time

WordPress website load time example - Simplex Studios

WordPress website load time example – Simplex Studios

WordPress website load time

Shave 3 seconds off your WordPress website load time? Is this a big deal! Well, the short answer is Yes. You have 7 seconds to load your site or your potential business customers might leave because the site is slow. When you add mobile phones into the mix you want to make sure that your site is mobile-friendly for slow connections. Plus who wants to wait 30 seconds for a page to load when the rest of the internet is quite snappy.


WordPress website load time Update:

Firehost no longer exists and now we use WPEngine which results in the same experience as we detail below. Questions about WordPress hosting? See our services here for Managed WordPress hosting or contact us anytime with questions.


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 website load time 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
Google Page Speed
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.

What is your WordPress website load time?

Let us know on our contact form and if you would like help shaving off a few seconds.

John Bunka - Simplex Studios

Have a question about this article? Let us know we would love to help!

Contact Simplex Studios Today!

We provide website design, support, and marketing consulting for all businesses. We use the latest tools to push your businesses forward and help you get in front of your customers.

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