A slow site is a bad first impression for potential customers, do you want them to see your business as sluggish and slow or fast and responsive? Speed is also taken into account by Google when deciding how to rank your site. If you have an ecommerce/woocommerce site, downtime due to slow performance can lead directly to lost revenue.
Sometimes a few lines of custom CSS can bring your google Pagespeed score up by 25 points by avoiding layout reflows. I also use a plugin to avoid other common layout reflows, bringing your speed score up.
I enable caching at multiple levels, the browser, the webserver, within PHP processing and with redis for object caching.
I convert all images on your site to next generation formats which will load in a fraction of the time without compromising on quality. If required I also apply asset minification to CSS/JavaScript
I set up lazy loading for images and most javascript and if necessary generate a custom minimum set of CSS which allows the page to render as quickly as possible.
By enabling features such as http2 your website can load far more quickly, moving to high speed Australian VPS hosting ensures that your website loads quickly even if you have many plugins such as woocommerce and that it won’t go down if you get a flood of customers.
In some cases I’ll enable a CDN, but honestly if you have quality hosting already, a CDN may not be necessary. I’ve found the fastly CDN to be the best option for performance.
Strength Potential is an Australian not for profit who’s mission is to help young men and women live up to their potential. Their website looks straightforward but it was being slowed down by multiple plugins and complex elements. It seemed ok on desktop but was taking about 8 seconds on mobile giving a bad impression to potential users who would sometimes change their mind and go somewhere else.
After moving the site onto fast Australian VPS hosting and optimising their fonts, css and page loading, it loads on a mobile device in under 2s and a loads on a normal laptop in well under a second.
About me
