The GREED for SPEED – 3 Sacrifices to Make for Maximum Website Speed

Yes you read that right, The GREED for SPEED. If you want to obtain maximum speed results on your site and be certain that your WordPress is setup for Maximum Website Speed, you may need to make some sacrifices.

Now we know what you might be thinking, “I do not want to sacrifice anything on my site because my site is so perfect as it is. I just want it to be faster.” Well if you are wanting Maximum Website Speed then your site must not be perfect just yet.

Do not worry, let us guide you a bit to get there.

Here is a list of the top 3 things that you can sacrifice for Maximum Website Speed.

#1 – To Plugin Or Not To Plugin

Some of the largest speed sucking processes come from the plugins you have installed and running on your site. Many plugins use resources that are called from another website.

This means that the functions of these plugins have to wait on the speed of the site it is calling on to load a particular part of the plugin functionality.

Now the best method of attack here is to remove any plugin you do not need 10000%. Not 100% but 10000%. Let us put it another way. Would your site be just fine and carry on if the plugin you have installed and active disappeared forever?

Carve out some time to analyze each and every active plugin on your site. Look at each one and ask yourself “can I remove this and will be well in the world?”

You may have many plugins installed and activated because you like the fancy features they provide and feel like your visitors like them even more than you do.

When talking about Maximum Website Speed, stop thinking that way.

Make sure you look at plugins in a way that the reasons they are active on your site is because they are crucial to your overall goal of having a website in the first place. Let us give you an example of this.

You might have an amazing looking slider on your home page or any page that took you hours to setup and looks super cool when you view the page.

Unless this slider is making you more money, attracting more visitors or boosting your credibility, GET RID OF IT!!!!

This sacrifice of plugins will get you closer to Maximum Website Speed.

#2 – Is Content Really King?

It is said often that “Content is King”. Yes this may be true when it comes to Search Engine Optimization and the reading impact of a page on your site but it is surely a SPEED SUCKER in some cases.

The more content you have on a page means that the browser must take more time to render and display it.

So often people try to cram as much content as they can on the home page of their site. Somewhere along the way they heard that the home page is the most viewed page on their site. Now in most cases this is true but not always.

Regardless though it is a bad idea to overload your home page with content in hopes that one will see it all just because the page itself is viewed often.

So what exactly is considered content? Content is not just text. Content includes but is not limited to images, videos and audio. Jut imagine adding an embedded YouTube on your home page.

Well if you remember from the advise above with plugins calling for outside scripts, this is exactly what a YouTube embedded video does. It must call to the resources it needs from YouTube.com and you can not control the speed of this calling.

Best thing to do in this example it to perhaps LazyLoad the embed video to allow it to load only when in sight on the page or to use an image that links off to the video.

Yes the image is still content but will load faster than than the embedded video if optimized properly.

YOU MUST take the same approach with content as you took with your plugins. Look at the content you are displaying on your pages and ask yourself is this is making you more money, attracting more visitors or boosting your credibility, if not GET RID OF IT!!!!

This sacrifice of plugins will get you closer to Maximum Website Speed.

#3 – Your Time and Money

This is the one that most people hate to sacrifice the most. Let us break this up into 2 segments. The first one being money. What we are referring to mostly here is the amount you have invested in you website when it comes to speed. Now let us break that down into 3 things that cost money.

1. Web Hosting Company
2. Speed Enhancing Plugins
3. Content Delivery Network

Now let us explore each one of these.  The hosting you select for your website is like the foundation of a home.  This must be well built and stable or the home it supports will suffer.  Your hosting is SOOO IMPORTANT in the overall speed of your website. 

A good rule of thumb with this before diving into any research is you get what you pay for.  If you are on some type of unlimited website and space hosting plan for $5/year (showing and extreme example here), we can tell you right now that your hosting plan is not very good. 

The best way to find a plan that will give you Maximum Website Speed is to ask others that are using WordPress and happy with their speed and then ask them what hosting company they are using.  There are so many articles out there online about WordPress hosting and you can find alternative review articles for just about any hosting company. 

Best is to ask someone that has personal experience and make sure you ask them how they feel the speed of their site is as well. See the link below for a great place to ask others.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/wordpressspeedup/

Next we have the costs involved in premium caching plugins.  We do not discredit any of the free caching plugins that exist.  We simply believe that a small investment in a premium plugin can yield way higher speed results on your site. 

Below is a link to an amazing article highlighting some of these premium plugins we are referring to.

https://www.designbombs.com/top-wordpress-caching-plugins-compared

Then we have the cost of a CDN or a Content Delivery Network.  A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver pages and other web content to a user, based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the web page and the content delivery server.

This service is effective in speeding the delivery of content of websites with high traffic and websites that have global reach. The closer the CDN server is to the user geographically, the faster the content will be delivered to the user.

CDNs also provide protection from large surges in traffic.  Below is a link to an article with 6 stable and succfessult CDN solutions.

https://www.shoutmeloud.com/best-cdn-wordpress

So in closing the biggest sacrifice you need to make in obtaining Maximum Website Speed is your time.  WordPress Speed Optimization is a process of trying and testing.   There is not a single process to speed up a WordPress site. 

It requires you to try things and then speed test to see if you have either gained or lost speed on your site.  Be patient and most importantly RELENTLESS when it comes to achieving Maximum Website Speed.