Now approaching more complex speed optimization. Requires swapping things out entirely, more probing and testing, and waiting to see how the site and server loads respond. Here you learn several ways to accomplish the same thing. While I may have my own speed philosophy, there’s no wrong way as long as clients are happy! I’ll add more lessons to this as I see fit. (About 32 videos, 160 minutes.)
- Ideal webhosting settings
- Finding a good webhost.
- Migrating sites with minimal downtime.
- Using latest php & mysql.
- Cleaning up htaccess.
- Redis/Memcache object-caching and Varnish?
- Do you need Cloudflare or CDN?
- Using Linux cron instead of WP-cron.
- MySQL database optimizations
- Checking database queries and autoloads.
- Cleaning up autoloads.
- Converting DB tables from MyISAM engine to InnoDB.
- CSS/JS asset optimization
- When to minify CSS/JS.
- Why to avoid combining CSS/JS.
- Whether to defer CSS/JS.
- Whether to inline CSS/JS.
- Should you use Critical CSS?
- Localizing external JS.
- Media optimization (images & videos)
- Optimizing images.
- Best image optimization plugins (and settings).
- Optimizing videos.
- Font loading tips
- Load fonts only from theme, set plugin fonts to “inherit”.
- Choose fewer fonts and only necessary subsets.
- Tips for icon fonts (e.g. FontAwesome).
- Lightweight security recommendations
- Choosing the right security strategy.
- Enable network firewalls.
- Enable WAF firewalls.
- Replacing bloated theme and plugins
- Replacing theme (but keeping same design).
- Converting from pagebuilder to Gutenberg.
- Converting to developer-grade plugins.
- Intermediate caching strategies
- Preloading cache for low-traffic and/or large sites.
- Exclude query strings (from caching).
- DNS prefetch.
- Gravatar caching.
- Handling redirects
- Redirect plugins (PHP) vs htaccess (server redirects).
- Cloudflare redirects.