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Hey all. Im looking to hire someone who is an expert in website speed optimization. Our website is on wordpress but we keep having issues with site speed. Would appreciate some assistance here
Might help to know what aspect of the site is giving issues or what recent changes were made, as well as what you’ve tried so far.
Some tips you could consider:
- Hosting - all the optimisations in the world won’t solve a sub-optimal hosting package. Try upgrading your hosting package (at the very least moving from shared to dedicated) and see if that doesn’t solve the problem.
- A CDN is probably a good point to look into next. Cloudflare helps, Kinsta is pricier. Choose a location closest to your customers.
- Images - compress these as much as possible. 200kb is a decent benchmark. Less, if you can swing it without losing quality.
- Minify CSS and JS scripts - there are plugins that can help with that.
- Delete dormant plugins you don’t need.
When possible, I'd recommend moving to Shopify since it's cheaper/easier to get a higher-performing site.
As mentioned above, better hosting helps, WP Engine or Kinsta, are solid.
But though hosting helps, 95% of performance problems are in the application layer (e.g. plugin/theme with slow queries or some other issue). You'll want to hire an expert to help debug this, but IMO, it'll be cheaper to just switch to Shopify since with WordPress it's never just one thing, but thing after thing you'll find that needs fixing because it's open source (less controlled like Shopify). And every plugin/theme/core update changes code, meaning it's like playing whack-a-mole.
Experience: I've worked with WordPress for 15+ years and ran WordPress at the largest host in the world (a public company). Suffice to say, I'm a WordPress expert...and I still built my wife's store on Shopify 😆
For my personal sites, I still use WordPress to design/build them (local installs), but I deploy them as static sites on Cloudflare Workers so they're lightning fast. But unfortunately, that's much harder to do with dynamic ecommerce sites, which is why Shopify is by far the best game in town. All that said, WordPress does have more flexibility, which some businesses need despite the lower performance.
@Gabriel A. Mays Everything you said makes sense, however, because of the vertical of what we are selling, Shopify doesnt really allow these kind of products!
Ah ok, too bad.