Do I change form my wordpress website and build a new faster site from scratch?
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The answer to your question depends on what you want to build in the future and what you have already done now to speed things up.
Speed:
You may want to see if there are ways to even still reduce (compress) some of the usual suspects:
1. Compress your images better, size them properly, see what file formats can give you just as good quality for less file size.
2. Minify your HTML, CSS, javascript...(Wordpress plugins for this are available)
3. Move your linked javascript code that can be moved to the bottom of your html page
4. See if you are calling content from other domains or using full path calls in your code to different images as includes, if so make relative calls for what you can.
5. Check your server speed, the web host you are using may have a slow server response time, see if you can move your Wordpress site to a faster server.
6. Try CDN's for storing your images.
7. The Google Page Speed test tool gives you what you need to do to help increase the pages speed, in the results it will give you the information on your server response time and how Fat your Images are... Make sure you have someone other than your developer look at these results to see if there are ways to cut the Fat and speed things up. If your UI is so image heavy that it is degrading your user experience, then you may want to modify that, things that look pretty are great but they can look pretty and work as well.If you can first look at those issues and fix them, that will increase your speed. Then move to step 2 Caching.
Caching for Speed:
Once you've taken care of the usual issues above, try a caching plug to cache your Wordpress site, that way when new users are hitting your site in their browser they will get a cached (already rendered) version of the Wordpress site. This will load a lot faster! NOTE: Every time you make an update to your Wordpress site you will need to reload the CACHE. This is simple and done in the interface of the plug in. Take a look at the different Wordpress site cache plug ins and see which one will do what you need based on the other parts of your site.If you guys have already done all of this and it is still too slow and you can't make any changes, you may have other issues to take care of that deal more with Usability and Design and that trade off with performance. A/B testing different landing pages for conversion can help you trim down your sites UI to get it to a place where customers can complete their transactions and it still looks amazing. You should definitely do this before you start building a full e-commerce solution.
Starting all over and adding E-commerce from scratch.
I will preface this by saying I was a code snob for many years. I wanted everything from scratch and even my IDE for writing code was bare bones. I've built systems alone and worked on huge teams that have built enterprise level e-commerce solutions. And now I would say this: If you can get 50% of the functionality you want out of using something like a bigcommerce or shopify or something similar, use it and focus on your core competency SELLING, PROMOTING, MARKETING your products! Spend the money you would developing an e-commerce platform on marketing the products you are trying to sell.When you do things from scratch you have to be prepared to maintain them and grow them and make sure that it all still works together as it grows. This is a big undertaking especially if building e-commerce sites and new web features is not what you are an expert at. As a developer I loved to build new things and new features, I also hated to keep them up and do maintenance, and documentation... If you have a TEAM of developers then it is a little easier but still a big chore if building e-commerce platforms is not what you do. The sheer size of the code gets overwhelming at a certain point. That said using your own developers and building from scratch gives you the freedom to build anything you want. That freedom does have a price tag and a time investment.
Remember if you can use something like big commerce for your web store, integrate Wordpress for your blogging, and then your developers can build add on features that link into your store if you feel the platforms do not have the exact functionality you want. Also remember that switching UIs and doing testing to see what converts may be easier if you just have to click a few buttons to reroute traffic as opposed to thousands of lines of code to do the same thing.
PM me if you want any more advice, hope it helps and Happy Holiday!
Erick
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If you are ranking well, I would work on your web designer to roll up their sleeves and help you get a higher score. In many cases, it's some minor CSS tweaks for mobile that are needed (ie: spacing out elements), as well as minifying your CSS. If you are using Wordpress, try the W3TC plugin, which will walk you through most of this.
At the end of the day, your web designer needs to get off his hiney and help. (sorry, things like that just tick me off!).
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Go with Erick's recommendation. It sounds like you just need to get the bloat cleaned up by minifying and compressing. Also check how many plugins you have actively running. The more plugins you have running, the slower it will be because you site will need to load javascript from all those files before the page can completely load - That eats away at speed.
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I can achieve a score of 95 out of 100 using WordPress. I do not see why it would be different for you. You have to look into your hosting
- Who are you hosting with?
Use some high quality web hosting to make certain that your server is not the issue I have had a lot of luck and seeing a lot of speed come from using Panthion.io
I strongly recommend Panthion.io for anyone using WordPress for Drupal. They are a managed WordPress hosting company as well as a manage Drupal host.
Presslabs.com optimizes your site for you prior to going live.
The unique thing about these hosting companies as there are container-based and both extremely fast. Giving an average user load time of under one second according to a very unbiased and a respected report. On here
WPengine.com ( you can get 4 months for free using moz.com/perks )
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Set up newrelic.com or Copper egg on your server you will know what is slowing you down Instantly. (Panthion.io comes with the ability to run your site as a staging server for free on their server and use built-in new relic)
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use this it is an excellent resource for how to make your site much faster your site on WordPress for using whatever you want. ( personally I would not change to a static pure HTML site because it is extremely difficult to update and Google cares too much about fresh content) if I did update from WordPress I would use Ruby rails this is my opinion others may have very different opinions.
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Things like CDN's & DNS can make a world of difference you must find out what is slowing down your site. I personally put every site I own on DynECT DNS however if you do not want to spend that type of money you can get extremely fast reliable DNS on DNS made easy for just $29 a year.
See:
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https://dyn.com ( DynECT lite starts at $5 a month)
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https://ns1.com ( starts or free and begins at $100 a month)
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https://dnsmadeeasy.com ( starts at $29 a year)
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Verizon edge cast route DNS ( extremely fast you can purchase $40 a month at speedyrails.com )
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CloudFlare DNS ( free however does not have the best uptime I would recommend them over your standard DNS any day)
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http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/4020-10-Free-Website-Speed-Tests-
CDN Networks are another method of making your site very fast. If implemented correctly.
See: http://www.cdnplanet.com/cdns/
If you feel comfortable sharing your URL I can tell you exactly what is wrong with your site.
All the best,
Tom
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Thomas you used to also like Websynthesis for Genesis sites?
I am considering moving from them and curious about your opinion?
Thanks!
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Hi Chris,
Sorry about the long-delayed man. I think there are much better companies than Web Synthesis for hosting Genesis framework for regular WordPress. There "fragment caching" is available on hosting companies like Kinsta by default without the W3TC Plug-in.
I would currently recommend WordPress hosting companies in this order
- Pantheon.io ( container-based rocketship incredible capabilities must understand WordPress their support will make changes to your site if you purchase the $400 plan two hands-on help sessions or regular support if you buy the $2500 plan or up) with that said they're still my favorite.
- PressLabs.com ( container-based rocketship some of the best support available)
- Pagely.com ( the two and three are tied Pagely is amazing)
- Kinsta.com ( very fast but lacks some significant features and support is very fast)
- WPengine.com ( a little bit of everything moderate price)
- GetFlywheel.com (Great host if you want inexpensive and high-quality support)
- WebSynthesis.com ( Is not very well maintained anymore. Unfortunately, everything is focused on New Rainmaker)
take a look at the most unbiased review I have found on managed WordPress hosting
http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2015/07/28/wordpress-hosting-performance-benchmarks-2015/
I hope this helps,
Tom
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Hi Vinny,
Thank you for the kind words. I am extremely happy I was able to be of help.
For WordPress hosting take a look at this review it's the most unbiased one I can find and pretty much tells it as it is.
http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2015/07/28/wordpress-hosting-performance-benchmarks-2015/
All the best,
Tom
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Thanks Thomas. Great information as usual!
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