This week we’d like to showcase an impressive example of a fitness website running WordPress that optimized its load time from 12 seconds down to 6 seconds. That’s a 100% improvement!
Take a look at the trend of this site over the last 30 days:
Let’s see at what stage of the page load lifecycle they were able to optimize:
You can see their TTFB (time to first byte) didn’t change, which means this wasn’t a server-side upgrade or a host change. All of this improvement was done on the front-end.
Let’s dig deeper into monitoring the size of the page over time:
Started out at a 5 MB website, and trimmed it down to 1.3 MB – by way of also reducing the number of resources from 76 down to 36.
A quick look at their WebPageTest data before and after showed use of a wordpress optimization plugin, smaller image sizes, and combined CSS files.
This is proof that the thinner your website is, the faster it will load – regardless of what hardware or server you’re running on. Even going from shared to dedicated hosting alone would not have had nearly the effect that optimizing the front-end (requests, CSS, JS, images) has done.
Bravo! Now let’s see if we can get that 6 second load time down even more!