When it comes to site speed, a better question might be “when don’t I need this?” Study after study has shown that every major online sales and marketing metric is impacted directly by site speed. Site stability, uptime, and speed all impact conversion rates, abandonment rates, ad click throughs, and overall customer satisfaction. The general expectation most visitors have is that your site will load in 2 seconds or less. Consequently, most studies suggest that for sites that take over 2 seconds to load, you can expect a 4-7% conversion or ad revenue loss for every second it takes to load your site. And that’s just for desktop/laptop users. If the majority of your site traffic comes from mobile devices, those numbers go up from there. And that is exactly why Google now considers both page load speed and a site’s appropriateness for mobile devices when ranking your site against other search results.

If you’re trying to squeeze every last ounce of speed out of your WordPress install without having to change your hosting infrastructure or recode your site’s themes and plugins, an Advanced Optimization will do just that. If you suspect that your hosting infrastructure is also part of the problem, a Total Optimization is more tailored to that purpose – whether you’re looking to switch your hosting or just optimize the dedicated hosting setup you have now.

With Advanced Optimizations, you will definitely notice an immediate improvement in load times and stability once one is complete. Since they are designed to squeeze every last ounce of speed out of your existing WordPress and hosting setup, they touch on every major part of the site that impacts its speed. And because of that, they’re ideal for every type of WordPress site – which is exactly why they are our most popular optimization package.

Ultimately though, WordPress can only move as fast as the hosting infrastructure it is on. So whether your hosting setup is a 4 lane highway or an 8 lane highway, if only 2 lanes are open, your visitors will still be waiting in traffic for the site to load. If you suspect that your hosting infrastructure is also part of the problem or you have a dedicated hosting environment that you can control, our Total Optimization packages are designed to address that problem as well.

Advanced Optimizations are our most popular package because they’re designed to squeeze every last ounce of speed out of your site without having to recode it or change your hosting infrastructure. If you have the budget and desire to do that, but are married to your existing hosting infrastructure then it’s the right fit for your situation – regardless of whether your site is just a small business site, blog, or something more complex like an e-commerce site.

Total Optimizations are designed to eliminate every roadblock your site has to improving its site speed short of rebuilding some portion of your site. If you have a dedicated server/VPS or are willing to switch to a more speed optimized web host to solve the problem, then a Total Optimization is designed to handle just that and is the ideal choice for very high traffic or very complex websites.

PageSpeed Optimizations are specifically tailored to appease Google’s PageSpeed scoring mechanisms and optimize your site’s Core Web Vitals metrics.  When your focus is either on maxing out your site’s speed or optimizing your speed for search engine rank or Adwords scores, the PageSpeed Optimization is what you want.

As a benchmark, we always aim to achieve a 3-4s minimum site load time even with our most basic optimizations, but 3rd party factors like poor quality hosting can definitely impact that. Ultimately, our optimizations are designed to help your site tap into the resources that it has. So if the hosting offers it little in the way of resources, the impact of that poor hosting will be more noticeable. As an example, it is not out of the ordinary for a boosted site to take 4 seconds to load on a poor quality host and only 1 second to load on a higher quality host, while a non-boosted site might run equally slow on both hosts. That’s why ultimately if you’re looking to get the most speed out of your site, you will have to keep an open mind with your hosting and other 3rd party providers. And, of course, if you’re trying to max out your site’s speed and you have your own dedicated server or are willing to change your hosting infrastructure, then you may want to consider a Total Optimization which is more tailored for that purpose or a PageSpeed Optimization which is designed to max out the frontend speed of your site.

That depends. Advanced Optimizations are designed to make your site as fast as it can be WITHOUT changing your hosting infrastructure or recoding parts of your site. So if you’re married to your current hosting infrastructure and it is not providing adequate horsepower to your WordPress site, then yes this package would offer the best you are going to get. But if you’re trying to squeeze every ounce of speed out of your site and you are open to changing whatever parts of your infrastructure may need to change, our Total Optimization package is better designed to do just that.  If your focus is on Google’s PageSpeed metrics or on improving your Core Web Vitals, then a PageSpeed Optimization is the appropriate fit since we not only achieve that with that level, we guarantee it.

Unfortunately, no. Popular speed testing reports are known for requesting impossible changes or changes to software or websites that you do not control. One ironic example is that Google PageSpeed has been known to occasionally request changes to code in Google’s own services (like Google Analytics). Obviously you can’t change something that you can’t control. Ultimately, what matters is the actual speed of the site. If your site receives an F grade on some particular speed score, but it loads in 1 second (considered better than perfect) it doesn’t particularly matter that you have an F grade for that score. The people visiting your site won’t ever see those grades anyway. They are only interested in being able to use your site and get to it quickly.

Of course, if you’re trying to perfect your site’s A-F grades, you should consider our PageSpeed Optimization instead.  While it is still not possible to achieve any impossible speed test suggestion, with that optimization tier, what we can do is max out your scores to the degree that it is possible without breaking your site or amputating key features to do so.

All of the ones that matter and that are included with an Advanced Optimization, yes.  Speed tests typically report everything that it sees as “potentially” causing a speed problem.  For example, most sites will report that there are too many DOM nodes in the site’s content.  In non-technical jargon, for most sites, this means that the speed test feels your site will be faster if you delete some of its content.  While that’s technically true, it’s ludicrous to actually do that.  In that situation, you would be pitting content against speed in an SEO ranking death match and, simply put, there’s a reason that they say that “content is king”.

Unlike other vendors that might blindly follow every suggestion that a speed test makes about how to further improve your speed, we take a more wholistic look at the site by considering its business impact, marketing impact, and long term cost.  If one of the test’s suggestions is only mildly affecting the score or contradicts an even more important consideration like having lots of relevant content, then we’ll intentionally ignore that suggestion in favor of what supports the overall goal of the site.  In practice, that just means that we’re ignoring the theoretical in favor of the realistic.  So while you might “theoretically” have better results by following some of the speed tests’s more eccentric suggestions, realistically, you’d be knee-capping your site in the process.  So we most definitely do NOT follow suggestions like that from any speed test – nor would you want us to.

Yes. E-commerce sites like WooCommerce, forums, blogs w/ comments, high traffic sites, custom sites, and other more interactive sites all require more processing power in order to function as expected. As an example, a very common complaint amongst e-commerce site owners is that the checkout page is slow. Given that the site has to process a credit card, complete an order, calculate shipping/taxes, and more – often for several customers at one time – the checkout page is already geared to be slower than other pages. But when you take a site that is configured with stock WordPress settings and put the weight of e-commerce behind it, you typically find that the checkout page is also being artificially slowed by all kinds of misconfigurations – often the sort that you will never see in a speed report from major vendors like GT Metrix or Pingdom. And if you’re using a dedicated server, VPS server, or low quality hosting on top of that, you can couple that slowdown with either stock server settings (and their slowdowns) or with just insufficient horsepower for the site to operate smoothly. Ultimately when your checkout page is slow, you can more readily feel the tie between speed and conversion than you can with any other type of site. That’s why Advanced, Total, and PageSpeed Optimizations are specifically designed to handle those sorts of problems.

Yes, absolutely. But sites with this type of architecture really only tend to gain from the optimizations that we provide as part of our Total Optimization package.

We provide before and after speed tests from a publicly available and independent 3rd party speed testing service.  That includes cached and uncached page loads along with a rough comparison against mobile specific speeds.  We also include a full breakdown on the changes that we made to your site and any suggestions that would further improve your site’s speed above what’s included in the Advanced Optimization.

Advanced Optimizations can usually be taken care of inside of a 2-3 business day window.

Yes. Our Total Optimization package includes the option to switch hosting providers if your current hosting provider is part of the problem. As an alternative, we do also offer standalone hosting migration as a completely managed service including site migration and DNS change management.

Yes.  Advanced, Total, and PageSpeed Optimization packages do include image optimization as part of the service.

Yes. Advanced, Total, and PageSpeed Optimization packages do include database optimization as part of the service.

Yes we do.  But bear in mind that the more custom a site is, the more custom its optimizations often must be as well.

No, but we do often have to do that for more complex or custom sites.  If your site has some sort of artificial speed limit imposed by the way that the theme or a plugin is coded, we can provide you with a quote to address that separately from the main optimizations that we do for you upon your request.

Yes.  Our speed optimizations work the same across all platforms.  Bear in mind that some speed testing sites will recommend that you make your site responsive as part of a speed optimization and while that is definitely a great idea, it’s something that is a larger undertaking than just speeding up your site.  That said, if you do need help making your site responsive, we do offer assistance with that as a standalone service and can provide you with a quote specific to your site upon request.

None that are permanent.  Finding the right fit for the optimizations that are appropriate for your site may take a little bit of trial and error, but they are relatively quick and painless to address and once they have been addressed are permanently fixed.

While it’s always a good idea to plan for down time when making more substantial changes to your site like this, in practice very few sites ever incur down time with the type of changes that we make to them.

Yes.  While our off-the-shelf optimizations are all intended to optimize WordPress sites, we do often work on sites that are blended with other technology.  In those situations, you typically need one of our regular optimizations for the WordPress part of the site and a custom effort for the non-WordPress part of the site (unless the speed problem is limited to just the WP site, of course).