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.

Total Optimizations are designed to optimize every aspect of the site from the WordPress configuration all the way up to the hosting infrastructure. In fact the only thing they are not designed to address are the rare problems that can only be fixed by recoding some part of your site. Whether you want to ditch the hosting you have or just squeeze every last ounce of horsepower out of the hosting you already have, there is simply just no way to squeeze any more speed out of your site and hosting than what you can will with a Total Optimization without rebuilding some part of it. That’s what makes the setup so ideal for e-commerce sites where every second makes for a conversion rate improvement.

If your main concern is on PageSpeed metrics and Core Web Vitals scores instead of “stopwatch speed”, our PageSpeed Optimization is what you would want instead.  Not only does it focus on the more real world “stopwatch speed” but it also focuses on maxing out your PageSpeed grades so that the frontend rendering speeds that Google prefers are as fast as they can be for your site.

With Total Optimizations, you will absolutely 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.

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 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.   For most sites, yes.  This will max out your site’s “stopwatch speeds” through any pure optimization techniques.  For some sites, though, custom code solutions may be needed above and beyond what you can do through pure optimization. We definitely know how to provide custom coded speed solutions for those unique scenarios and can provide a quote for those if the need arises.

On the other hand, if your focus is not on “stopwatch speed” but on Google’s PageSpeed metrics and Core Web Vitals scores, you should consider our PageSpeed Optimization instead.

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.

All of the ones that matter and that are included with a Total 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 Total Optimization.

Total Optimizations can usually be taken care of inside of a 4-5 business day window.

Yes.  Our Total Optimization package does include the option to switch hosting providers if your current hosting provider is part of the problem.

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. Improving the speed of WordPress will often improve the speed of the rest of your site too. If you have this type of setup, an Advanced or Total Optimization is the closest fit for your scenario. Advanced Optimizations focus strictly on WordPress and shouldn’t be expected to have as dramatic of an affect on other parts of the site. Total Optimizations do include server or hosting optimizations so those do tend to more noticeably impact non-WordPress parts of the site. Ultimately if you are having problems with the speed of something that is completely outside of WordPress, though, special attention needs to be given to just that. In special cases we do extend support to those non-WP areas of the site and if you would like to discuss that possibility with us, just contact us so we can discuss directly.