Welcome back to the Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops! In this episode, building on previous episodes in season two that also focus on eCommerce, we will be exploring the effect and importance of performance for your online store. This month we’ve invited Patrick Garman, CEO of Mindsize, to discuss speed optimizations for your site!
Let’s dive in:
In This Episode: With Site Performance, You Need Simplicity.
It’s easy for people to say you can boost performance with better hosting, or using a caching program — and sure, that’s true to a certain extent. But according to Patrick Garman, these changes won’t make the biggest impact… and he should know: He’s in the business of building and optimizing online stores! Instead, you should focus on simplicity:
You probably only need a third of […] what it takes to actually do what you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to sell online, you need a product, an add to cart button, a cart, and checkout.
Key Takeaways
- Simplicity is the name of the game. You probably only need ⅓ of the features you want.
- You don’t need complex faceting and search. Customers aren’t going to use those.
- Hosting doesn’t matter most of the time when it comes to performance. Yes – shared hosting is less secure, but throwing hardware at a performance problem is a band-aid, not a solution. Good hosting still can’t account for slow internet connections, and bloated sites will always load slowly there.
- Stop relying on a caching plugin. It doesn’t make your site faster – it makes it look faster. You can’t just cache everything, especially on an ecommerce site.
- Check performance with Query Monitor. It’s a great, free plugin for WordPress. Look for colors. Red is bad, green is good! Look for high numbers and make them lower.
- Database hits are usually the culprit when it comes to ecommerce performance. Optimize your database calls to make accessing data faster (or hire an expert to do it for you).
- Post Meta is another thing that’s really detrimental to WordPress sites — there are a lot of database hits and complex queries associated with them.
- As you evaluate features, try to cut away as much as possible. Ask yourself:
- How does this feature/ plugin/ add-on make me money?
- Are website visitors actually using this feature/ plugin/ add-on?
The Official Plesk Podcast: Next Level Ops, Featuring
Joe Casabona
Joe is a college-accredited course developer and podcast consultant. You can find him at Casabona.org, helping creators create more easily.
Patrick Garman
Patrick is the CEO of Mindsize, an agency that focuses on making great ecommerce websites.
Did you know we’re also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts? In fact, you can find us pretty much anywhere you get your daily dose of podcasts. As always, remember to update your daily podcast playlist with Next Level Ops. And stay on the lookout for our next episode!
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