Nearly a year ago, we published information about a new project by Arūnas Liuiza, a WordPress plugin developer, called Measure Jetpack that would benchmark Jetpack’s performance on websites. Outside of a post published in January, there’s been little information on its progress. I reached out to Liuiza and discovered that he’s going to give a…
WordPress caching plugins are notorious for being packed full of confusing options, spammy with upsells, and difficult to uninstall. Users who are looking for a caching solution that simply works and has nothing to configure should check out Simple Cache, a new plugin on WordPress.org that offers a one-click install. The plugin promises lightning fast…
When people ask the question, “Can WordPress scale?” they are often pointed to some of the largest websites running on WordPress, such as Time Magazine, TechCrunch, NBC Sports, Playstation, the New York Observer, and others. But how do you get there and what does it take to deliver WordPress at scale to millions of visitors?…
In 2010 Google patented its methods for using resource load times in ranking search results. The published patent describes how Google factors in page speed when presenting results: A search result for a resource having a short load time relative to resources having longer load times can be promoted in a presentation order, and search…
WP Rocket is celebrating its second year in business. The commercial caching plugin for WordPress launched two years ago in the French market and opened its doors to international customers last May. At that time, WP Rocket was entering unproven territory as the first major caching plugin to launch with a 100% commercial model. Could…
This week HHVM developers shared the results of their first ever open source performance lockdown. HHVM is Facebook’s open source PHP execution engine, originally created to help make its infrastructure more efficient. WordPress managed hosts, including WP Engine, Pagely, and SiteGround, have added HHVM hosting options within the last year to cater to customers who…
Sucuri launched a new free performance tool today. The Global Website Performance Tester allows anyone to enter a URL and get a quick assessment of how fast the website is loading from 13 globally distributed testing stations. Results include three key metrics: connection time, time to first byte (TTFB) and total load time. At the…
Mark Jaquith, one of the lead developers of WordPress, released Cache Buddy on WordPress.org over the weekend. His new plugin works alongside caching solutions, such as WP Super Cache, Batcache, and W3 Total Cache, to enable WordPress to better serve cached pages to logged-in users. Jaquith knows just about everything there is to know about…
This post was contributed by Ryan Hellyer. He is from New Zealand, lives in Germany, and works as a full-time WordPress geek for Forsite Media in the Netherlands. He spends his time building WordPress plugins and getting up to mischief in his adopted home of Berlin. I have an issue with WordPress caching plugins. It’s…
This post was contributed by Tomaž Zaman. He is the founder of a Danish startup called Codeable, a WordPress-only outsourcing service on a mission to help WordPress companies and enthusiasts from all over the world effortlessly scale their businesses. He spends his free time with his wife and four kids. A vast majority of online…
If you’re obsessed with improving your site’s loading time then you’ve probably already looked into caching and server optimizations. Frontend optimization is often further down on the list but can have a tremendous effect on performance. One of the most common frontend optimization techniques is to concatenate and minify your resources, which reduces the number…
The cdnjs service is used by hundreds of thousands of websites to offload static files for performance. It’s an open source community-driven project that hosts a variety of different file types, including JavaScript, CSS, SWF, and images, thanks to help from sponsors UserApp and CloudFlare. WP cdnjs is a new plugin that allows users to…
TechCrunch is one of the largest sites publishing with WordPress and its developers are always looking to improve performance to maximize engagement and ad revenue. This week the team open sourced its WP Async Task Library, which was created to offload time-consuming tasks into background tasks. Alex Khadiwala and Nico Vincent introduced the library at…
Embedded content with external requests can really slow a site down. This is especially true when the requests cannot be cached and the content would be impossible to host on your own domain, i.e. third party videos from Youtube and Vimeo. Calling external resources in these instances is unavoidable, but it doesn’t have to drag…
Managed WordPress hosting company Pagely, will be hosting a BuddyPress hangout tomorrow at 11AM Pacific, 2PM Eastern. Pagely’s CTO Josh Eichorn will be interviewing BuddyPress lead developer Boone Gorges. The pair will discuss the differences between BuddyPress 1.9 and 2.0 as well as details surrounding the major performance improvements. Pagely CEO Joshua Strebel will moderate…