Making a blank WordPress install fast is easy. Making a nine-year-old site with a marketing stack, a booking system and 200,000 posts fast is the actual job.
How an engagement runs
Two to four weeks, fixed price. We measure first, on your real site with your real traffic, using field data rather than a lab score. Then we tell you where the time is actually going, which is very often somewhere nobody expected.
What we look at
- Server response time, which is usually the biggest single number and the one most often ignored
- Database queries per page, and the plugin that is running 340 of them on every request
- Object caching and page caching, configured for a site that has logged-in users rather than one that does not
- Images, fonts and the render path, in that order of usual impact
- Third-party scripts, and an honest conversation about which of them are worth what they cost you
What we will tell you
Sometimes the honest answer is that the site is as fast as it can be on the hosting it is on, and the money is better spent moving it. We have said that to clients who came to us with a budget for optimisation work, and lost the work by saying it. It remains the right thing to say.
What “faster” turns out to mean
A retailer we worked with went from 4.1 seconds to 1.3 on their category pages and saw their bounce rate on mobile drop by about a fifth. We are careful about attributing revenue to speed work, because a lot of things change at once and honest measurement is harder than the marketing suggests.
What it costs
$4,500 to $12,000 depending on the size of the site and how much of what we find you want us to fix rather than hand to your own team.