[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 401, entitled, get it optimized with Remkus de Vries, episode 2, your site is running, now what? It was published on Thursday, the 5th of December 2024.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we joined, Remkus, a few bits of housekeeping. The first thing to say is that if you are still hoping, scrambling around, trying to get some black Friday deals, well, there are still some on our Black Friday page. WP Builds.com forward slash black. Some of them have gone, many of them certainly have. But it's well worth checking out. You never know. You might be able to find some of the deals which are hanging on for a little bit longer. If it's on the page, the deal should still be live. WP Builds.com forward slash black.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, it's the second in the new series that have started with Remkus de Vries.
Remkus is a speed and optimization expert in the WordPress space. Our first episode covered the bare bones of thinking about setting up a WordPress website. So it was the bits and pieces that you do, really before you'd even installed WordPress.
And then today we move on to the bits and pieces that you might do once you have got WordPress installed. Top advice from a top expert, and we talk about all sorts of different subjects, including Remkus' brand new plugin, his tool, which is going to help you do a lot of this stuff called Scanfully.
But we step outside of the bounds of that plugin as well, and we talk all about caching strategies. Remkus' approach to optimization. The technical challenges and solutions for those challenges, as well as a whole host of other things.
It's a fairly technical episode, but very enjoyable, nonetheless. I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast once again by Remkus de Vries. Hello Remkus.
[00:04:10] Remkus de Vries: hello.
[00:04:11] Nathan Wrigley: If only you could see what I can see. Remkus has the most. Beautiful setup, and Remkus has actually been, he's been fairly influential.
I have decided to make my setup a little bit like his, because not only do I want to copy his newsletter every week, but I also want to copy his room. Dear, listener, if you watch this week in WordPress, very soon, myself will look exactly the same as Remkus'.
[00:04:40] Remkus de Vries: I welcome it.
[00:04:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. thank you. It's so nice. It's so nice. Sorry though most people are listening to this on audio. In fact, that's the only way you can consume this. But it is really nice, I promise you. Where are you at the minute, Remkus?
[00:04:52] Remkus de Vries: Back home in, my lovely, studio in, Freelon, the Netherlands.
[00:04:59] Nathan Wrigley: If you've, if you've been in WordPress for any length of time, you'll know Remkus. He's been there, done that basically. we did a show of, like a few months ago. This was the first part of this series. We're calling this kind of like the, the optimization show if you like. There is a, different name, but that's the thrust of what we're doing.
Episode one will be linked in the show notes, so go and listen to that 'cause it. It provides the bedrock for what we're talking about today, but, rem for those people that don't know you, just give us a quick potted bio.
[00:05:31] Remkus de Vries: It's a, it's an ever changing bio, but the current version is, co-founder of scan workers performance specialist, and I run a. WordPress related newsletter, weekly newsletter, on WordPress news and WordPress tools, as well as a podcast about the people behind our wonderful community
[00:05:50] Nathan Wrigley: It is really helpful that you put your newsletter out on a Friday because then it gives me Saturday and Sunday to steal everything.
[00:05:58] Remkus de Vries: I know,
[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: that you've put in there Ready for Monday, my show. It's really helpful. Thank you. so the endeavor today is to talk through a little bit of extension of what we did last time, but, let's just concentrate on your scan fully thing first.
And at the risk of this sounding a bit like an advert, just tell us what it does, and then we'll talk roadmap quickly as well.
[00:06:21] Remkus de Vries: so Scan is a, performance and site health monitoring tool for WordPress. That is the TLDR, meaning we have a bunch of features that scan your site for its health that we can measure from the outside as well as the inside. We have an activity log. we have SSL monitoring, we have uptime, we have performance scanning.
There's a whole bunch of stuff we're, going on, and there's even a lot more to be added.
[00:06:51] Nathan Wrigley: Tell us about the roadmap then. 'cause you, we just had a chat, when before we hit recording. It was quite nice. There's quite a few nice features coming. I.
[00:06:59] Remkus de Vries: So the, I think it's most, it's probably the best just to focus on the most immediate, roadmap. Meaning, the next, let's call it six months. we are going to extend everything we currently have, meaning. For instance, if you have an uptime monitoring or performance monitoring tool somewhere else, they'll just ping your front page and that, that'll be it.
we're going to add priority pages to that, meaning we're not just going to scan your front page, but your important landing pages, your checkout, your well checkout is hard. But, product pages and stuff like that. so we're, expanding on that. and we're very much expanding, all the stuff we're adding to our, activity log. And lastly, we'll introduce, an entirely new feature, which is content health. and that is, That's essentially a feature that is as wide and as broad as you can possibly think of it. So anything and everything having to do with your content being healthy, meaning broken links will make a distinction between in internal, external, embeds, image images, not loading CSS files being called for, but not actually there, that type of stuff.
[00:08:20] Nathan Wrigley: Because.
[00:08:21] Remkus de Vries: But the goal with, for you to find out what it is you need to do to make your site healthy again and thus perform.
[00:08:28] Nathan Wrigley: So matches perfectly what we're talking about today. just a quick one, because it's a fairly new product. I know it's been out there for months now, but because it's fairly new, are you still in that kind of phase where you're taking, product roadmap ideas from your customer base?
Not that journey never ends, but it always feels if you get in early with something, you've got much more of a, voice in the way it goes.
[00:08:50] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, so most of the features that we have defined on our, immediate roadmap are features that we have defined ourselves already. Meaning, if we look at Site Health, if we look at performance monitoring, we know the things we would like to see. And we being, Barry and I, my co-founder and I, in, our experience, I've been doing WebPress for 20 years, and, Barry about as long as well.
So we've, done a lot of agency type of stuff, the clients, the, types of things they would want to do, want to check, wanna know all of these things. And we've brought that into one tool. but in, in terms of features, enrichment, we are very much listening to whatever clients have as feedback.
Yes.
[00:09:37] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, scan fully, I'll put a link in the show notes, but just drop the URL for everybody.
[00:09:43] Remkus de Vries: scan.com.
[00:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: Nice and simple. Nice. Pretty good that you've got that name. Actually, I would've fully predicted that wouldn't have been available. I dunno if you had to reach into your pockets for that, or if it
[00:09:53] Remkus de Vries: we did. We
[00:09:54] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see.
Okay. yeah, Oh, damn.
[00:09:58] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, it's, it, we've, we've brainstormed so many different names, and this is one we ended up using. but everything you look at is taken already. It's just, there's no on
[00:10:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's a hot
[00:10:11] Remkus de Vries: So it's more hopefully this one is doable and this one was doable,
[00:10:16] Nathan Wrigley: So go check it out, scan fully.com, pause the podcast, go and have a look and then come back. last time, like I said, the first installment, if you like, of this mini show, mini series, whatever you wanna call it, within WP Builds is all about site optimization and speed. And in the first episode, MKU laid the groundworks for basically what you need.
To, do as the first task before you get your website up and running. Do you just wanna paraphrase honestly, literally in a sentence or a handful of words? What, did you say in that episode? Just so that we can catch up.
[00:10:49] Remkus de Vries: So most people, lemme rephrase. So most people think of optimization as something they, just have to do at some point because, stuff needs to be faster. the, problem there is that you're gen generally doing it at the end of the whole project. and, I've mostly focused on getting the mindset right in terms of where do you actually put the focus of performance?
And that should be the performance check, should be done before you even build. So when you look at your hosting, when you look at your, the stuff that you use, whether that's, a full site editing theme or, a page builder all come with a cost, right? So instead of just doing what you've always done, because that is your routine, I invite you to regularly check what you're doing, what the impact of that is, and if there are better, more performant, more versatile solutions out there.
And I promise you there are.
[00:11:50] Nathan Wrigley: nice. Okay, so there's the bedrock. once you've figured out your hosting and the basics of your WordPress website, now we're talking about extending it, which I think most people will imagine. We're gonna talk just about plugins, but I think you've got a little bit more under your, on,
[00:12:05] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. So extending means, from your base WebPress site, you start, filling out the functionality your client needs, whether, either by, a custom code or. an existing plugin and, the same, presumption that is made with just, doing your optimizations at the end is, also being used in extending your site.
So there's not a lot of people who actually look at your site build, start building it, have the base functionality in there, and then go okay, but the client needs landing pages and it needs to have forms and all this and that. but then actually measures that. So there's different ways of doing landing pages.
There's different ways of using different types of forms and all have their benefits, but all have their costs. And if you're not measuring what you're actually doing or the choices that you made, I. and looking at the impact of what they have, then you are, you're doing the same thing again, in choosing the incorrect hosting or choosing, a, page builder, for instance, that just slows your stuff down and just complicates.
Locks in, does all the things in a unnatural way to WordPress. those can still be conscious decisions, but in general, they come with a performance cost. and that's something you need to look at. If you're building a site for, I don't know, 500 visits a month doesn't really matter, right? 3000 doesn't really matter that much, but as soon as performance becomes a thing, if you want it to be snappy and fast and all of these things, then you need to start looking at your total expenditure of resources.
Meaning, the time the site loads cached and uncashed. 'cause most people are just testing cached. you need to test uncashed, and you need to see the impact of every single plugin, your ad to your site build. Now this is, generally something that's just being skipped. You start adding your plugins that you have always used, and then at the end, the full functionality is there. But you haven't actually looked at the choice you've made for, let's just say there you wanted to add settings and, custom fields and stuff like that. Now you can use pods, you can use, a CF, two, and I'm sure there's a dozen more, solutions out there. but every single one of those solutions has its benefits, its ways of working, which you may prefer or not, but it also has a performance cost.
my favorite tool, for that particular functionality, for instance, is a CF what I don't do as I don't leave the settings in the database, you can configure it in the database, right? You configure all the extra fields that you need and make that whole perfectly, through the ui. Once you're done, you should export the code, put it in your site, plugin a, a dedicated plugin for your site, and then remove whatever's in the database because if you can load it in the, the plugin, it is always going to be more performant than having everything stored in database.
It just makes sense to, if I don't have to hit the database, that is a win. but that's one of those things where people just go in automatic and just configure everything and then yep, move it along. Next, next task. but this is something that you should want to double check, which reminds me, one of the, one of the things we're adding to scan fully, in Q1 as well is, profiling.
So you'll get to profile your performance of your site, meaning you can say. you can determine how much, how many milliseconds, nanoseconds, or even, it takes for a particular plugin to load. So you can see what the impact of that particular plugin, but also, hey, what if I turn on this setting inside the plugin?
Will I see a difference in load time? And oftentimes you'll see a difference. so that type of profiling is something you need to add to your stack. In terms of determining, helping you determine what is the most perform version of my setup here?
[00:16:23] Nathan Wrigley: I guess what we're talking about here is, you, we, are in the sort of nerdy end of things, but if you, as you said, if you've got a mom and pop store, which is getting three hits a day, this is. irrelevant, right? But if you are hoping to sell, I don't know, a website into the enterprise, or you've just got a client that I don't know, during Christmas in the local area, gets hundreds and hundreds of hits simultaneously, not only does this stuff start to matter, but it's basically the difference between them succeeding and falling flat on their face.
[00:16:54] Remkus de Vries: So yes, there is technically a difference between your mom and pop site and a site that's actually making money and thus, becoming. Mission critical. I would argue that the mindset of the latter needs to be your mindset for all. perhaps not to the extreme, but the, it, it is the mindset that I'm talking about that performance is not an afterthought.
Performance is a, I'm starting with performance in mind and I'm, as I'm building, I am continuously measuring the impact of my choices because I want to have my sight load. Obviously within one second, but preferably within 500 milliseconds. That needs to be a goal. in fact, if you can even get it under a hundred milliseconds, which is phenomenally fast, the impact on e-commerce is immeasurable.
Sure
[00:17:45] Nathan Wrigley: Huh.
[00:17:46] Remkus de Vries: meaning the, example that you see a lot is the reference of Amazon changed something and then saw, let's call it the time the first bite was reduced by, I don't know, a hundred milliseconds. I don't know what the exact example is, but this example is about the basics of it.
that change in responsiveness in, and it's there. that yielded a higher, revenue, once implemented. So there's a direct correlation between making a site faster, making it more snappy, making it more pleasurable to navigate through, and the enjoyment that people have while they're on your site.
[00:18:28] Nathan Wrigley: How, just curious about you personally. How long do you personally give a site before you start to get fed up that it's not loading? Are, you in the, okay, I've waited two seconds here now. This is too much and obviously we know that I. The impact is more about what Google and things like that are taking from it.
But I'm just curious about what your actual personal capacity is to wait on the internet anymore.
[00:18:54] Remkus de Vries: so I'm, quite close to being very annoyed. Anything longer than a
second
[00:18:58] Nathan Wrigley: I think I'm the same. Yeah. I.
[00:19:00] Remkus de Vries: it's not needed. So why is this happening? Why, am I being bothered with a broken solution? if it's a, if it's a product that I need specifically from the vendor that I am visiting at that point in time, then I'll accept it as is.
But if there's competition, okay, I'm not, gonna wait for this. I'm just gonna go to the other site that hopefully is, fast and then services me in a better way.
[00:19:22] Nathan Wrigley: Because the whole enterprise that we're talking about here is gonna, it's like a double fronted marketplace really. You've got the, you've got the end user who's gonna get fed up in a human measurable amount of time. that's a second or what have you. And two seconds, three seconds. And if you're getting into two.
Two to five seconds, forget it. I'm imagining the younger generation in particular who've been brought up on healthy, fast internet and mobile connections, they just, they've just got no capacity to wait. I would imagine.
[00:19:49] Remkus de Vries: I was talking to, one of my kids, over the weekend saying that once upon a time you saw a screen, load line by line. And we were okay with it.
[00:20:02] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:20:03] Remkus de Vries: and they went Uhuh. I'm like, yeah, it really was.
[00:20:07] Nathan Wrigley: so there's that side of things, the human angle, which is when people are actually gonna give up. But then of course there's the other side, which is how the people are gonna find you in the first place. So it's the Googles and the people that are actually putting the websites in people's path anyway.
if you're lucky enough that everybody knows your website by word of mouth, great. You might not need to worry about this on quite the same. you probably do, but Maybe not quite so much. But if you're relying on things like search all of this. Getting down to the 100 milliseconds, 200, 500, whatever it may be, that starts to really affect the bottom line because basically you're not gonna appear in search if your competitor is equal in every measurable thing except their superior in, I don't know, all of the lighthouse tests and things like that up.
[00:20:52] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. So the actual impact of is, smaller than, how you just, described it. How much detail and in what combination with other metrics is very hard to have any, anyone say anything specific about it's more of a general user experience, that you want to provide. So search, yes, it has an impact.
Google has indicated so, but we really don't know how little, or how much the assumption is that, all things considered equal. The most performant one is the one that is most favorable, but all things considered equal is a very difficult thing to say because what if the product on one end, just has a better experience, better support, better content, better?
I don't know. so that's a difficult comparison to do. The only thing we know for certain is the faster your site is. And the, snappier it is, the better it's represented in both user experience, search results, favorability, likability, all of these things that you actually want. So the more you focus the, I wanna make my site fast because the end user will appreciate it way more than a slow one.
That is the better mindset than to say, I gotta make it fast for Google. That's less, it's important to make it fast, but have your motivation be towards, making the visitors happy versus making Google happy because Google will be happy when the visitors are happy. That's basically how they
[00:22:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so if. obviously we could send everybody directly to scan fully, and, once the roadmap is complete in the not too distant future, then you'll be able to do all of this kinda stuff over there. But let's say that we're talking to people who don't have scan fully, but still wanna pursue these endeavors and make it kinda muscle memory that part of the website build is to Okay.
Performant is a first relation. It's right up there with SEO. It's right up there with accessibility and all of that. Performance matters. How? How are you doing this? How are you actually doing the measurements outside of scan Regretfully?
[00:22:57] Remkus de Vries: Yeah, so there's a whole array of plugins that you need to combine. but, code profiler specifically the pro version of that's an interesting plugin because once activated gives you a profile, it gives you a, an insight into what a particular plugin does. we wanna service that natively inside scan fully.
But if you don't have scan fully, that's a plug in. The look at, query Monitor is also a good plugin to look at. it will tell you literally. This is my query. We've monitored. This is what it, consumes what it uses, gives you a lot of insights into, maybe this is not the smartest query type of, usage.
it, both of these plugins come with a, you need some technical insight
[00:23:48] Nathan Wrigley: was gonna say.
[00:23:49] Remkus de Vries: and it's inevitable. So whichever way you, cut this, all of these solutions have, Ha have you they, force you to look at the thing you're building from a slightly different perspective. 'cause most people build it visually.
and then you have to look at what it is that is producing the visual component. And that's a little bit of a mindset, but it's also something that, while it may look like a steep bump to climb onto and overcome, it's actually quite doable once you wrap your head around some of the basics.
[00:24:24] Nathan Wrigley: I, I was gonna say, it feels a bit like turning up to the mechanics with your car that's broken in some
[00:24:30] Remkus de Vries: It's not that bad.
[00:24:31] Nathan Wrigley: And then the mechanic goes, it's the car Beretta that's broken, and you go, great. ne what do I do with the carretta that's
broken? you need it. You need to fix it.
[00:24:40] Remkus de Vries: yeah. So there's some comparison in the sense that if you have no idea where the carburetor is, which is quite normal. 'cause in, nowadays we use injection,
Uh,
[00:24:49] Nathan Wrigley: I don't even know what a car
[00:24:52] Remkus de Vries: carburetors is something from the, early nineties, probably the last versions
[00:24:57] Nathan Wrigley: I felt most alive then Mku,
frankly,
[00:25:00] Remkus de Vries: clearly, some people who, grow old gracefully just keep up with the, times. It's, a good, it's a good example in where, you, do know you have an engine and you do know the engine is a, the main driver of the performance of your car.
but in general, they will tell you it is not the engine that is the most important part in terms of, determining the performance of your car, the actual brakes, and maybe not even the brakes, it's the tires because if the brakes are good, but the tires are crap. You're not going to use your brakes as effectively.
So it's a more understanding which components work together and do what. So it's not just the engine. So it's not just your PHP version or your, configuration of WordPress. It also is your brakes. It is also your tires. and some would even argue it's possibly the way your steering wheel is connected as directly to your tires and steering as.
as, as close as a connection as possible, which is why sports car have a very direct conversion of your steering wheel, changing of tires. So all of these components you know, but you need to think about it.
[00:26:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:26:15] Remkus de Vries: And it's, this is what I'm saying is start thinking about it. Start thinking how things are correlated.
If you're loading a bunch into the browser, it's going to do more ti, it's going to need more time to process the thing you wanted to load into the browser. We can make that example very simple. If you're loading a 25 MB picture to be displayed at two 50 by two 50 pixels, I can, you can easily understand that's loading a lot for very little screen estate. Now if I have an optimized image for that 250 by 250 pixels, if that's more than a hundred kilobytes, that's a lot. It's probably already a lot less. So just understanding those differences and the choices that you make. and I'm staying with the analogy of the car, 'cause I really like cars, so that's an easy one to explain.
[00:27:03] Nathan Wrigley: wish I hadn't trodden on that landmine Now.
[00:27:07] Remkus de Vries: but yes, to understand that there are various components that play together to determine whether something is performant, yes or no. that is my main goal with these series for you to understand. It is not just your hosting, it is not just the choice of where do I build the actual site in and is not just the choice of the plugins that you use, it's which plugins, which page builder, which hosting combined together that determines whether you have a fast and performance site.
[00:27:33] Nathan Wrigley: I guess. I guess one of the things though is that if you are in WordPress, and a lot of people are in WordPress just because it's a convenient CMS, which is lying around and it's completely free to use, and so they get on board and then they discover this whole plugin architecture and it's oh, wow.
Can do all these
[00:27:47] Remkus de Vries: Do everything. Yep.
[00:27:49] Nathan Wrigley: And, but there's no sort of technical understanding of how anything's going on. So obviously we're trying to tackle that a little bit here. But the, image one is like really easy to grasp because you can see it. Look, there's the actual image, it's really wide. I can see that it's never gonna be used, and the browser is just squashing it down, which is totally unimportant.
And, I should lose that and replace it with a smaller one. But then we get into things like, the query that's going on and all of that, and suddenly we're into the realms of, I don't know how to do this. So we're either gonna be. Learning ourselves. And where do we do that? Or we're gonna be employing a developer to take that burden on, or, you go somewhere scan fully, which I'm imagining at some point we'll have a knowledge base of helpful articles and things like that.
but what do you do to say when you talk to novices who are just using WordPress because it's lying around and it's free, what's the, sort of best advice, where do you advise them to go learn? Who do you advise them to watch on YouTube apart from yourself?
[00:28:48] Remkus de Vries: so first and foremost, it, starts with you understanding that all of these choices that we've referenced so far, together determine the actual performance that you see. Now if you are then wanting to tackle all the things that you find are slowing down your site. and it's something that maybe, you inherited a site, right?
And you need to maintain it from going forward, and you're absolutely stumped in how do I make this actually faster? there are solutions, resources, out there, absolutely. But none of it is really well put together in a way that it speaks to the novice, I would say. I think that's the, that is a, thing to overcome.
Which means, you are unfortunately left to, look at all the questions you have and Google them one by
That is very unfortunate. This is one of the things, and you already referenced it, our knowledge base for scantily. So every single feature we're going to add that has an impact, left, mid center, whatever.
we're going to have a knowledge base article that just explains this is the problem, this is why it exists, and here are. Directions of where you can find your solution. But, you'll, find some of the stuff on, various blogs and some are more important than others. So in terms of, how correct are they, how accurate and all of that, I unfortunately don't have a proper answer for this.
[00:30:22] Nathan Wrigley: I guess there isn't though. The landscape's always changing as well, but Also there's no, yeah, and also no, there's no two people that have got the same set of knowledge. somebody will come to it with absolute newbie, they can barely open up a website. that's, hard. there's people who are fairly knowledgeable but not quite a pro.
[00:30:40] Remkus de Vries: yeah, so the, the, direction where the most valuable information is to be found is in the direction of, front end optimization. Meaning there's plugins that do certain things, get getting the Google Lighthouse, scores, Loading. It's snappy from a cached version perspective, and those are all important.
But if you don't know why your query is slow and it takes five seconds to load, and yet you're presenting the, cached version of that query in a, literally in a cached file, You are not really that concerned with it because it's not touching you unless you have a WooCommerce site and everybody logged in or everybody having something in cart, is then running your site in an uncashed version.
We'll never see that optimized version of that slow query, for instance. So the, there is no easy way out here, which is why performance typically is being handled at the end. Because it means you need to start investing your, time and energy into understanding how certain layers work. Now, do you need to know the nitty gritty of every single performance related thing?
No. But do you need to know that simple things like profiling help you determine the impact of your choices? Yes. And it's more about changing your philosophy, changing your build. principles to include performance, just like you need to include accessibility, just like you need to include all of the, user friendliness that is out there.
there's. There's various plugins out there just providing perfect solutions to, but horrible UX to get to, u ui, ux, the whole thing. but you need to include that into your build and that is, unfortunately, performance is also one of those things you need to understand a little bit more than close to nothing.
[00:32:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we seem to have, I'm gonna describe it as bosses. There's metaphor in the UK of, you wait for a while, no bosses arrive, and then suddenly five come at once. and it feels a little bit like a, we're in a moment where there's several. Big things that agencies and website builders have to think about.
like five years ago it was called web vitals. SEO has constantly been a thing that's never gone away. now accessibility is a thing largely driven, I think by legislation, but also this whole performance thing. And, I've got a question which is slightly off piece, but interesting as well.
do you think there's like a credible career? In optimizing your website. So in other words, if you became the agency that specialized in optimization, not necessarily that's all that you do, but if, a big part of the, offering that you've got is, look, we'll take care of your SEO and we are really credible with that.
We'll take care of your, your accessibility and again, like we really do the work and we'll take care of the optimization and making sure that your website is. Fast and so on. Do you, see that as like a badge of honor, which people are gonna, people out there, normal people, if you like, are gonna take notice of?
[00:33:56] Remkus de Vries: I think, so I think being specialized in it is difficult as a full agency. and I can say that with confidence because I am a full agency, be it a small one. I have a focus on, performance and scaling mostly, but I. Something that is changing over the le over the last couple of years is that normal agencies that are just have a generic focus are starting to understand the impacts of performance. be that from an SEO perspective or usability or whatever. it's becoming com more common knowledge, and you'll see.
Agencies adapting all of these different strategies slowly but surely into their, workflow. So while there's still, a place to be found for optimizations, and understanding what it is that you're seeing and translating it into, okay, these are the things that we have to do to mitigate the problems you're seeing, which is A-T-L-D-R for what I do in terms of, performance optimization.
There's still a place for that, but in general, more and more people are starting to understand the, oh, okay. and then when I say people, agencies where they go so it's not just clicking together this site. It needs to make, we need to make sure that all the decisions that we make are in fact, the yield of that is a fast and performance site that is user-friendly for all walks of life, meaning including accessibility, as well as robots who happen to visit your site and want to index it your site into their system, meaning search engines.
[00:35:39] Nathan Wrigley: I, think your intuition that everybody bolts this on right at the end is totally true because I know, I just know from the work that I've done in the past that's exactly how this kind of thing. Goes, you just, you're concentrating on putting the pixels on the page, and once that's been achieved by hook or by crook, but whatever works, then, suddenly it's a question of staring and you go, gosh, it takes forever.
now we've got to retrofit this monster. And in some ways, everything that you've said previously about, start with the basics. Do it correctly from the start, and you are gonna have, it's basically that muscle memory isn't, it's, we're gonna build a site. Okay. Performance has to be part of it.
Let's think about that on every single thing that we do, every plugin that we install, every box that we
[00:36:24] Remkus de Vries: made. Every decision made in the build process needs to have performance in your mind. and I'll, come back to the, slow query thing. So what if you have a slow query that is just slow because it's doing, a metric ton of things. Then there's not a lot you can optimize on the actual query.
There's surely there's an optimized way of presenting that query to the, to the database. But the end result, it's going to always be a heavy query. That's fine. But then the smart thing would be, for instance, to cache the output of that query for the duration of maybe, 24 hours, maybe an hour, depending on your situation.
But there's stuff you can do. That sort of solves the, I am running heavy queries all the time. 'cause if it's the same type of data that's being queried and it doesn't grow stale in, I don't know, 24 hours, then really doesn't make a lot of sense to continuously do the slow queries. Just save the output of that query in a transient and then have that transient, run out, of, after 24 hours and then you do the query once more, but. Everything in between those 48 hours, just, visits the cached version of a query. So understanding that you have these options and choices as you are building your stuff, and yes, saving a query re requires somebody to actually understand what a transient is, how to save one, and all those things.
Sure. But it's also not rocket science. if you dive in the transient API, you'll figure it out. if you Google the problem, you'll figure it out. There's plenty, of examples of how do you optimize for these types of things. the, whole thing is about understanding the furthest you can possibly understand today and then improve on that tomorrow.
[00:38:17] Nathan Wrigley: I've got a question, which you may or may not wish to answer, and that is, do you get a quite a kick. Out of speeding up a site by a really small amount. In other words, if, you've inherited this site and whatever metric it is, you've managed to shave 5% of something away, do you sit there and smirking to yourself, stroking the cat, I'm gonna take over the world, gonna do, you get a kick out of that?
'cause I know I would.
[00:38:48] Remkus de Vries: I, got two cats, so yeah.
[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: But seriously is that, is this the kind of stuff that, it keeps you awake at night and get, gives you real satisfaction when you get it right, because there's something in that, isn't there? There's something about that you have to have. I think a little bit of that personality type to be as fussy as you need to be to get this stuff right.
And I think that's amazing.
[00:39:10] Remkus de Vries: yeah. So it, there's, and it's more the, reward is more, and this is the problem. I found the
[00:39:19] Nathan Wrigley: That Exactly that. Yeah. It's the puzzle sitting on the table that you cannot ignore.
[00:39:23] Remkus de Vries: exactly. So I don't build many, mom and pop sites anymore 'cause I don't have a challenge in that I've built possibly thousands over the past 20 years. I, that doesn't excite me.
what does excite me is somebody can't figure out why, how to make this site faster. and, there's different ways of attacking this. my, my favorite is I bring it to a hosting from where I know everything is optimized, like there's no questions asked, that the hosting is the problem.
If the problem still exists, then I go into, okay, how much time and money do I want to put into solving this particular problem? and then, then the next problem becomes the smaller version and the smaller version, and you end up with a solution of having to solve a little, a lot of little problems, and the end result is, oh, my, the site has become fast.
Great.
[00:40:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Then you give yourself a nice pat on the back and stroke the cat and feel very smug.
[00:40:21] Remkus de Vries: Yeah. Yeah. So it's, very satisfying to. To figure out where the slowness is coming from. And it's sometimes very simple things like a, a premium plugging that doing a license check on every single page load, and their license check takes three seconds. First of all, it shouldn't take three seconds.
Second of all, shouldn't absolutely not happen on every single page load. 'cause also that sort of stuff should be, saved in a transient and, once a day, maybe, even once a week, I don't know. but there's stuff that you can optimize and just figuring out where to do what, when to do what is just a fun journey.
Absolutely.
[00:41:02] Nathan Wrigley: That's interesting. I'd love to, I'd love to know what kind of games you enjoy, like things like chess or something I imagine.
[00:41:13] Remkus de Vries: I'm not much of a gamer actually.
[00:41:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.
[00:41:16] Remkus de Vries: but, I, I used to enjoy, this is gonna really date me. hairier attack, nemesis. And then on, on the board side. Yeah. chess is, was, is one of my favorite things.
[00:41:36] Nathan Wrigley: It is, don't worry, it didn't date you as much as my car, Beretta comment.
[00:41:42] Remkus de Vries: actually, the reference I made Harrier Attack is the late eighties.
[00:41:48] Nathan Wrigley: do remember that game. I was never much of a game. I always used to stand over people's shoulders and think this is gonna make me seem like some sort of dreadful curmudgeon. But I always used to think there's so many better things to do with my time.
[00:42:01] Remkus de Vries: How I see it now. Yeah,
[00:42:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:42:05] Remkus de Vries: gamer, certainly if you are an online gamer.
Problem solving, skillset. Absolutely it does. I just love to do that with different things that benefit me as I'm doing it. 'cause it's not just a skill that I, a skill that I wanna sharpen. I wanna get the knowledge while I'm sharpening the skill. I.
[00:42:26] Nathan Wrigley: So if unlike Mku, you don't enjoy problem solving and you'd rather just hand it off to somebody else, there's Remkus to talk to. You can find his details, [email protected]. So go there, scan fully.com, and if you just wanna install the plugin and hopefully offload a lot of this stuff so that you don't have to do it again.
scan.com. Go check it out. Remkus, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I appreciate it.
[00:42:51] Remkus de Vries: You are welcome. Happy to be here.
[00:42:53] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Very enjoyable chatting to Remkus today.
If you've got any commentary, head over to WP Builds.com, use the search feature and search for episode number 401, and leave us a comment there. We would really appreciate that.
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