How To Speed Up WordPress Sites

I have just recently hired an expert on Fiverr to speed up this WordPress site and wanted to share my experience. A fast website makes the user experience better and helps your Google ranking.

Unfortunately I don’t have the skills to do more than basic optimizations myself. Therefore I headed over to the Fiverr freelancer marketplace to find a WordPress speed optimization gig.

If you are not familiar with Fiverr, its a marketplace that allows you to hire freelancers from all over the world. This means you can find professionals to do jobs for you for very competitive prices.

I think it works particularly well for technical jobs like web development and SEO. That’s because it doesn’t really matter if the person speaks your language fluently or not.

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What Makes A WordPress Site Slow?

If you run your own blog, company website or eCommerce store then page load times are important. According to 2018 research by Google, 53% of mobile users will leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So not only will you lose loads of potential traffic but Google will also punish you for it too. Your site really needs to be in the “green zone” of Google Page Insights and GTMetrix. This blog was OK but needed a few tweaks to get faster load times.

However as already stated I am not the expert, Neil Patel covers the importance of page speed in much more detail.

What can you do to speed up a WordPress blog or site?

There is no one single thing that instantly makes your site super fast. Lots of small improvements can each knock important milliseconds off your sites load time. There are various plugins you can download to help but just blindly adding them doesn’t work in my experience. Here are some of the things that help:

• Reduce the number of SQL queries
• Don’t show a cached version for logged-in users
• Separate cache for mobile devices
• Cache clears when posts/pages are updated
• Reduce the file size of the page/post
• Minification of HTML
• Decrease size and Minification of CSS files
• Decrease the size of JS files
• Fewer HTTP requests
• Integrated CDN setup

Know how to do all these things effectively? Nope me neither, lets head over to Fiverr.

Fiverr WordPress Gig

Given all the different things potentially effecting the speed of my blog, I headed over to Fiverr to find a gig. Freelancers on the site are so cost effective that is really didn’t make sense to try and figure it all out myself. The way Fiverr works is freelancers create listings called”gigs”, each gig has a fixed price and a specified service or product you will receive. So I just headed to the site and searched for “WordPress Speed Optimization”.

Fiverr Gig Hiring Process

When looking for gigs on Fiverr, I usually look for a balance between price and ratings. My search initially returned 12,000 results, wow too many need to refine. So I filtered for:

• Delivery Time: Max 3 days
• Budget: £50
• Seller Level: Top Rated and Level Two
• Seller Speaks: English

This brought a slightly more manageable 871 results, Fiverr’s algorithm is usually good at putting the most relevant ones first. I then look for gigs that have a high number of reviews, ideally average of 5 Stars. At this point you just need to read the gigs and reviews to find one you are comfortable with.

WordPress Speed Optimization

To get my site loading lighting fast I settled on a seller called “milaltariq72“. He had 313 reviews and an average of 5 stars, he had also been offering his services since December 2018. When it comes to giving a stranger temporary administrator access to your site, you want somebody with a good historical track record.

The gig was £25 for his Premium service and he offered to do the following:

• Browser Caching
• Minification
• Database Optimization
• File Compression
• Software Version Upgrade
• Resize Photos
• Green on Gtmetrix

Fiverr Gig Results

So before I hired an expert on Fiverr, my site was loading on average over 4 seconds. It scored 81/100 on desktop and 70/100 on mobile. I already had plugins for caching, image optimizing (Smush), image lazy load and other speed improvements. But clearly it was not enough because I was not “green”.

So 2 days later, after my man tweaked and optimized my site i was GREEN! I now have a desktop score of 99/100 and a mobile score of 91/100. I have to say for £25 I am very please with the results. For me to figure this out myself would have taken hours of misery watching YouTube. potentially breaking my site in

I hope you found this review helpful and the page loaded super quick for you!! Why not head over to Fiverr now by clicking the button below to get your WordPress website super fast.