July 17, 2022 — In this workshop, participants will learn more about the performance of their websites. What goes into having a fast website, and a good user experience? We will answer the question “Why should you care about site performance in the first place?”

We will learn about simple tools you can use to test and monitor your website, and how to interpret and act on the results. We will talk about setting a performance budget and how to weigh performance when updating sites. If you can, bring your laptop along, and have a plan for a specific website (or plugin or theme) you want to work on optimizing. We’ll take a couple of short working breaks to try out the tools we learn about.

October 8, 2021 — Let’s talk about speed! One of the major factors leading to online frustration is a slow website. Users do not want to wait – and if you’re not careful, this can make you lose traffic before your page has loaded! As we all know, a dissatisfied user is worse than not having users at all! A better user experience is the driver behind Google’s anticipated Core Web Vitals update, which focuses on loading, interactivity, and visual stability of a website. This talk mainly deals with how you can speed up your WordPress website and make it faster for users, thus improving their conversions, importantly before Core Web Vitals come into force. We’ll start by looking at website hosting, latency and DNS, and then discuss how you can optimize the performance of your WordPress website. Solutions will be for all sort of users, from beginner to advanced, and for different hosting scenarios. Further discussion will be about different performance optimization strategies like cutting down your queries, tweaking the code base, caching mechanism, use of cloud services, scaling up/forward and so on. All this together shall help a newbie or even someone who has their website slow and frustrating for users, faster and better optimized. Thus, saving their day and being ready for Google’s update in May 2021!

June 29, 2021 — Marketers and business owners continually report that their greatest content struggle is measuring success.

That’s because organic content is a long-term strategy, someone may see your blog posts 4 or 5 times before filling out a form or converting. That doesn’t mean the content is any less valuable.

The 5 non-sales metrics discussed here can be used to measure the success of blog and website content, even if you can’t directly attribute sales to content.

When done right, content provides significant business value, you just have to know how to measure it.

November 3, 2020 — Speed matters. People are impatient. If your website or a client’s website doesn’t load quickly – within a just a couple of seconds – many visitors will abandon it completely. A slow site means lost time & revenue. But figuring out how to speed up a slow site can be HARD. Everyone’s got a suggestion and an idea for how to fix your performance issues, but most are just guesses, and not based on real data. STOP GUESSING. If you have a performance issue, or just want a faster site, you need to KNOW exactly what is slowing things down, and how to fix it. This talk will show you how.

October 30, 2020 — This talk explains how to use free resources to examine and prune WordPress databases.

How tidy is your WordPress database? While WordPress site content can be exported and imported into a newly installed environment, many larger or more active sites need surgical precision to clean the database. This is especially true for eCommerce stores or sites where user content (such as comments, accounts) are active, and migration or downtime must be avoided.

Presentation Slides »

September 1, 2020 — Fasten your seatbelts! We will dive into page performance, what it is, how to measure it, why you want it and most important how you can achieve a high performant website.
Based on some latest experiences with a customer project Stefan Kremer will give the talk and share his learnings.

Presentation Slides »

June 21, 2020 — Performance matters. Doug’s talk will take a look at some tools and techniques that will boost your site’s speed. There are three main places where speed can be impacted when delivering a site to an end user, and we can have differing levels of impact on each of those places.
The first is the end user’s hardware and browser. The second is the infrastructure used to serve the site, and the third is the code for the site.

June 5, 2020 — We all want fast sites, but what is fast? What is performant? We may know it when we see; yet quantifying and communicating about web performance effectively is still a challenge.

In this talk, we discussed our ever-evolving set of standards for what comprises a fast site. With special attention to the problems that ads and analytics present for publishers, we also discussed how antiquated notions of web performance are a ripe environment for abuses by 3rd party code.

Finally, we reviewed techniques for improving performance monitoring as a tool for institutional change.

Presentation Slides »

May 30, 2020 — Speed matters. People are impatient. If your website or a client’s website doesn’t load quickly – within just a couple of seconds – many visitors will abandon it completely. A slow site means lost time & revenue. But figuring out how to speed up a slow site can be HARD. Everyone’s got a suggestion and an idea for how to fix your performance issues, but most are just guesses, and not based on real data. STOP GUESSING. If you have a performance issue, or just want a faster site, you need to KNOW exactly what is slowing things down, and how to fix it. This talk will show you how.

April 22, 2020 — A talk about why WordPress websites might be running slower than we’d like them to, how to pinpoint what is slowing the site down, and things we can all do to speed our sites up.