Guess I’m guilty of not “dogfooding” enough and I should spend more time actually reading articles on the site here.

I was shocked when I saw this load time for www.jeffsteinke.com tonight:

not the best screenshot but we were seeing 30-60+ second page load times. gross.

So I got to work and did a bit of tuning. I’m not an expert though so wanted to share what I did, what I learned, and leave room for additional ideas.

  1. First, I learned what TTFB is (hint: time to first byte).
  2. Looks like I can improve TTFB by using a WordPress caching plugin. Here are some options.
  3. Ended up choosing WP Super Cache…because turns out I already had the plugin installed, but deactivated. Who knows why?!?
  4. Decided to look up my hosting details on DreamHost and compare to other options like WPEngine and Kinsta.
  5. In the process noticed that I didn’t have SSL on. Whoops! Should be fixed shortly.
  6. Deactivated and deleted plugins I wasn’t using.
  7. Turned off the Jetpack Admin Bar, which was throwing a nasty, page-load-time wasting error of its own

The result?

3-4 seconds…much better. Sure there’s plenty of room for improvement still but this is still just a lowly old blog.

The wp-admin portal is still slow (this is where you can write posts, etc) but I can at least put up with that for the time being as it only impacts me.

If you’re still seeing anything slow on your end let me know. Always open to other ideas and recommendations…