+150% Sever-side Speed

The Power of Page Caching: Caching plugins serve as the cornerstone for accelerating WordPress site performance, with page caching playing a pivotal role. This process drastically reduces load times, particularly for non-logged-in visitors, by creating and storing static HTML versions of your site's pages. When these visitors access your site, they are met with these pre-rendered, lightweight HTML pages, bypassing the need for dynamically generating the page using WordPress PHP scripts and database queries each time. The result? A swift, efficient browsing experience that keeps users engaged and reduces server load.

User Cache:  Traditional caching mechanisms focus on storing static HTML versions of pages for non-logged-in users, as WordPress sites are dynamic by nature when a user is logged in, with content often needing to be updated in real-time. This is where the concept of user cache comes into play. Premium caching plugins like WP Rocket offer a user cache feature that saves a static HTML version of each dynamically generated page for individual logged-in users. This feature is especially useful for pages that don't require frequent updates, allowing for a seamless and speedy experience without sacrificing the dynamic interaction that Listeo sites provide. So it can be enabled for most Listeo pages, apart from the dynamic Dashboard and Woocommerce Pages.

Cache Preload: For a dynamic platform like Listeo, which may feature thousands of listings, traditional caching plugins that only save a page to cache after a first visit and perform periodic cache clearing every 4-12 hours present a challenge. This often leads to a situation where new user visits, including those from crucial search engine crawlers like Googlebot, land on pages that aren't cached, causing slower load times and potentially impacting SEO due to TTFB (Time to First Byte, or server response time) being a significant ranking factor. The larger the site, even worse for a multilingual setup with multiplied listing pages, the more pronounced the issue becomes—almost 90% of new visits hitting uncached pages. The solution to ensuring a consistently fast page delivery lies in cache preload, a must-be feature for your page caching strategy. With cache preload, immediately after the cache is cleared—whether manually or on an automated schedule—the system proactively regenerates the cache for all the site's pages. This means that almost all visits, whether from new users or search engine bots, are met with pre-cached, swift-loading pages. WP Rocket, our recommended cache plugin, excels in this area with its advanced preload capabilities, ensuring that your Listeo site's performance remains optimal, your user experience seamless, and your SEO standing strong.

Challenges with Dynamic Content: Caching within the dynamic nature of a Listeo site presents unique challenges. Key areas like user dashboards, where information such as new bookings, updated statistics, and listing modifications must be the latest, present a challenge to standard caching practices. To balance the need for speed with the demand for up-to-date information, a thoughtful caching strategy is vital. To ensure users always receive the most recent information, we strategically configure cache settings to exclude certain dynamic pages from being cached.

WP Rocket x Listeo plugin: The golden solution: All cache plugins have the option to exclude certain pages from caching. But this also, removes all other frontend speed optimizations the cache offers to these pages. The solution? Our tailored WP Rocket x Listeo plugin which is designed to optimize Listeo's dashboard pages by ensuring that while the HTML is not cached, other performance optimizations are still applied. With this plugin, dashboard pages benefit from frontend performance boosts such as JS/CSS minification, the crucial Defer & Delay JS feature, even for uncached pages. 

In summary, the caching plugin configuration for Listeo sites increases TTFB to lightning-fast by reducing reliance on real-time page generation. Through strategic page caching, we effectively decrease the frequency of generating pages from server, ensuring that most visitors are served with pre-generated, cached pages but without compromising functionality. This strategy significantly lessens the server's workload, leading to a more responsive experience. However, the focus of this portfolio is to enhance backend speed directly. We don't just aim to avoid real-time generation; we strive to make it as fast as possible when it occurs. Stay tuned for the methods and tactics we employ to ensure rapid backend performance for your Listeo site.

What is Object Caching?

Object caching is the process of storing database query results so that the next time the same result is needed, it can be served from the cache without the need to query the database again. Since WordPress relies heavily on database calls, implementing object caching can significantly reduce the load on your database, thereby improving your website's performance, especially for sites with high traffic volumes and extensive database interactions.

Understanding WordPress Object Cache

WordPress includes a built-in object caching system which is designed to store data retrieved from the database in PHP memory to prevent the same data from being queried multiple times during a single page load. However, this built-in cache is non-persistent — meaning it does not survive beyond the scope of a single page load.

The Need for Persistent Object Caching

For optimal performance, especially with complex and high-traffic sites, persistent object caching is essential. Persistent caching allows data to remain in the cache across multiple page loads, which can significantly speed up WordPress by avoiding repetitive database queries.

Redis and Memcached as Persistent Caching Solutions

Two leading tools for persistent object caching are Redis and Memcached. They are in-memory data stores that act as a cache for the MySQL database, reducing the server's workload and improving response times.

While both are effective, Redis is often favored due to its broader feature set, better support, and popularity. It can handle complex data types and offers features like replication, clustering, and transactional support.

Using Redis

For Redis-based object caching, plugins such as the Redis Object Cache plugin are available for free. Before installing, ensure your hosting environment supports Redis with the necessary PHP Redis extension.

If you're using Cloudways, they offer an integrated solution called Object Cache Pro, which provides a more advanced object caching system, including the benefits of Redis, at no additional cost. This plugin is particularly potent, as it comes with serializer and compression options that can reduce Redis memory usage by 70-80% and cut down on network overhead.

Custom Configuration

While installing the plugin can be straightforward, optimizing it to get the full benefits requires some custom configuration. This can involve tweaking the serialization, compression and many more settings to ensure minimal memory usage and efficient data retrieval.

In conclusion, object caching is a powerful technique for WordPress sites to minimize database load and improve page load times, especially for dynamic content. By implementing persistent object caching with Redis and optimizing the configuration, WordPress sites can achieve better performance and scale more effectively as traffic grows.

Speed Enhancement through Database Optimization:

Τhe MySQL database is inherently quick. However, there's always room for improvement. While there are countless plugins promising automatic optimization, we know that genuine, impactful database enhancement is not that straightforward. True optimization requires a hands-on, detailed approach rather than a one-click solution.

Real Optimization vs. Generic Tips:

You may be familiar with common database optimization tips such as executing 'OPTIMIZE TABLE' commands, deleting old post revisions, spam comments, purging orphaned data, cleaning up trash, and managing transient options. There's a wealth of plugins available to automate these tasks, and it's likely that you have some of these measures already in place. However, these conventional methods typically offer only minor improvements.

wp_options Table and Autoloaded Data:

A key focus area is the wp_options table, specifically the autoloaded data that loads on every page. A bloated wp_options table can significantly slow down a WordPress site. While plugin data should ideally load selectively, the reality is many plugins set their data to autoload. Our investigations across various sites have consistently revealed this as a significant performance bottleneck. The sweet spot for autoloaded data is between 300KB - 1MB. Anything above this, especially reaching 3-5 MB, needs optimization, and beyond 10 MB requires immediate intervention. We've usually managed to reduce autoloaded data by 50-70% in our optimizations, focusing on removing the largest and most unnecessary autoload rows.

wp_postmeta: The Controversial Giant

The wp_postmeta table is notorious for swelling in size, which can lead to slower database queries and a lagging WordPress backend, particularly for sites with extensive content. As each post or listing is added, associated metadata accumulates, often including unnecessary entries that worsen the table's growth. This can dramatically impact site speed and scalability, making it a critical focus area for optimization.

WooCommerce's High-Performance Order Storage

HPOS represents a strategic pivot away from the overloaded wp_postmeta table, introducing a specialized table designed to handle order data more efficiently. HPOS signifies an important step towards optimized data architecture, offering a scalable solution that enhances database performance and overall site operation for WooCommerce-powered sites, including our Listeo sites. We will make sure your plugins are compatible with HPOS or make them, and then enable HPOS.

Cleaning up wp_postmeta

When it comes to optimizing your Listeo site, the wp_postmeta table demands a profound clean-up. Sites with fewer than 500 listings typically operate smoothly; WordPress is robust enough to handle up to 100,000 postmeta rows well. However, the strain on the database intensifies with larger listing numbers. We often see each listing carrying 20-40 postmeta entries – a number that becomes unmanageable with thousands of listings. By refining some parts of the class-listeo-core-submit.php, we ensure that only meaningful data is stored. Many postmeta entries are placeholders containing no actual data ('0' values), especially in imported listings. These can be safely removed without impacting functionality, significantly reducing database load. Image data attached to listings further increases the size of wp_postmeta. Our strategy includes pruning unused image data and ensuring that when a listing is deleted, its associated image data is also removed from the database. Also, we will search and find all other kinds of unnecessary rows that come in bulk and after careful examination, we will safely remove them. Most of our wp_postmeta cleanup works will reduce its size 40-50%.

Effective database optimization for Listeo sites requires an expert touch, far beyond what automated tools can offer. Our specialized approach covers deep cleaning of wp_options, detailed pruning of wp_postmeta, and strategic implementation of custom coding, ensuring your site scales efficiently while maintaining peak performance. 

Reform Plugin Usage for Enhanced Performance

In the pursuit of an optimized Listeo site, a critical aspect often overlooked is the thoughtful management of plugins. While plugins add functionalitiies, they can also be a source of inefficiency, leading to unnecessary bloat and sluggish site performance. Our approach focuses on a thorough evaluation of all your plugins, identifying and eliminating redundancies to reorganize your site’s operation. 

Eliminating Unnecessary Default Plugins

Firstly, Listeo requires installation and activation of certain plugins, but not all of them are essential. We aim to eliminate or replace these with more efficient alternatives:

1. Autocomplete WooCommerce Orders: This plugin, designed to mark WooCommerce payments as 'Completed' automatically, can be replaced with a custom function in your functions.php file. This small but significant change eliminates the need for an external plugin that adds slowness to your site.

2. CMB2 and CMB2 Field Slider: Both are mostly included in the Listeo theme code by default. We plan to optimize and directly integrate the rest of the features into the theme, thus removing the need for separate plugins and reducing your site’s load.

3. Envato Market Plugin: Used for theme updates, this plugin can slow down your site for no good reason. A more efficient method is to manually update the Listeo theme directly from ThemeForest, by downloading and installing it within the WordPress dashboard.

4. Kirki Customizer Framework: If you're not frequently altering your site's settings or your settings within the "Customize" layout are already set without a plan to change, this plugin is redundant. Removing it can help in reducing the site’s loading time.

5. Purethemesnet CPT: This plugin contains some code used by themes created by Purethemes developers but is not needed in Listeo. We will remove it.

6. WP All Import & WP All Import Listeo Add-on: If you dont plan to import listings from data sheet, or have done your import and won't use the plugin again, or even if you don't plan to import new listings right now, you can remove these plugins, since they are not used at all!

7. Listeo Editor Plugin: For users not utilizing form editors, we propose removing this plugin and integrating package management into the Listeo Core settings. This step further simplifies the backend and boosts site efficiency.

Our expertise in optimizing Listeo sites involves more than just removing these plugins. It requires a deep understanding of how these plugins function within the Listeo theme and replacing them with custom coding. We advise against trying this on your own due to the complex nature of these modifications, unless you know what you do. Partner with us, and we'll ensure your site is optimized safely and effectively, enhancing performance while maintaining essential functionalities.

Benchmarking and Further Plugin Removal

Our optimization process for your Listeo site continues with thorough benchmarking using Code Profiler Pro plugin. This tool enables us to analyze the backend speed of each page, providing detailed insights into the load time and performance impact of each plugin, file, function, etc. This initial assessment is crucial as it informs our decisions on which plugins to keep, modify, or remove. In this way, we will work on these slow and non-essential plugins, integrating their functionalities into the theme's functions.php file, or replacing them with customized, more efficient alternatives. This approach ensures that every plugin on your site adds real value, without compromising performance.

The Importance of Advanced Plugin Management

In the realm of WordPress speed optimization, the technique of unloading plugins per page stands out as a highly effective yet completely underutilized strategy. This advanced method is not discussed online, making it a specialized skill that requires a serious expert, particularly for those using the Listeo theme.

Utilizing Perfmatters for Targeted Plugin Control

For this intricate task, we rely on our favorite plugin, Perfmatters. Similar to our frontend optimization strategy where we used Perfmatters to disable JavaScript and CSS per page, it also offers the capability to disable entire plugins from loading on specific pages. This might seem unusual at first, but it’s a feasible and incredibly powerful technique. Unloading plugins from the front-end pages of your site doesn’t affect your WordPress admin dashboard, preserving full functionality while optimizing the user-facing side of your site.

Conditional Unloading of Plugins

Before we proceed with unloading any plugin, a comprehensive benchmark test on various pages of your site is conducted using Code Profiler Pro. As we discussed in the previous "Remove Redudant Plugins" technique, this tool provides detailed insights into each plugin’s impact on backend speed, load time, and overall performance, guiding our decisions on which plugins to conditionally unload. Some plugins are not used site-wide but only on specific pages. In such cases, completely disabling them isn't feasible. Here, we employ conditional unloading, allowing these plugins to run only on pages where necessary. This approach takes plugin optimization to new heights.

As you can see on the benchmark, on a random page (Bookings dashboard page) there are several plugins that are either completely unneeded and add slowness to the site, and can be replaced with a little code in functions.php, and other plugins that are not needed on all pages. These plugins are conditionally loaded only on the specific pages they are needed. 

Case Study: Optimizing Payment Plugins

Consider payment plugins for WooCommerce, like PayPal or Stripe. While essential for checkout, cart, and woocommerce my-account dashboard pages, they are unnecessary elsewhere. For instance, having several payment method plugins can add severe unwanted load to your site's other pages. Using Perfmatters' script manager and MU-mode, we can conditionally unload these plugins, reducing unnecessary bloat.

The Complexity and Necessity of Expert Handling

This technique involves multiple combinations of conditional unloading across different plugins and pages, making it one of the most complex and labor-intensive tasks. It requires an expert who has sufficient WordPress and Listeo experience and can safely determine where plugins can be unloaded without issues. Incorrect unloading can lead to problems ranging from minor functionality absence issues to Fatal errors. As you can see on the benchmark below, the same page (Bookings dashboard page) with all the speed optimizations discussed on this portfolio is way faster. These specifc times are not completely realistic and are higher than the real TTFB, since the benchmark plugin takes much more time to benchmark all functions, files, and plugins on a single page load. After thorough tests on real browsers, we can safely say that the average page time went from around 800ms to 300ms. Which is an exceptional speed increase.

Special Focus on WooCommerce within Listeo Sites

A notable example is WooCommerce, often one of the slowest plugins on Listeo sites. With specific customizations, like removing the cart from the header, we can unload WooCommerce from most Listeo pages. This tailored approach, based on extensive testing and experience, ensures efficient performance without compromising crucial functionalities. 

Our thorough, expert-led process ensures that every step of unloading plugins per page is conducted with precision and care. We strongly advise against attempting this yourself, if you don't have deep experience in WordPress speed optimization and know exactly what you are doing. Our approach guarantees a significant enhancement in your site’s performance, achieved through detailed planning, testing, and execution.

The Crucial Role of Translations in Site Speed

Enhancing translations is vital for the speed optimization of WordPress sites, especially when dealing with multilingual sites. This aspect of site optimization is often neglected, but it plays a significant role in determining the overall performance of a website.

Evaluating Multilingual Plugins

Popular multilingual plugins like WPML, Polylang, TranslatePress, Weglot, GTranslate, and MultilingualPress while providing multilingual capabilities for your site, are all terrible performance-wise. Of course, they don't add the same slowness to your site, some of them are way slower, due to extreme complexity and features they offer, like WPML, and some are faster due to their simple straightforward nature, like Polylang. Still, Polylang is almost as slow as the huge Woocommerce plugin on our benchmarks. We won't even discuss WPML...

Customizing TranslatePress for Enhanced Speed

TranslatePress, a widely-used multilingual plugin, stands out for its unique approach, utilizing separate database tables and a front-end translation interface. Despite these advantages, TranslatePress can still be a drag on site speed, especially for heavily translated sites. A client wanted us to make TranslatePress as fast as possible. We aim to retain its multilingual features but shift the translation mechanism. By disabling the gettext translations within TranslatePress and adopting the standard WordPress internationalization and localization system, we can leverage .po and .mo files for translations, without relying on the heavy translation engine of the plugin, which is not optimized for speed. This change dramatically improves performance, with translations being managed more efficiently through Loco Translate.

From TranslatePress being by far the slowest plugin, like all default multilingual plugins, to TranslatePress being blazing fast, after our optimized version:

The Challenge with .po/.mo Translations

The standard translation system in WordPress, utilizing .po (Portable Object) and .mo (Machine Object) files, is a well-established method for managing site localizations and is used by all WordPress sites. However, it's not without its drawbacks. Recent research in the WordPress community have highlighted a significant issue. "Initial benchmarks showed that the median loading time for a localized site can be up to 50% slower than for non-localized sites, depending on which themes and plugins are being used." This slowdown is due to the nature of how these files are loaded and parsed for each request, which can be quite resource-intensive, especially when multiple plugins and themes each have their own translation files.

Revolutionizing Translation Efficiency

To combat this performance hit, the WordPress research team developed the Performant Translations plugin. This innovative solution reimagines the handling of translation files in WordPress. By replacing traditional MO files with PHP files, the plugin significantly speeds up the parsing process. PHP files are not only faster to parse but also benefit from being stored in the OPcache, providing an additional performance boost. This enhancement is particularly beneficial for non-English and multilingual sites, as the plugin can deliver immediate speed improvements immediately.

Optimizing Multilingual Sites 

For multilingual sites, the Performant Translations plugin offers a cooperative solution when combined with Loco Translate and our customized version of TranslatePress. Loco Translate facilitates efficient translation management, while our customized TranslatePress ensures that multilingual features do not add unnecessary overhead. This approach allows us to leverage the benefits of PHP-based translations, bypassing the performance issues associated with default .mo translation rendering. For sites using other multilingual plugins, we can migrate their translations into Loco Translate and integrate them with our optimized TranslatePress version, ensuring seamless language support without compromising on speed.

In optimizing WordPress sites for speed and efficiency, especially those with multilingual content, we employ a targeted approach that revolutionizes traditional translation methods. By customizing TranslatePress in conjunction with Loco Translate and integrating the innovative Performant Translations plugin, which replaces slower .po/.mo files with faster PHP files, we significantly reduce the performance drag typically associated with multilingual plugins.