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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

I expect this should hit bad WordPress developers hardest, since the throw-another-plugin-on-the-fire philosophy has led to pages that load 15 javascript libraries for features not even present on that page.

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Couple things I found while optimizing a particular WordPress site

1) https://www.webpagetest.org for analyzing loading times

2) a3 lazy load for lazy-loading images: https://wordpress.org/plugins/a3-lazy-load/

3) autoptimize for combining multiple CSS files: https://wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize/

More description of what we did at my write-up here: https://hackernoon.com/dont-brake-for-fonts-3-web-performanc...

Don't forget caching. A plugin such as w3 total cache or wp fastest cache (my current favourite) will greatly improve your load times.

In my experience the biggest issue with with slow load times are people uploading large unoptimized images. Things like multiple css/js files, unnessary plugins and framework are nothing compared to people using uncompressed large images. Use a plugin, ImageOptim or cloudinary.

Wordpress is well optimized from my experience.

It loads the page and the text first so you can start reading. The images and scripts are delayed and cached. Comments are last. Pictures and thumbnails have various resolutions to improve load time.

Wordpress itself is good at getting the important content to you ASAP. Many Wordpress plugins are not as good.

But what about themes?

Most i've seen load 5+ CSS files and least 10+ JS.

Out-of-the-box stock WP is OK, but many/most plugins are not at all optimized, especially when you install a bunch of them. Hence the "bad" WP developers who pile on a dozen and ruin perf.

Many (most?) of them are not even good on Desktop. Agree to the other comments that the basic Wordpress is very good optimized but who uses only basic Wordpress?

Is there any fast alternative?

https://www.hardypress.com/ makes a static version of the site which will be faster

The issue GP is taking about is with lots of client side plugins and CSS files, and not with WP taking too long to render the HTML.

So how does this product helps in this case?

Static files means that your server might serve the page faster (especially under load), but page bloat is a different matter.

In general, it’s not an alternative so much as actually measuring performance and making sure you don’t exceed your targets for each type of visitor. For almost everything you can find fast and slow examples based on how people configured it.

yes sure, I get that. But: I am looking for an alternative, that you can't "mess around" with, the one, that can't be configured to death. I guess "medium" is an obvious choice if you are looking for a log only, but I have no idea how fast their site really is

If it can’t be configured, people won’t use it. The kind of stuff most sites suffer from is as simple as being able to not have it look like everyone else: once you do that the odds approach certainty that someone’s design will load 8mb of ads, fonts, etc.

Well that depends on the use case, right? People do use Medium for blogging, you don’t need WP to setup a blog these days

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