Getting The Most Out of WordPress

We make WordPress websites fly.

We talk a lot about speed at Barrel Roll, and that’s because speed matters. How fast your website loads can be the difference between a sale or a bounce, or ranking on page one of the search results or being lost in the shuffle.

Another reason we like to talk about WordPress website speed is more self-indulgent; we’re pretty nerdy about it. We spend a lot of time testing, optimizing, and re-testing sites to shave off every millisecond of pageload time that we can.

This has resulted in some numbers that we’re really, really proud of. You may have seen them elsewhere on our site, so let’s take a few minutes to go over just what they mean and why they matter.

How Do We Calculate The Numbers?

Each of our member sites is scanned each day with a third-party tool that records their performance. This tool has a global database of performance metrics. We take an average of the performance of all of our sites and compare that to the global average each day. The numbers reflect how much faster/better our sites are than the global average.

How much better are our members than the average website?

These numbers, generated daily, are based on an average of our member websites over the past month.

181%

Faster Page Load Times

103%

Smaller Page Sizes

129%

Fewer Requests Made

99.99%

Monthly Member Uptime
(Top 1k Sites 99.85%)

Page Load Times

Nothing matters more than page speed. Not a test score. Not the number of elements being loaded. Not the mobile usability test. Page speed rules them all. As you can see above, our members enjoy a significantly faster average page speed than a typical website.

Smaller Page Sizes

One of the key elements of a fast website is having optimized content. That usually means properly optimizing images and videos, as well as keeping code clean and efficient. We work with our members to cleanup existing content and make sure newly uploaded items are optimized.

Fewer Requests Made

Another key to having a website that loads quickly is to reduce the number of requests. Sometimes referred to as elements, these are the files your site loads in order to draw the content on your screen. Some sites load hundreds of images, scripts, and other files. We combine and minify whenever possible to reduce the total number, which means the server has to do less work and fewer items have to be loaded on each request.

More Uptime

What good is a lightning fast website if it’s not online? So often we find that new members aren’t aware of just how much downtime their website experiences. Sometimes, simply optimizing the site and replacing abandoned or insecure plugins is enough to make it more stable. Other times we help migrate the site to a faster, more reliable host. This results in our members having better uptime than the top 1,000 sites on the Internet.

Ready For An Upgrade?

Reach out. We can make your site faster, safer, and more reliable.