Takes a second to say goodbye, say goodbye – apologies to The Edge (U2 not CloudFront) – but it does only take a second for website visitors to get bored and say goodbye.
Luckily it’s never been easier to do a global speed test from 18 locations thanks to the amazing service at fastorslow.com.
This is showing an average page load of 1.09s from 18 locations for a fully loaded WooCommerce shop page hosted in AWS London region. Underlying that, the European locations Sweden, France, England, Ireland fully load the page in <0.6s whereas a few outlying locations are showing >1.7s or 2s in the case of Singapore.
The key underlying components to this level performance are:
- CloudFront CDN and S3 offloading front end requests from the server.
- Lazy Image loading, appropriate image sizing and Webp means that unnecessary images are not loaded, and where they are needed, the most optimal format is used
- WordPress page output caching means that for most requests the webserver is returning a pre-made .html page without executing any php, for example an .htaccess rule that returns the cached html file if it exists
- and for calls which do require dynamic execution:
- Redis Object Cache means that even when executing php WordPress does not query the database more than necessary: commonly used objects are instead reactivated from Redis in-memory cache. Without Redis, WordPress will still attempt to cache objects, but uses the database to do so causing high database load on each request.
- OPCache: ensures that the compiled php is cached in memory and does not need to be re-read from disk, re-parsed and re-compiled on every request.
