Learning Hub | Maintaining Your Website

Why We’re Making The Switch To WP Engine Hosting

Let’s face it: people don’t like waiting. Would you wait in line to enter a store that you know is already open? Probably not. So why would any of your customers do the same to enter your website?

According to a study done by Kissmetrics, 40% of people will abandon your website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Furthermore, 47% of your visitors will expect your website to load under two seconds. If you’re a recent client of ours, now you understand why we are advocating the two second rule so much.

What Do Page Load Times Have To Do With Hosting?

The majority of the custom websites that we build are developed on the WordPress platform. WordPress relies on PHP and MySQL to work, thus making it a server-side application. The server that your WordPress website lives on is also known as a host.

If your server (or in other words, your host) isn’t functioning optimally, neither will your website. Therefore, a slow performing server can still cause slow load times, even if your website itself is optimized properly.

How Can WP Engine Improve My Load Times?

WP Engine specializes in hosting WordPress websites. The foundation of WordPress is composed of thousands of individual files, and a decently-sized database. WP Engine understands this, and has developed their hosting to specifically perfect the logistics of optimizing WordPress to load optimally for end users.

To support these claims, we did our own independent test for a new website that we developed for our friends over at Sahara Grill Mediterranean Restaurant. Below is a before and after comparison of a Pingdom speed test, which analyzes the load time of a website in seconds, and its performance score. The screenshots speak for themselves.

pingdom-liquidweb

Before – Site installed on our LiquidWeb VPS

pingdom-wpengine

After – Site Installed on WP Engine

The Results Explained

This site was a perfect case study for examining the effects of WP Engine due to the fact that it is graphic and text heavy. Lots of high-resolution imagery, icons, and custom fonts were used in the development of this website. We thought that a 1.23 second load time was an accomplishment for a project like this, however, we were surprised to see such great increases in the following areas:

  • Performance grade – Jumped from 79/100 to 99/100 – an increase of 20%
  • Load Time – Dropped from 1.23 seconds to 903 milliseconds – decrease of 327 milliseconds
  • Page Size – Dropped from 2.7MB to 2.0MB – a decrease of 0.7MB

What’s Next? How Do I Switch To WP Engine?

One of our major goals in Q2 of this year is to move all of our WordPress clients over to WP Engine.

If you’re interested in speeding up your website and don’t want to make your customers wait longer than they have to, reach out to us today. We will be providing special pricing to our customers, well below the $29/month that they advertise for a single account.