Internal WordPress Sharing Session

0
4877

An internal WordPress sharing was conducted at Exabytes HQ, Penang last week. The session was mainly about the new features of WordPress and the experience of using WordPress. We are happy to have Mr Julian Song, a WordPress community leader, to provide internal training for Exabees!

Wai Lock, the Digital Marketing Strategist of Exabytes shared with the audience the recent Upgrade of Exabytes WordPress Hosting.

The first session was about the upgrade of Exabytes WordPress Hosting and the main concerns of users. One of the biggest concerns and common mistakes made by WordPress users is not updating their website. This can accidentally break the websites when users update their core, plugins and the themes of the website. Now, with the smart update feature, users can analyze the update, preview the changes and decide if the update should be applied. After running the update on a clone of your website, Smart Updates tests your WordPress automatically looking for bugs, errors, and display issues.

Another biggest concern of users is the loading speed of the website. We will launch a new extension of Plesk, namely Speed Kit, which will help you monitor and boost web performance in a couple of clicks. So as soon as you install the extension, it analyzes all your Plesk websites. For each one, by resizing and transcoding images according to the user’s device dimensions, Speed Kit saves bandwidth and accelerates page loads. In contrast to all other acceleration plugins, Speed Kit caches even frequently changing data such as your website’s HTML or user comments. Speed Kit serves your data not only from CDN edge caches but also from caches within the user device (browser cache, Service Worker cache) for instant load time. Users can check how much their website will improve with the Speed Kit now.

Mr Julian’s sharing on how to interpret speed test waterfall report.

Julian shared on how to check your website speed and interpret the results. The first concern of the loading speed should be the loading speed, the number of requests, page size, instead of the grade and scoring. This is because scoring alone is not actually a good indicator of speed. In fact, most people do not optimize or resize their images before uploading them to a website, and this is the main cause of a slow website in most cases. Also, users should learn to understand the waterfall report, in order to analyze each request to see which part is slowing down your site. Thus, users can remove unnecessary elements to reduce HTTP requests. 

Besides, Julian recommended the plugins below to speed up and improve the site’s performance.

  • Swift Performance –  It’s relatively easier to use, and no complicated coding and settings are needed. The plugin will suggest the suitable level of optimization based on your website setups such as PHP settings, 3rd party plugins, timeout test, loopback, connections and various caching settings. 
  • Flying Image by WP Speed MattersThe setup is pretty simple (almost no setup required) to start optimizing your images. If you really need to configure, you can configure these few options: CDN setup, Compression, WebP and Lazy Load. 
Kelvin, the Digital Marketing Strategist of Exabytes shared with the audience the issues he faced while using WordPress, and how to overcome them.

Kelvin shared that using WordPress to build his website is a learning curve for him despite he already has certain knowledge in HTML, CSS, & PHP. He had faced countless challenges in building his website, from choosing the best theme to transferring his website to another domain name. Most of the time, he searched for solutions on YouTube, blog posts, and the WordPress community. With so much information online, it can sometimes be overwhelming, and this made him ensure how his problems could be solved. If a workshop is conducted by Exabytes on a regular basis (weekly/monthly),  it will be something beneficial to all WordPress users.    

Here’s a quick wrap-up of the sharing, along with some key tips and takeaways from the sharing:

  1. Demo of new features
  2. New WordPress hosting launch
  3. How users judge loading speed and their action plan
  4. Understand the waterfall report in a speed test
  5. The correct way of speed optimization + Demo

Kick-start your WordPress project with the best WordPress hosting. Start your WordPress website/blog/online magazine today! We’re glad to help! 

Upcoming Event:

To learn more about WordPress, join our upcoming WordPress Workshop! This workshop is reserved Exclusively for our existing WordPress Hosting Clients only.