When more is less

Time is money! Hire a pro

1. Migrate a website in under 2 minutes
2. When more is less
3. Optimization
4. Always do your best
5. The key for achieving success

Migrate a website in under 2 minutes

I have an agency plan with WPEngine (I don’t pay for it) and yesterday, I decided to switch a site to production.

Everything finished in less than 2 minutes:
- backup on WPEngine with All-in-One WP Migration
- created a new website in Gridpane, imported the backup
- sudo nano /private/etc/hosts and point the domain to the Gridpane’s server IP
- remove the WPEngine auto-updater plugin
- login with SSO from Gridpane’s panel, change the admin password
- save the permalinks.

That’s it, that’s all.

When more is less

Feeling good about the whole process, I decided to do the same with my sister’s website, which is beautiful but a pain to use.

It was hosted on a 8cpu server with 16GB memory from PlanetHoster, that for an unexperienced eye, looked good. The site was loading in around 12s
Or maybe I should say that it was waiting 12s before loading 😂

And that’s when more specs and features offer less than a small(er) High Frequency Vultr VPS. Even 1Gb or 2 Gb are enough.

I moved the domain to Cloudflare and then I did the backup with the same All-in-One WP Migration. But then surprise … the backup had 1.3GB.

For a 7 pages brochure website this “performance“ is hard to beat.

Problem was that All-in-One WP Migration is free for backups under 500MB.

Normally, at this point, my choices were Duplicator and UpdraftPlus, but because WPVivid collected dust for too much time, I decided to try it.

I wasn’t wrong. Everything went smooth, I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to enable the incremental backup with BlakeBlaze. WPVivid also has an Image Optimization section, that’s doing WebP conversion, CDN integration and image optimization on the fly.

Optimization

The speed got better - around 3-4s (largest contentful paint) but the feel and speed was actually very good. Anyway, for an Nginx/Redis stack, this was unacceptable and I start looking around to catch the problem.

I did the test in Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom Tools, I couldn’t believe my eyes: the site homepage size was 12MB ! One image was 6MB 😅

The other thing was that in viewports of 480px the site was loading 3000px images.

I fixed the size using Pixelmator and from a 6MB image I end up with a 60K WebP image 🤩
Then I replaced the images in place using WP Media Folder.

At this point I decided to install Super Page Cache for Cloudflare¹ and Optimole².

One last test and the site was finally loading under 800ms.

Always do your best

We can’t speak about this without mentioning “The Four Agreements“ from Don Miguel Ruiz and i strongly recommend you to read or listen to it.

ALWAYS DO YOUR BEST

I see this kind of mistakes very often:
- people trying to save money by painting themselves - that’s how I ended up few years ago, painting one room for a whole week 🤣🤣🤣
- asking amateur friends and family to do professional jobs

Not only we can damage our image, because we end up with a subpar product but when we buy cheap, we end up paying twice (because will have to buy again the right thing). Plus, we are loosing way more time, because we have to redo it.

While doing the second website transfer, I couldn’t stop thinking how instead of a 2m job, I ended up working for around 2 - 3 hours.
And I lost 2 - 3 hours because is way harder to come after someone did a bad job - you have to see what the heck is happening, to reverse engineer the problems and that often times is 2 - 3 times more time consuming that doing the job right from the beginning.

Many businesses are cutting corners

What businesses do not realize is the missing potential. Many are patting themselves on the back for doing $5M, without realizing that they could do $20M if they will do their best.

You always have to do your best

You need professionals, know when you have to do a step back and let them do the job.

Even today it happen to see the president of a company getting involved and taking decisions in place of his professional team and the hilarious point in this is that he actually hired them because they are professionals, so he should listen to them.

The key for achieving success

The key for success is delegation.

Delegation is indeed a powerful tool for achieving success. By entrusting tasks to capable individuals, leaders can focus on strategic decision-making and higher-level responsibilities.

1. The free Cloudflare plan allows you to enable a page cache by entering the Cache Everything page rule, greatly improving response times. However for dynamic websites such as WordPress, it is not possible to use this page rule without running into problems as it is not possible to exclude critical web pages from the cache, the sessions for logged in users, ajax requests and much more. Thanks to this plugin all of this becomes possible.

2. Offers real-time image optimization, CDN delivery, lazy loading, auto-scaling, and digital asset management. Its all-in-one approach ensures that images are optimized, stored, and delivered efficiently from a single platform.
Optimole seamlessly integrates auto-scaling and adaptive image serving based on the user’s device, ensuring optimal size and resolution without additional plugins.