Excite Media Hi David Horton - glad you asked! I've jotted down some notes on the 1-7 below:

1. Images. The biggest contributor to page weight! Look to optimise image compression using tools like Kraken.io or ShortPixel.com. Also, be selective about which images to make "retina ready".

2. Server processing time. Typically we see this being an issue with CHEAP hosts where their servers are overcrowded, however even quality servers can struggle with a high volume of traffic thrown at them. The two biggest things you can do to reduce server processing time are:

- Use a quality host that doesn't overcrowd their servers. We refer our Australian-based clients to Conetix Hosting, however there are many excellent hosts to choose from. Generally avoid the "Big & Cheap" hosting companies (I won't name names here!).

- Use a caching tool to cache the static HTML output of each page (rather than making the server/CMS do hundreds of database queries for each request). For WordPress, we utilise "W3 Total Cache" or "WP Super Cache". Even a good server can quickly hit CPU/RAM resource limits when your web traffic scales up. Using a caching solution means you will be able to cope with MUCH more traffic without needing to add server resources.

3. Server location / CDN. Think about where the majority of your web traffic will come from. For Australian businesses with a predominantly Australian audience, it's usually best to use a QUALITY Australian host (as mentioned above we refer clients to Conetix Hosting based in Brisbane, but there are many good hosts out there). If your hosting is not in Australia, or your audience is global, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) so that all static resources (images, CSS, JS) are served from a location near your user. We've found KeyCDN to be a reliable CDN provider with Australian servers.

4. Is WordPress itself part of the problem? Ok, so I wrote the click-bait headline for this article before writing the content, so I had to make No 4 something controversial. WordPress is an excellent tool, but out of the box it is optimised for flexibility & extensibility, not speed. The architecture of the CMS is great for allowing plugin developers to extend the functionality, but what this means is: MANY more database calls than necessary & MANY more HTTP requests than necessary. These things can be mitigated through caching, file concatenation, and other techniques, but it does require special care and ongoing maintenance.

5. PHP version. Enable PHP7 on your web server (if your site runs on PHP - which all WordPress sites do). Many hosting companies still have PHP5 as default, even though PHP7 can process requests significantly faster.

6. Gzip compression. Quickest win ever! Enabling this will tell your server to compress html/css/js files before sending to the user (and the user's browser will decompress).

7. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). This one is a bit of a long story, it's a new(ish) standard created by Google & Twitter to help mobile sites load much faster. It's basically a cut down version of HTML/CSS/JS optimised for speed. There are some trade-offs and there are still a few issue to iron out, but AMP pages do deliver on the promise of fast mobile load times (and mobile speed is Google's latest area of focus in determining rankings).

Cheers!

Scott