My Free Site Speed Optimization by WPX: Before & After

I’ve been using WPX as my web host for many years now and can’t recommend them enough. 

I currently host all my blogs with them and am always amazed by their service, features, and customer support team.

They are known as the fastest managed WordPress hosting. You can also host up to 5 sites with 1 account. Which means you don’t pay for hosting for the other 4, just for the domain name.

I recently wrote an article sharing how I started a second blog for free with WPX.

But what I want to share today is their latest addition – a free site speed optimization.

I had never heard of this before, never had one, but was definitely interested to find out more. Turns out, they are offering 1 such optimization per website per customer and I just had to fill in a form.

Below, I’ll take you through the steps, the optimization, and the changes they made on my site.

What to Expect

I first did some research to see what changes they plan to make on my site and decide if I want the optimization. In this article, they share exactly this.

Here’s what they do:

• installing a cache plugin and setting it up correctly to work with the WPX platform and their custom CDN;
• minifying/combining CSS/JS (it may not be possible for every website but they will do their best);
• optimizing all images on the site by reducing their file sizes;
• database optimization;
• plugin audit;
• running new GTmetrix tests on the website before and after optimization + a list of all the changes that the team has done.

I also learned the team will create a backup of my site before they do the free site speed optimization and can restore it in case I’m unhappy with the results.

In addition, the optimization process takes from 72 hours to 3 days. And they don’t do them on weekends.

And here are the optimization goals they aim for:

• TTFB (Time To First Byte) – under 250ms in the state where it’s hosted, under 400ms internationally.
• FCP (First Contentful Paint) – under 2 seconds.
• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) – under 4.5 seconds.
• Load Time (document complete) – under 2.5 seconds.

It was good to know what to expect so I filled in the form. I also kept in mind that it’s better not to perform any tasks inside WordPress once they start the site speed optimization (so the changes aren’t lost and so I don’t interfere with their work).

Getting Started with The Optimization

Here’s how to start the optimization if you too are a WPX user.

In your dashboard, just head to your hosting services, then ‘Manage service’, and you’ll see a button on top saying ‘Send an Optimization Request’.

Then you select the website you want optimized and fill in a form.

In it, they invite you to explain the issues with your site, to provide some speed test results, share specific requests and any requirements or restrictions you may have.

I wrote things like:

“According to the Core Web Vitals inside my Google Search Console, 390 URLs need improvement. 

I ran a PageSpeed Insights test, and things don’t look good.

TTFB is 1.8s (mobile)

FCP is 3.2s (mobile)

I haven’t been able to figure out how to fix that.

I live in Europe but most of my audience is in the US or all over the world. I run speed tests by setting the location for the US.

The items I score F on, using the Pingdom site speed test, are:

Compress components with gzip

Use cookie-free domains

Make fewer HTTP requests

Add Expires headers

I’ve done my research on the topic, tested different plugins, but haven’t been able to fix these.

My site has many redirects as I update old content, and often republish it, change the URL, and redirect it to prevent broken links.

A few months ago I made many changes to my site with the goal to improve performance.

I removed: 

• Jetpack (not lightweight and I didn’t really need it);
• Elementor (I believe it slowed down my site);
• I had a paid WP theme, but instead installed Kadence (the free version) as it’s lightweight and has great customization options;
• SiteKit by Google (and simply use GA for stats);
• Autoptimize (I didn’t see any benefits from it and it might have led to conflicts with other plugins or 2 or more plugins doing the same function);
• replaced Yoast SEO with RankMath;
• etc.

W3 Total Cache has been my caching plugin of choice for many years now, but I’m open to trying another one as long as it doesn’t interfere with other plugins. I’ve read that CDN can be enough and a caching plugin is not necessary, but I don’t know enough about this to take any action.”

Once I submitted the request, it was immediately received and in 2-3 days the optimization process began. Once it was completed, they contacted me to share exactly what they’ve done.

How My Free Site Speed Optimization by WPX Went

They replaced my existing image optimization plugin (ShortPixel Image Optimizer) and instead installed and configured the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin.

They also explained that it provides more features in its free version than ShortPixel, covers and serves the images in a more modern format (.webp), 

which provides better compression for the images and as a result improves their load time.

The next thing they did is to deactivate my caching plugin – W3 Total Cache, and replace it with LiteSpeed Cache. They configured it manually and said it optimizes the CSS and JS resources on the website more efficiently.

They also ran speed tests using PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix and provided links to the results. Mobile versions were included too.

Next, they pointed out I have many external resources (and included a list) and suggested I reduce my homepage size. 

They can’t optimize the external resources as most of them are related to the overall website design, layout and possible functionality. So I’ll look into these.

Before & After

We shouldn’t obsess over site speed test tools, and many of the top sites don’t have the best score on them either. But in this case, WPX encourages website owner to take tests before the optimization and after so they can compare.

They also provide links to tests right before and after the steps they take using different tools.

Here are my results using the Pingdom speed test:

Before:

And after:

The goal of this was to speed up the site, so they definitely did a good job. I haven’t been able to reach half a second in page load time for years.

So overall, I’m really happy with the site speed optimization test. And of course, it was all for free.

I’ll keep the changes they made to my site and their preferred plugins and will delete the others (W3 Total Cash and ShortPixel Image Optimizer).

I contacted them once again to share that the ‘Compress components with gzip’ score was still F (0) on Pingdom. They looked into it and said that the LiteSpeed cache plugin has compressed the resources and provided a screenshot of that. 

I also learned that LiteSpeed Cache handles Brotli compression (better than GZIP in most cases). And when it comes to the Pingdom tool, it scans everything on the website including the external links/domains, which is why the score for Gzip compression is low even though the resources are well compressed.

Final Words

I’m happy with the free site speed optimization they did, how well it was executed, that they always responded to me and I could ask all my questions. This really could have been a paid service (and it is, for any next optimization you request for the same site).

That’s the first time an expert takes a look at my site and does something to optimize it, so I’m really grateful to the team. They really keep providing value to existing customers. That’s been the case for many years now in different ways.

I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at my site speed optimization. Check out WPX if you’re picking your first web host (or want to upgrade your current one).

Let me know if you have any questions.