#### Notes, Links, Supplemental Materials & Whatnot Addendum for Section 1

Lecture 1: Website Speed: How Much it Matters & Why "Fast Enough" Isn't

Notes:

Google is “obsessed" with speed.

- Google found that a 500ms slowdown equals 20% decrease in ad revenue.
- Bing found that a 2-second slowdown means a 2.5% decrease in queries and overall clicks.
- Amazon finds a 100ms slowdown – one tenth of a second! – can mean a 1% decrease in revenue.
- Yahoo! found that a 400ms improvement in load time translated to a 9% increase in traffic.
- Mozilla mapped a 2.2s improvement to 60 million additional Firefox downloads.

A study released by Akamai in September 2009 came to similar conclusions:

- 47% expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
- 40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
- 52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site.
- 14% will start shopping at a different site if page loads are slow, 23% will stop shopping or even walk away from their computer.
- 64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will go somewhere else to shop next time.

The Gomez Peak Time Internet Usage Study conducted by Equation Research on 1500 consumers (February 2010) also confirms the negative impact of poor performance:

- At peak traffic times, more than 75% of online consumers left for a competitor's site rather than wait on a slow one
- 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a single slow experience
- Almost half expressed a less positive perception of the company overall after a single slow experience.
- More than a third told others about their disappointing experience.

Optimization is a PROCESS not an EVENT, and when it comes to website speed there is no such thing as "Fast Enough".

Lecture 1 Further Reading:

- Using site speed in web search ranking
- SEO 101: How Important is Site Speed?
- How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line
- Why Website Speed is Important
- Does Website Speed Equal User Experience?

Lecture 3: Tips on How to Take the Course

Notes:

- Material of this nature is best learned, retained, and becomes a thing from which one can extrapolate from by doing. By practicing it. Think of yourself as an optimization doctor: just as a doctor of medicine practices medicine, so too must you practice optimization.
- The best way to apply this principle to this course it to do, to practice, the different optimizations discussed, as they are discussed.
- I highly recommend you do your initial doing, your first practicing, on a test website or in a testing environment prior to applying what you're learning to a live, trafficked, production site (don't kill your patient).
- If all you have is a smartphone to take this course, that's one thing. But, if you have other, better suited options available to you (a laptop or, and especially, a desktop computer) please do use them.

Lecture 4: What the Course Is (& Is Not)

Notes:

- The official WpFASTER WordPress Speed Optimization course is fundamentally a WPO (Web Performance Optimization), FEO (Front End Optimization), and UX (User Experience Optimization) course.

So, what does that mean?

- Well, WPO, Web Performance Optimization, is the same thing as Speed Optimization which is the same thing as Performance Optimization; which, for all intents and purposes of this course, is the same thing as FEO, or Front end optimization: it's all about SPEED. It helps to think of Front End Optimization as looking at a website you've navigated to: you see it, but not the server serving it, which would constitute the site's back end, with which this course does not concern itself a great deal.
- In short, the course will teach you the methods, modes, techniques and tricks to make your WordPress website as fast as it can possibly be, everywhere and at all times, so as to provide the best possible User Experience everywhere and at all times. Course emphasis is on optimizing the front end of your site as opposed to it's back end, or server.

This is not a course in SEO, Search Engine Optimization, even though optimizing your WordPress site for speed will get you ranked higher in search engines, Google in particular.

- Search engine optimization concerns itself with the process of maximizing the number of visitors to your website by ensuring that your site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
- Web Performance/User Experience Optimization on the other hand, concerns itself with what happens for your sites visitors during their navigation TO, and once they are ON your website, regardless of how they got there.

Enrolling in the course does not purchase WpFASTER.org's offerings or enroll the student in an optimization concierge service. I am thrilled to assist in the understanding of course material, to clear up any confusion about it or its application and to further explicate principles; but, I will not optimize students' websites for them. As such, when I receive questions like, “I just can't seem to figure out the best means to defer the parsing of JavaScript on page X of my website, can you have a look", the individual asking it is, and will be, referred to this lecture.

Kittens, Yo. Kittens.

Lecture 5: Optimizing for Mobiles/Tablets (I.e. "High Latency" Devices)

Links:

- WP Touch (Free Version)
- WP Touch (PRO)

***I am in no way affiliated with, nor do I receive compensation from, WPtouch should you opt for the PRO version of their product.***

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn" (Benjamin Franklin).