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Why Choose Me?
If you are looking for speed, I live and breathe WordPress and WooCommerce performance. I provide tailored speed up services for your site on any type of hosting platform: shared, VPS or dedicated. I have sysadmin and systems engineering skills to provide various approaches. Together, we will squeeze all the speed we can out of your current hosting solution or find a new one that suits you better – usually while saving you money too!
Services
- General performance optimization for fast page load times
- Site and host migrations to get more resources and speed
- HTTP to HTTPS migrations covering all bases so Google doesn’t punish you!
- Database cleanups tailored for your site
- Infrastructure optimization for scaling your site
- Performance Troubleshooting to find out what’s slowing your site down with New Relic or alternatives!
- Custom server setups for maximum speed
- Custom WooCommerce performance solutions to speed up products and order searching
- Performance consultations if you want some guidance or clarity for your project
- Pleasing Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and the think with Google test
- Scaling solutions to handle thousands of concurrent users (see below for proof!) to get ready for Shark Tank
Proof of Results
Michael had some complaints from users that his site was taking too long to load. I managed to reduce his page load time from over 30 seconds.
After my optimizations it took 945 ms to load.
That is over 30x faster!, Michael and his visitors are much happier now!
A jewelry store named Unspoiled Jewels running WooCommerce came to me because they weren’t getting any sales. I ran some speed tests, before optimization it was taking 6.65 seconds to load.
After my optimizations it took 900 ms. The site size reduced from 5.7MB to 2.1MB to load.
That is 6x faster! They sold 4 items of jewelry that same week and are selling on average 1 product daily now!
Steve was having to deal with cancelled orders and missing payments daily because his store was running so slowly. He sent me this screenshot, how frustrating and heartbreaking as a store owner! His staff also hated doing any order administration because it was agonizingly slow
After we optimized the hosting, server and application, orders were going through like a dream and the admin team was no longer dreading doing their job in the backend!
Serious WordPress Scaling
Kevin had a hugely popular site that was crashing even with very high quality hosting. After we worked together his site was able to handle more than 4000 concurrent visitors without crashing – very stable!
Speed Fanatics
Christian had a fast site loading in 1 second he wanted even faster!
I managed to halve that to under 500ms
Pleasing Google’s Speed Tests
Pleasing Google can be challenging but with enough time and effort your site can be in the Excellent category for website speed just like mine!
With the right consulting and implementation you can even get your mobile score up in the green area on Google’s Lighthouse tool
Excellence in the eyes of Google can be yours so you even beat the top performers :)
Even on the new Google Lighthouse test you can get in the 90s
You can also read about the irony of Google Pagespeed Insights
Improving gtmetrix scores
Contentful First Paint is how quickly you see consumable visual content for your website. This is absolutely crucial to pleasing your visitors – we are visual creatures!
A contentful first pain(t) of 4.4 seconds is going to cost visitors and increase bounce rate.
After optimizations we can get that crucial contentful first paint to a super fast level like 0.6s!
Or even 248ms for my own site! Google loves faster rendering time
WordPress Admin Performance Benefits
Michael was also frustrated his wp-admin area was very slow. Who can blame him? Who wants to wait 15 seconds to manage their WordPress or WooCommerce site?
It should only take under 2 seconds in the wp-admin backend
Performance Troubleshooting
A very popular news site in Asia was so slow you could not even access the admin area. After I spent several hours troubleshooting the results blew the client (and myself) away!
Thanks to one of my favorite hosts for the New Relic screenshot – a fantastic company with great speed and quality support.
Database Cleanup
One client had an agonizingly slow wp-admin area because of a bloated database which was excruciating to work in.
It used to take 45 seconds to perform anything there
Now it takes around 200ms after a thorough database cleanup!
Take the Leap
If you are looking to take your WordPress or WooCommerce speed optimization to the next level, let’s talk. I have extensive experience with Linux servers as a sysadmin and systems engineer on Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and others. Server-side performance solutions like Apache, nginx, Varnish, Redis, memcached, Apache Solr and Elasticsearch are just a few of the technologies I work with daily. I can help you automate with scripting or help harden your site as well the way pros do it.
Work with WordPress Professionals
Tom Usborne from GeneratePress was my first client whom I helped move hosting to save $500 a month and improve the speed of his site. Tom has also implemented performance improvements to his themes based on my feedback. I am privileged to work with Frank Gossens (the creator of Autoptimize) to create new awesome plugins. Most recently, my volunteer performance work has been with Elementor who have been taking on my suggestions to help make Elementor even faster.
Free Time
In my free time I write tutorials for making WordPress faster on WP Bullet Guides and design plugins to make our sites more awesome via WP Bullet. I also weightlift, enjoy watching football and assist on various WordPress groups on Facebook.
Education
Psychology MA from University of St Andrews
Psychology MSc from University of Birmingham
Network Systems Engineer AP from EAL
Customer reviews
Mike did an amazing job for us! We were experiencing excruciatingly slow speeds on the backend and instability on the frontend. By the end of one day, Mike had reduced our page loads on our backend down from 1 minute to 3 seconds. Our frontend also stabilized and he eliminated the 502 errors. My staff is so excited that they no longer have to wait 30+ seconds for pages to load in WP Admin. Mike is a true professional; super knowledgeable, great communicator, and very accountable. We still have some work to do, but it's comforting to know that he is there as a resource. We will definitely be using Mike again.
Mike did a great job communicating his plan, his findings and proposing next steps. He was also helpful in discussing topics that were not directly related to the project. Most striking was Mike's honesty in proposing to drop the next steps since he believed (and he was right) that they wouldn't be cost effective and cheaper solutions were available. It is a pleasure working with a developer that isn't just out to write hours, but thinks of the client's needs and puts in extra effort out of his own curiosity. I look forward to working with Mike again in the future.
This is the second time I have hired Mike and he is always very responsive and has a genuine enthusiasm to help you solve your problems. You won't find anyone who is more knowledgeable on server configs and caching solutions than Mike, he will even educate your hosting company! He is an excellent communicator who takes the time to make sure you understand the problem at hand without jargon and he is a nice guy too. I highly recommend you hire Mike, he is worth every penny.
I had great communication from Mike, and I'm very happy with the service.
Thanks Mike for professional suggestion and nice service!
This is the second project with Mike and again he was great at diving in to figure out the problem and offer solutions. I would highly recommend Mike for any technical or troubleshooting WordPress problem.
Outstanding in every way you want to consider. Mike took our issue - that had very large "reputable" hosts baffled - and literally resolved all in a few hours. The result? A site that was loading in 15 seconds and timing out... to now loading in a little over a second. A pleasure to work with.
Mike was easy to schedule a call with and did a great job of handling a ton of questions we threw at him all at once. Looking forward to continued work with him.
I've hired lots of developers over the years, some good, some bad. Mike is the best I've ever worked with. He won't let you down.
Mike is the real deal, pure genius.
I've hired Mike several times over the past two years and he's always very quick to respond and willing to jump into any fire to help. Mike has excellent communications skills and style and is a pleasure to work with. He takes care of business! I cannot recommend him enough.