Speeding Up Your WordPress Admin Area
As you all know 3001Web offers some of the fastest WordPress hosting available in the UK and the US. We are also more than adept at speeding up WordPress websites for your visitors. But what about your WordPress admin area?
Typically once logged into your admin area for your site things can slow down and extra seconds can cost you valuable time when working on your site. Slow loading admin pages can be a pain and are not really suitable for caching as you need to be able to see the latest data and settings as you work.
The Cause
When WordPress is first installed, the admin pages load pretty quickly especially on our super fast hosting but as you start to add plugins, posts, pages, or products your admin area can really start to slow down. The more data your site has to process to show you an admin page the longer these pages will take to load.
Most of the time this is caused by your choice of plugins. We have often said not all plugins are created equal and indeed some of the most popular plugins can be heavy on resources slowing things even further. Just because they are popular does not necessarily mean they are the best.
New WordPress Admin Speed Optimisation Service
We have been working for a while now on our own sites testing some of the heaviest plugins that impact admin speeds and researching equal or better replacements that will help speed things up for you.
We found the following plugins to be really heavy on resources and have sourced some excellent alternatives that will supercharge your admin speeds.
1. WordFence Security
When this was first released many years ago it really did not have that much impact on speed, indeed we have used this on a lot of sites we have built as it offers good protection and is free to use, however, over the years it has become more bloated with promotions for upgrades, remote calls for various functions and indeed some functions that are not really necessary. It can also have up to half a second impact on any uncached front-end pages like your customer login pages or shopping carts. Remember every 1-second delay can cost you 7% in sales or signups so this little half-second lag can cost you 3.5% which over a year could be considerable.
Our Alternative to WordFence
We have come up with an alternative to WordFence by replacing it with four much lighter plugins which when combined with our server-level security will secure your site without slowing it down.
BBQ Pro
This is a well-established and very secure site-level firewall for WordPress created by one of the worlds leading WordPress security experts. It is also the fastest WordPress firewall available. Unlike Yoast and other big companies, they charge a one-time fee for their pro plugin.
This plugin actually offers TWO firewalls within its programming and is truly excellent.
Were you to buy this yourself it would only cost you $20 one time, however, we can provide it to you for £7 one time under our developer license.
A lightweight plugin that protects plain email addresses and mailto links from email-harvesting robots. This can help stop potential hackers from guessing your admin email address. This is a Free Plugin
This is a free plugin that does an excellent job of protecting your WordPress login page from brute force attempts by hackers.
Black Hole For Bad Bots
This is a free plugin that does what it says on the tin, blocks bad bots that may try to harvest information to attack your site.
These four plugins combined with our server-level protection for your sites are more than enough to protect your site WITHOUT slowing it down.
2. YOAST SEO
Another plugin that is CPU heavy, has far too much bloat, and can have an impact on your site speed.
Our Alternative To Yoast
The SEO Framework. This is a much lighter plugin that uses AI to provide basic SEO optimisation. The plugin is free they do offer addons but the free version will take care of basic SEO for your site and further lighten your admin area load.
3 UPDRAFT PLUS (and other backup plugins)
Some backup plugins can be extremely sore on server resources and can literally bring your site to a standstill while backing up. Not to mention the fees they charge for storage and updates to the plugin.
Reminder!! If you are using one of these plugins you are not allowed to store your backups on the server it is against our terms of service so you will need to pay for some remote storage to save your backups to.
Our Alternative (as well as the server backups included in your hosting)
Yes, you have guessed it we have another lighter plugin for updates called Backup Guard. The free version allows you to back up to Dropbox only. The pro version allows you to back up to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and One Drive. The pro version is $39 per year were you to buy it yourself, we can provide it to you for £10 per year via our developer’s license.
By just switching out the above plugins you will see a serious increase in speeds inside your WordPress admin area. We can also optionally add some extra Redis caching to your site to further boost the admin speeds Redis is free.
In our tests, on lighter WordPress sites the average admin page load speed dropped from 5 seconds to between 1.5 and 2.6 seconds. On heavier sites from 8 plus seconds down to about 2-3 seconds.
This can be a real time-saver if you update your site regularly. If you would like us to speed up your WordPress admin area for you please pop in a support ticket and we will sort it out for you. We can implement any or all the above changes for you. Here are two options for you.
Option 1
Replace WordFence with BBQ Firewall Pro
Replace other backup plugins or add as an extra backup for you by installing Backup Guard Pro
Add Redis
Add Email Protector
Add Limit Login Attempts
Add Black Hole For Bad Bots
Replace Yoast with The SEO Framework
£25 first payment then £10 per year (this is for backup guard pro)
Option 2
Replace WordFence with BBQ Firewall Pro
Add Redis
Add Email Protector
Add Limit Login Attempts
Add Black Hole For Bad Bots
Replace Yoast with The SEO Framework
£15 one time payment
