How Hosting Choices Impact Website Speed: A Deep Dive with Bigscoots

**[00:00:00]** hello everyone this is the web talk show my name is arando preno and today I'm joined by sack a performance engineer from Big scoots how are you Zach hey how's it going thank you for joining us I'm very happy that we could get this call I very excited because we're going to try to tackle some topics that a lot of people don't get into which are related to how your site performs and why it can perform that way so I really appreciate you coming on the call today Zach you work at Big scoots in performance uh big scoots for those who don't know is a fantastic hosting company I use them for a bunch of our sites as well some other hosts but I can truly say that there is a big difference in support and performance with big scoots and other companies and that's why I particularly like uh big scoots for hosting um I have clients on on kinsta WP engine all sorts of different hosts even on WP Cloud but what I really like that I haven't found elsewhere is that your support team is next to none I mean you get an issue or just have a question you reach out to support and someone at least in my experience you always get someone in a high tier of knowledge to answer your request and get in that conversation going instead of canned responses and other things that uh I have seen before had experience with our company so very happy to be able to discuss with you what happens behind the scenes to make this all happen because it looks like magic from our stpoint so Zach how did you get into all this performance Etc uh so I started **[00:02:00]** at Big excuse in 2021 as just like a regular uh Linux systems administrator and then um in 2022 into 2023 I uh showed an interest in in helping customers with like performance-based problems you know like they fing core web vitals their checkout was slow whatever you want to go into and and I kind of got a um thrown into the fire I got kind of got promoted to to start working on performance stuff kind of one of the first people on the performance team and um I've just been working at that ever since um so that's like my history at Big scoots is I've kind of just been you know been there for essentially four years I guess you could say uh going on here soon um and then before that I was in like kind of the the the like kind of tech startup World here out on the west coast and things like that and then um um before that I was in the military but before I was in that in that um you know back I got involved in web hosting back in like 2005 when I was a teenager like in high school so I just I've I've been kind of off and on in the web posting industry I worked at a data center back then as well like when I was like 18 19 so I've been kind of all over the place um but I I feel like my experience overall has kind of helped me um you know kind of always no matter what job I've had or what role I've have always kind of made made sure things were as efficient as possible so I think kind of fit me that I was you know **[00:04:00]** kind of in this performance role now so I then that fits with with what I've perceived from Big scoots and and also got reiterated uh when I heard how the company got started and sort of the the metal beginnings of the hosting and then evolving into WordPress and it's the fact that you work or have worked with uh data centers and directly on Linux and performance at the lowest level not and only in the application layer gives you a very different perspective into how things work because a lot of people get stuck in the application layer and they're just like oh well let me just patch on a CDN or some caching and we we'll get into caching later on which is great and definitely necessary M but one needs to First figure out what's going on uh at the very basic level before patching on things that that will help you scale right and so that is great I'm very happy that to hear that that you have that experience because it's I'll give you an example for the listeners out there when we had a particular very Niche scenario with a customer website where we needed specific page to be I don't know regenerated or um purged from the cash or whatever for whatever reason whenever something specific happened if I asked any other host to help us with something like that they would be like no no our caching works this way you can Purge it automatically with a button based on just these specific rules but on beig scoots we would get an engineer on board and there would be like oh yeah yeah we can put a script on your server that does this whenever this other thing happens and **[00:06:00]** and they would know the inside out of not only the the WordPress site but also the infrastructure underneath the actual server and and what what's what's happening so I found great and can you speak to to that a little bit like how what makes you different sense that's a good thing so um obviously as you know we have our own Data Center and we own our own hardware and that's kind of like that's we can kind of get into that as well but um on top of that you know we have our own software that we use for on wo or manage WordPress hosting that we manage and control right we have our own software development team that is constantly working on that and then uh on top of that we have another a WordPress software engineer Samia who works on our big suits cache plug-in and other perform performance related topics interfering with uh interfacing with Cloud Flor Enterprise uh so we kind of control everything from top to bottom I mean we control it from all the way at the edge there in cloudflare all the way down to like the someone plugging in the network Port Port on the server and data center right so nice because we control everything in between uh like you said we can just control we control everything in the process so we can we can modify uh things in our cache plug-in you know let's say that you come to us and you have this um specific need or something like that and it's not even in our cache plugin and if we think it's worthwhile and and it'll help you out we will like you know uh deploy a a temporary version of the cash **[00:08:00]** plugin for you that has that rule and then we'll just release that for other customers at a later date right so we kind of really like to uh have that that customization I mean we still kind of like have a product right but we still like to to um offer and do whatever we can to make sure like our customers are taken care of so um yeah I mean we control everything in the process uh on the server everything you know we have customer that um you know they uh have like read and write speeds and the database is slowing down and stuff like that like we can just throw them on a different server in data center like it's and we have people there that can just do it right so I think that's really kind of our um our prow is that we control the entire process and and everything in the process so there's no like waiting on a third party or doing this or that to to get problems done so and and kind of reiterate on your point I when you first kind of talked about like you know a l all of our people that work with us are skilled we don't really have like entry level employees I mean not saying that we don't train people but I'm just saying like we we we kind of go for like the cream and the crop and try to get like the best people we can so that when you do get fun a problem you're just we're just addressing it right away so that's great I think that is one of the main reasons I wanted to have this conversation with someone from Big scoots and not another hosting **[00:10:00]** company and I happy to have anyone for any other company as well and we've host with other companies also but I think this the way you do it brings back to basic principles because you own the infrastructure right the hardware and so it's like if back then I had someone host my website and they added in their machine and I could call them up and say hey what's going on with this can you make this adjustment or something happens I somebody actually sees it happening in the in the monitoring and the logs and and make an adjustment quickly right like you were saying you can literally just move them to another box if necessary or scale horizontally or do whatever you need um in in a personalized manner which I think a lot of companies need especially a lot ofs businesses that are selling online some of them might be smaller businesses they can't afford to have a whole tech support staff and but maybe they are doing well or maybe suddenly they get a big traffic Spike or suddenly they get a lot of sales and if you're on any of these other sort of more scaled up hosting providers which they're great and I'll get into that as well I think there's a disconnect because for example if I go on K and I like Ina very much I I have many customers there and they they uh they do a good job but it's hosted on like you might be hosted on AWS or Google Cloud right and great because it scales but the problem is that you are generic you're just one of thousands of customers nobody knows who you are and you ask for support and it's all generic support **[00:12:00]** like we were talking about and the problem is not so much like yeah I want people to know who I am uh well while it's great that sometimes when I talk to Big scoots it's like hey AR and I know that person I've interacted with them before uh it it just allows you to do things much faster because they know the history right uh whereas in one of these spayer companies that doesn't happen but the the important thing of this I think is that you can do small adjustments like you were saying I need more memory because I'm paying a bunch of money for this server anywhere and for this particular reason I need a timeout that is longer for for this particular process in my website and they'll just say sorry this is a timeout this is the max you could do or hey I need more PHP workers and we might get into that as well and for those who are not technical we'll get into that but you want more PHP workers and they're like no no the limit is four you have to upgrade to another here to get more whereas on another host maybe big scoots you can say hey no there's no limit you can do how many many you need right or depending on on whatever that that may be the case right so I think just having this discussion with someone that actually knows what's going on and and what happens behind the scenes is a great idea because we can lay some of the groundwork for those who are just hosting their website anywhere just because they think they just need a host um to understand what can make uh website faster or slower and why **[00:14:00]** these things happen and why the different choices of Hosting provider uh might affect uh performance as well so getting into a bit more of the technical stuff if you're up for it the what happens on a WordPress page load I think nobody I mean a very small percentage of people really understand what happens when you load the URL into your browser and a WordPress page comes up like what happens behind the scenes uh could you Enlighten us a little bit um pretty much like oh I mean kind of this a technical question is like is it cached or is it uncashed right let's say it's noncash right okay yeah so um pretty much uh you're going to have WordPress is going to spawn like a a a process like say it's PHP FM and then it's going to generate the HTML and then it's going to go to the server and presented to um the visitor right so I'll give you example uh and not trying to make it too simple but you know like you know how on if you ever worked with like an old school like not old school but like a web server like Apache or engine X or anything like that and you go and you create like the index.html and it says hello world right like WordPress is essentially generating that on the Fly for the visitor when they when they load up your your your page or URL for that so right and I think that's a great example because if you go back to basic servers and the web when you go to a website the browser sees an index HTML and it loads it and it's just HTML that it reads and it shows it to **[00:16:00]** you and there might be some CSS to style it Etc but WordPress even just for the most basic page will do a ton of stuff because it's like you said generating it dynamically which means it has to look at its templates and and there's a bunch of hooks that that fired throughout the process and it's going to say okay where's my header it's going to either grab it from the database or from the file system and it's going to generate the HTML for the header and then what goes in the body what page am I on and then it's going to load that and it's going to do the footer so even for a very basic just homepage it has to do all that yep and some of those require database queries and some of those will have to do checks on like whether the user is locked in or not and some of these might spawn even other processes right so so it very quickly can become something that is uh complex and it's it's done in milliseconds at the end of the day but many other factors can come in and to affect This and like we were talking about uncashed and cash right and I'm not trying to get too much into this because I know I know we're early in the conversation but that's kind of like what the point of caching is and why so many hosting providers and Cloud flare and everyone recommends it even WordPress because itself because instead of every every time U uh somebody uh visits your website this process has to spawn and do everything you just said um it just the HTML is there and it just it's it's served to the visitor and **[00:18:00]** there's a lot a lot less processing so you know with a basic site um you know you're looking at cutting off you know the load significantly so um and that's you know a lot of cases um you know you see a website that's just getting slammed with traffic and they have no catching setup they may be able to do like 500 visits a a minute or something like that and then you just Implement even some basic caching and they're getting thousands without any problem the server is not sweating so um yeah I'm getting more in the performance side of things than the basics but that's that's great and and people should know this so there are very different levels of caching too and and for those who don't know what caching is it's like saas just saying there's but different levels but let's say at the edge if you're talking about Cloud your site might generate that page once give it to Cloud flare and then Cloud flare sort of stores it for a specified period of time and so everyone else who's going to visit the page from then on as long as there's no changes will'll see that copy of the page that's already rendered it has already been generated so your servant doesn't even know about these visits a bunch of times and so that sort of edge catching is is great because it takes like you said a tremendous load of of your server and but then it gets a little more complicated because some of these platforms might be something like e-commerce and you cannot cash everything because you've got products that change prices because of discounts uh it there's there's depending on the user if someone adds a cookie **[00:20:00]** because they added something to the cart now you cannot cat the whole page so what what happens then Zach H is it do you cash parts of it or how do you how does one manage cashing when when every user is different um you know in a Dynam like in a dynamic environment with e-commerce um I mean obviously certain elements are cash right like the the the assets right like on your CDN like you have your CSS and JS and things that can be that aren't changing can be cash right so that's one load off of things having to be served um and that's been out for like decades at this point so but um there is object caching um but to be honest with you in WordPress um and I and I'm I'm kind of kind of showing what big scoots is good at is that um we kind of like to throw horsepower at it I mean it there's nothing really beats having like if you have a a a checkout and you want to have like a really high clock speed on the server we do that for you and and that's that's always the way to get the fastest checkout I mean you can set up Obby caching we've set up object caching Pro we've done all these things for people and and you know um optimize redus like a million times trying to get things to be and you know the thing nothing beats clock speed and fast memory like and and fast uh you know hard drives and things like that so you know it's kind of like we go Bare Bones um and and we really just try to throw some horsepower so to speak so that's kind **[00:22:00]** of like what our approach is to it um I'm not saying you can't you know use other things to to speed it up but just in our experience working with a lot of different woocomerce and other Dynamic sites uh uh learn Dash and and member press and all these other things that have heavy loads it just sometimes you just can't be like good old bare metal clock speed just it's the best yeah I and you bring an excellent point the the thing about scaling there are multiple ways of scaling if you have a very basic site that everyone sees and it doesn't have to be basic let's say you have a news site but regardless everyone sees the same news sure you could strap on some good caching on it or maybe even object cach in some U scenarios and you can get millions of visitors with a very basic server right because everyone's viewing the same thing and you're just doing very small queries sometimes to regenerate the cash but a lot of people especially nowadays have highly Dynamic sites like you were saying woocommerce right member press learn Dash body boss uh body press any anything related to users having their own set of things that they're viewing that are unique to them if you have a little social network newsfeed on your site or eCommerce or e-learning then all that goes out the W not all of it but a lot of it goes out the window because you still have to process even if it's a little bit you still have to process all these either rest API requests or WP admin uh WP Ajax uh requests that that are hitting the server for little things like what are my points **[00:24:00]** uh what where am I in the course what is the new price what how does this coupon work right so even if you have everything set up you still at some point somewhere you have to run these processes so like you said that's where on highly Dynamic sites having the bare metal power changes things because you can process a ton of these maybe you spawn a bunch of BP workers and it's fine because each one will run a very short amount of time especially if you don't limit them and I want to get into this also this is one of the reasons I actually moved to B Scots originally for some of my clients the the fact that you have very fast clock speed servers and many PHP workers allows a site to be able to process many things basically at once so a lot of these requests come in and there's many people who can well not people PHP workers that can grab all these tasks and process them quickly because they has a high clock speed and just get them through the door and everyone's happy right whereas in a lot of these um sort of cloud scale Solutions the clock speed is slow and so the problem is that even though it can scale to whatever you want those processes take time to process and and then there's a lot of times there's limit on the amount of PHP workers you can have just because of how the infrastructure is set up right and so that many people don't know will affect memory usage as well so what what we saw happening with one of our customers was that another host they they would just suddenly get the memory out through the **[00:26:00]** roof and it was because the host was limiting their PHP worker count and so there were not enough PHP workers through this there was sort of this Quee of process that has to run and so the memory was like I don't know 200 megabytes or whatever per per visit and you just increase the number of PHP workers available and it went down to like 50 megabytes just the same same query same everything it's just the amount of P work PHP workers that were available yeah and so that is that is tremendous so could you talk about that a bit like why why would some hosting providers limit the number of PHP workers what why does that happen so you know I I haven't been in every hosting provider to tell you their backend but um the way I see it um is it depends on how their backend is set up in terms of like how they're limiting things so at Big scoots we're very traditional kind of old school in that you know we're putting if you sign up for like a wpo starter plan you're being put on a virtual machine and we can limit the numbers of CPUs and memory that you're assigned in hard drive space it's it's it's kind of a uh and and so for us that works very well and we're very close to bare metal and it it's it it's fast as you experience but um if if I give you a thousand PHP workers and you use them all and it I mean not that that it's a crazy amount but it would just You' hit the CPU limit and the memory limit and you wouldn't affect anybody else right so we don't need to limit **[00:28:00]** your PHP workers to control um uh you stepping on other customers on on that infrastructure okay but if you were to use like uh something uh infrastructure set that's more like horizontally scaled right like a kubernetes or uh something else similar to that where they may have like a containerization going on right where like the php's processing is processing happening in different container and but it's all like kind of a shared infrastructure or cluster uh they may need to limit the PHP workers just to prevent you from stepping on other customers in that same setup so that's the way I see it happening uh also it could just be like you are on kind of a shared server environment is another thing like where just like cpanel sort of I mean cpanel has Cloud Linux and stuff I won't get into that but um uh but generally just talking about like a gener shared server maybe they are sharing CPU and memory among their customers and it's not containerized but they still need to limit like in PHP fpm or whatever they're using um to those processes just to prevent stepping on each other so that's the way I see it why they would limit by that um but you know every provider has a different setup so I'm not trying to like you know say this is concrete or this is why it's happening but uh it's just more or less a way to control the amount of resources the customer is using on that infrastructure so for us we're setting it on the system level like we're setting it saying you get to you know you I'm just making these numbers up because we don't really have fixed CPU and memory numbers per **[00:30:00]** plan like if you need a little bit more to get that 250k visits we advertise we'll we'll bump it up but just say we we assign two CPU and four gigabytes of RAM that's kind of like what you're set up in or what's you're jailed in right so um Jail's a bad work to because it is an actual virtual machine it's not kfs and all this other stuff but um yeah we're we're we're limiting that and so um you know like you're saying though uh we like to control the PHP workers and not toine it because like you were saying sometimes uh it could be bad to have too many PHP workers and sometimes it could be good from a security aspect right so uh somebody could find a uh like a way to you know a Plugin or something to spawn a bunch of workers and time out your site all the time so um we kind of limit it you know I think we start like our base config is like 25 but if you need more you just submit a ticket and we'll give you more if you need less it's there's no like but I mean that's even funny because it's like some of these other companies will give you four yeah and if you do a staging environment they'll give you one and they don't tell you so you have one PHP worker and so you're on staging and you can never really develop properly on staging because it's tremendously slow and you run out of memory all the time and people don't know this and they're like why don't why can't I and so so yeah it's people end up working in production because it's so slow on staging **[00:32:00]** but it doesn't make sense staging should just work the same way and just lock it down such that uh it doesn't affect your visitors on regular yep hours right but anyway so i' I've seen that happen and then other things are like memory usage and and things like that it's very strange and I don't know if you can talk to this but I find and I haven't gotten a good response to this from anyone why will the same exact site have such a different load time amongst different hosting providers and I I don't mean cash like turnar off all caching all object cache CD everything just the the site itself just running and you're looking at the query monitor or whatever you're looking at the um what what the server render server generation uh time is and you go to one it's 0.5 seconds and you go to another one it's 1.2 and you go to another one and it's three and and these are similar similar servers or similar offerings why why is it so different and why can't we properly Benchmark something to see like well is my my site slow or is it that my site in particular on this infrastructure is slow and that's where I think it gets very confusing because it's like sure I run out my machine and for some reason the M1 Pro Max or whatever you run local on them they're blazing like extremely fast faster than any server um but then you put it on a server and it slows down quite a bit um that's fine but the same site on different servers or different hosting providers will perform very differently but then another site might perform better on another like on another combination **[00:34:00]** of Hosting providers so why why does that happen so there's a few there's a lot of things that could be happening but um I mean you got Hardware you got Network you got a lot of things going on but um something that's been common in web hosting and this is I'm just one part of it I'll get into other things but it's like overselling so um pretty much you can on a hypervisor right like like a a you may have a server that has 32 CPU and 64 gbt of RAM and you would think that you can only sell that much but realistically you could pretty much spawn as many virtual machines as you want on that server in the hypervisor right and hypervisor I'm talking about like whatever using uh Zen KVM or like you're using hyperv or getting into depends on the provider what they're using but um so you could have a certain provider that like they know that maybe only 30 or 40% of the customers are actually using the the resources that they are assigned so they may squeeze out a little bit more profit margin by overselling the server but then tra everyone neighbors are a little noisy sometimes so sometimes if it's a it's Black Friday and everyone's sit's getting hit or whatever um uh now all of the sudden things are a little bit slower because you know on the on the Node itself that there's you know things waiting to be processed on the CPU so um that's one thing overselling um and like I said I'm not saying it's all the case but also you know you could go to a different hosting provider and they could have one node that they just set up **[00:36:00]** two weeks ago and they've put like five customers on it and you go on it and there there's no overselling and because they haven't provisioned it yet and it's fast and great but then three months down the line it's slow because they've filled out their quota or whatever you want to call it on that on that node like I said I'm not saying every provider does this but if you kind of like look up overselling and web hosting on Google like you'll probably see a million articles about how this has been a problem since like the 90s posting providers doing this so that's actually a good point because it could actually be that it's not the site itself that like this site performs differently on these providers and this other one perform but there is that possibility but also it could be that just the the slot that you got in that moment is faster and if you would have put the other site there it would have been fast as well but then the next slot you got was already over provisioned or whatever and yeah and like I said I'm not trying to like I'm not trying to dog any hosting providers you know there's a lot out there that really have firm standing that say I'm not we're not going to oversell right a lot of your premium providers are like that uh it just it's something that you know kind of plagues um especially when you get into the lower cost and stuff like that so um that's one thing um second is just I mean Hardware like I mean you could you could have you could get on a um uh it's very very easy to mask like what CPU **[00:38:00]** you're on right so you could see that it's like 3.2 GHz or something but it's like a you know a e2030 from like 2011 or something that you're you're you're on so versus you know that clock speed on a modern processor where AMD Intel is going be a lot better right so um there's that Hardware uh differenti um you know are you on SS are mvme um uh things like that um network issues so um we've recently I mean network was good before but we've recently redid our entire network uh like I mean we even replac all the cables and everything like I mean complete ground up Network change and you know peering to different providers and I'm just talking about like ttfb and things like that so if you have like the and I'm not a network guy I'm just being I'm just being BL with you like I I know enough to like get in trouble right so but um you if you have like the right providers and you're and you're peering properly um you know if if say that data center may only have like one or two uh Network providers set up on it and like now you're all the way this is in Chicago and you're all the way in Los Angeles and and things aren't set up right with that provider that you're using then all of a sudden it's taking like 80 or 100 Ms to reach the data center versus that if things reped correctly and like I said I I'm I I'm sure some of my network people at my job are going to make fun of me for this but but uh but like if if the network set up properly and you're peering **[00:40:00]** right with your different providers and things like that then all of a sudden it's like 40 or 50 Ms and then in in the data center itself again like are all your networks set all your switches set up properly is is are you're not maxing or overloading anything um you know all every millisecond you can shave off um can really improve times so on the network onw that is that is a good point so milliseconds and time time to first fight for those who know the acronyms uh you were talking about uh the ttfb but every millisecond makes a difference since this is a very good point because like we were saying especially in Dynamic sites and I think this is where the most issues lie across providers you expect it to be fast like I'm hitting the server I'm getting something back but that's not the truth is it it's I'm hitting the server but then the page is asking it for something else and something else and something else to complete the request right and then if the delay between you and the server or the ISP and the server or the edge and the server is higher then those little gaps between those requests add up and suddenly you have like a second page load extra of just back and forth yeah and and I I won't get too like in depth I we can do this later but like um ttfb you know us in increasing ttfb improve increasing improving ttfb uh um has has such an impact for customers even on like the core web vital level uh because I mean if you can shave off 500 milliseconds that's going to affect all of your core web vitals in a **[00:42:00]** positive manner so uh yeah just improving that ttfb and cutting down all that talking back and forth um uh there's a lot of there's a lot of tricks uh to improve ttfb nowadays not just in the Ware and network level but I I think you're kind of more going on the kind of like base server why does this host perform better and this one doesn't and stuff like that um getting back on that for now um uh yeah hardware and network is definitely key and like I said because we own our own data center we own we own our own networking equipment everything's um you know we can kind of uh customize the solution for the customer to ensure uh they're as fast as possible and like if you if and and and like I said you know the idea that every hosting provider goes out and buys a thousand of the same servers is not the way it works right like you may have we may have a node that has um a lot of processors on a lot of CPU availability on it so it's like a an Intel Zeon but the clock speed's like 2.4 gigahertz on it right and that may work for a customer that needs a lot of a lot of processes to spawn right so we may allocate them more CPU but then you know let's say you have a woocommerce site or something like that we may provision you on a server with less a node with less CPU but higher clock speed so really it really depends and that's like our approach is we don't really try to pigeon hole you into one thing we will kind of see your site and if we I mean **[00:44:00]** switching into a different node is like a few clicks I mean it's it's really not a big deal so oh wow um yeah so we we do that quite quite regularly if we have to kind of make sure your website's going to perform and that's where we really like like to get in the weeds and look at the logs and look at how the Ser how your your service is performing how your websites loading um there's a lot of things that go in there on the back end that you know we're doing and every customer is really unique you just kind of have to make it work for them so that's I think where the value is because y every customer is unique and so if you adjust things for them it's going to make their site perform better you you don't need a blanket works for everyone approach it's it's better to segment and you can even if you're doing it like you're saying where hey this site needs less of this type of resource then you provision them here and if they need more of this other one you provision them there and so even your own resources are better utilized because some actually require the lower clock speed or some require the higher clock speed and so it it just makes more sense to do it that way it's some perhaps could say it's less scalable in like the extreme Scale Company size like I want to have millions of customers and manage them all yeah of course that could mean it's less scalable but but I mean it's not all about that it's also about providing the actual service people want yeah yeah and you know every if you have a **[00:46:00]** situation at any host where you're like oh I'm going to deal I'm GNA have a million people at check out on this day like and I need that to work like we will build a custom solution for you to make that work that there's there is you know I don't think you can take that and go to any hosting provider and it'll work without them setting up some sort of Enterprise setup with high availability and all that stuff it kind of gets uh you know unique but yeah we can do that too so I'm not trying to say that's not possible but yeah generally speaking your your normal like um e-commerce person that just wants to you know set up their selling like blankets or something on their site and they get you know 50 checkouts a day and and and you know we can customize we can put them we can kind of make sure they're working well versus we have somebody that has a static blog that they get a lot of traffic but they don't really I mean the edge caching is what's important to them not really the the hard Ware they're on uh we can kind of or or customize things or maybe they have you know more HX calls there's a lot of things it's hard to like I said pigeon hole into one one specific thing because uh there's a lot of um a lot of variables per every customer so we just kind of make it work for them based on their setup and what we're seeing at and and I saw that in practice with one of our customers we had a launch last year and I was very impressed because what happened was I heard **[00:48:00]** from ex SCS from from a performance expert and said okay I'll give him a try because of the recommendation so we set everything up and the launch was coming and I let your team know MH and so you expect okay yeah sure they know right any other but what really happened was that the morning of yes it was a big launch there was a celebrity that was doing a live stream and just the C was getting just smashed by by hundreds of of people at a time and so transactions coming through and everything but what surprised me was that the big scoots team was proactively monitoring the launch so they were looking at their systems and they would tell me what if something was close to a range so I would get these updates from Justin or like you wouldn't expect on the in the company to like oh everything's looking good the thresholds are a little closer but we're fine and then a little later hey the things are heating up uh but we're let's I saw this particular plugin is using a lot of your resources you don't need it right now let's just take it off and they so this whole experience was a breeze because everything worked because there was actually someone looking at it and and taking the time to make sure that it was a success whereas I'm sure everywhere else because I've had experiences like that before something were to happen let's say they wouldn't have done that eventually maybe the memory would have run out then the side would have gone down people have Kit with 502s and then we would have to reach support and then we would be like what's happening oh I have this **[00:50:00]** issue oh let me get you with someone and then would like 10 minutes later maybe I'm talking with someone maybe they restart I don't know right and but in this case they could even provision more resources they could make thing and so that going back to the basics we were talking about at the beginning the fact that you own the infrastructure and that you're there and you can see what's happening is such a different experience than than than what I'm what I'm used to and I just think these days it's very good to have this this type of scenario because you I don't know you're it's real right it's like real people uh doing real things to make your business work so I don't know I think that's that's a great approach yeah if you if you tell us you're having a busy traffic you're expecting something we'll just we can literally we'll go like internally we'll go and set on us you tell us what time it's going to happen and we'll create a ticket and we'll set on our our reminder like internally and and ass sisab and we'll keep an eye on it and that's that's really common I mean I see that happen all the time you know we've had a couple Shark Tank launches and stuff like that that we've helped people out so yeah you know or you know they again like you said a celebrity or or uh they're going to be featured in some some news station you know we've done a lot of that so yeah like you said we can go in the slow logging and we can we can uh figure out like what plugin is is eating up time right like it's hitting **[00:52:00]** a 20 or 30 second timeout and we're like oh wow that's uh you know a uh a social uh not social Shar but trying to give an example of a pluging that wouldn't be useful but it's kind of hard off the cuff but like uh no I know what you mean like something that you don't need at that moment because of the circumstan but it's eating up all this all this CPU or whatever or or database queries and we're like just just deactivate it and like we we activate it tomorrow you know and and like I said we've done that for a lot of customers um so um yeah we like to do that it's actually kind of fun um it's that's one of those things that like you know it's kind of fun to do I think it's hard to hard to convince people not to want to do that ticket so it's always cool to kind of optimize things and and see how real traffic is is interacting with the hardware and the network and stuff so I don't think anyone expects like someone at at the data center or um Hardware level or network level to to actually be excited about this but I understand completely what you mean like yeah these are people who actually enjoy what they do and looking at a server being like consumed by a swarm of users and seeing how it responds and how you can make it survive it's like a game right so if you really love what you're doing then you're gonna do a good job and the customers are going to be really happy so y it's a win-win yep yep I I I I thinking makes I I I was you **[00:54:00]** say it doesn't matter the plugin but like you know broken link Checker you know that plugin it runs a lot of like it it it's it's notorious for like we had I had a customer like a couple weeks ago where they they had a hight traffic event and they submitt a ticket and and I'm like well do you really need like all the broken link Checker to run all its checks right now like two in the afternoon for you like let's let's let's deactivate this plugin right so yeah with stuff like that happens real world example of like us just recommending something in the short term to get get on the road so and even yeah I just look sounds like I'm just bracing weak school but really it's really for everyone it's a great company just the experience so I'll give another example just just before we get into like the caching stuff but uh last what two days one of our customer sites was it's a relatively new site so it was which I know it gets 300 visits per day or whatever and suddenly it got 30,000 visits like in a second and a few minutes Twitter and so I was like well it's not hosted on big scoots it's hosted on wp.com right and so it's hosted there because there's a reason why it's hosted there anyway the it worked it scaled fine so you say okay well why doesn't just everyone use WP Cloud I think it's support at the end of the day uh I mean apart from other things that we've discussed but for this is a very good example of yeah it works and it'll I mean in this case it worked it's scaled but if you **[00:56:00]** ever have an issue like fortunately we didn't have an issue but uh few weeks ago we had a small issue and we reached out and it took hours before we heard back from them the First Response not even like they're checking on something no it took hours before we got the first response and so as a company that supports other companies with their websites May if you're a freelancer or an agency or whatever you you cannot depend on a hosting company that will not give you pretty much immediate support especially when something happens and so that made it very scary for me to be like well hosting on something like that well sure not we see that it can scale but what if I need something like there's an emergency you're you're on your own right yeah um yeah it and it's it depends on the the scope of support that the the that provider is willing to do um it's kind of a you know the the whole like manage ing term is such a loose term it doesn't really mean anything anymore yeah um and and and and kind of um yeah it depends because like there is support at web hosting support out there that's fast just like we are but they're very siloed where the like the web server is online the database is online oh the plugin slower something like that we're not developers like oh well that's you're your problem right so and versus like we we kind of try to um I mean we're not going to do development work for you that's not what I'm saying but but we try to bridge that app where we kind of have even if the person working on your ticket **[00:58:00]** isn't a developer we have somebody that has some experience there and we can kind of interpret things and how things are going and just keep your your your website online uh and and figure out things on a software level as well and and you know this is something I see kind of changing overall in the WordPress hosting Community not just a big I mean we've been doing this since big scoot started but um you know it used to be like 20 years ago or 10 years ago like web hosting is very siloed it was very like the sisin is a sisin and developer is developer and they do not not cross path whatsoever and and and uh uh you know this is a plug-in issue oh you go to the developer I'm not dealing with that your site's slow not my problem right and then then you have um and then you have the developer who's like oh this the the server slow uh not my problem go talk to cism so we kind of like try to try to meld those two together and and have you know a team that's that can address both of those problems um I said we're not like saying we're going to write code for you or anything but I'm just say I'll actually give you an excellent example in back in June we have this customer that runs body boss M for those who don't know it's a it's like a fork of body press that gives you news feed capability for your users it's very nice but uh this particular site doesn't have the body boss theme which gives you all the nice Styles it just uses some of their nice features like automatic uh refreshes **[01:00:00]** and notifications and media and stuff like that so in order to make it look nice unfortunately body boss does not give you just the styles for the plugin itself you have to use their theme so pretty much you have to grab the Styles and put them on on a style sheet on your site uh for it to look similar to how they have it and so this was one of those scenarios there was an update all right and suddenly the news feed like submit button or the comment button one of those stopped working so client is freaking out because they're getting customers saying hey it doesn't it's a nice community so everyone's like hey just a heads up it's uh the button's not working no haters fortunately um and so what you would think immediately is like oh the JavaScript something broke with the update or whatever right uh or an Ajax call I don't know but I reached out just as a hey did you see something change some like just as a I don't know precautionary measure I sent the ticket Sam ya grabbed it mhm he comes back to me like 2 minutes later and says oh no look at the CSS and this file you're overriding pointer events on this class and so the the events are not coming through back to the button it was a CSS thing like he found the code and like a, 1400 line CSS code that was overriding the pointer events such that with the update it it wasn't working and I was like what like I didn't I and and obviously he then said well we have this package where we can actually help with um and it's great but I was blown away **[01:02:00]** because I wasn't expecting it I know it's not provided support uh but the fact that he knew how to find it like you were saying uh it's not he's going to do development work but the fact that he knew where to look into a plugin into an override of a plugin and figure out the situation and give us back a response that actually helped us fix it in a matter of minutes instead of the typical experience that most of you have seen or had which is oh it's a third party thing we cannot help you with that or hey have you try disabling all of your plugins and seeing if there's a you're like I'm in the middle of something so I was impressed so I know exactly what you mean and and I think that's just marvelous yeah yeah but I I I do think having that on our team and our ability to do that is kind of why like if you reach out to us and you're having an issue obviously we're going to respond immediately but we're actually going to know how to address the issue regardless of whether it's a hardware software or network problem we can we can figure it out so yeah that's that's great I and for for those listening it's I mean don't expect like he said big scoots to to uh develop for you or anything but uh the support is is tremendously fantastic so let's talk about caching at the edge and Cloud flare for those who don't know Cloud flare has a Content delivery Network that can place all your assets around the world so that they're closer to your users so users get them from those points that are closest to them **[01:04:00]** instead of directly from your server so you reduce the load from your server but also it does a ton of other things right very very nice uh caching mechanisms that it has how does your integration with Cloud cloudfare differ from me getting like a free Cloud fur plan and just hooking it up to the site okay so that's a so we have what's called our big scoots cash plugin and it integrates with Cloud's API to um pretty much like if you update a post or if you update a page it will tell cloudflare to clear the cache automatically for that URL or the whole site whatever you want to do um and that's what that's what's unique about our integration is that we are controlling that we control the TTL pages that shouldn't be cashed like if you don't want checkout to be cashed as example um you would you would you could Define that in our plugin so that's the biggest the biggest benefit of our caching plugin is that so if you were to just go sign up for a free cloudflare account and enable like cash everything right on there when you update your pages your posts it's not cloudfare is not going to know that that was updated so it's just going to look like it's updated you're going have to either manually go in and clear Cloud FL every time which is cumbersome um or just not use the Integrations so that's really like our our strength there and then you know all the F we have a lot of controls too like we have um uh hooks where if certain plugins fire we'll we'll see they'll know to clearly cache we have a lot of things going on in **[01:06:00]** that plugin that um it's kind of like it could be a whole other podcast of in of itself so I'm not I'm trying to I'm really like scratching the surface here uh but allows you to control a lot of fine details that you wouldn't necessarily I mean you could do it on cloud flare but the amount of like Json and stuff you'd be writing to do it all would be insane so we're kind of just automating all of that for you uh so that's that's our that's our strength with our our integration to Cloud flare um also uh we have cloudflare as one of our uh Network providers in our data center so you're pretty much and Cloud flare has a pop in the same building we're in so like literally like your data is going internally in the data center like to Cloud flare it's not it's shaving off milliseconds yeah fiber it's shaving off milliseconds so that integration there alone uh is is is worth noting uh and then you know we we have because we have it at the network level we have like way more I mean not not that uh the standard free free Cloud flare even prade ones can't handle a Dos attack but like our because we're at the network level with them we can handle stuff even if you're not even using Cloud flare even if you don't have Cloud flare account you're using like GoDaddy DNS or something you still have that like dos protection there there's a lot of things I know we're going on caching but I'm just saying like our integration with Cloud flare is like I don't think any other provider has the same level of integration that we have with them **[01:08:00]** so I agree I don't I don't think so let's again not just talking about big scoots but in in thisen this is very important for people to understand clout is fantastic I've used it for many years you can open a free account and set it up as your CDN they're even is a little option where it almost it's like having a static site you can enable it for WordPress and it's like five bucks a month or whatever and it just caches everything and it's tremendously fast so if you have a static site or a site that doesn't move a lot or it's not very Dynamic you can use that and it's great tremendously fast but it doesn't work for dynamic sites very well and so doing everything that sack was just talking about where it will clear it will do like the extreme caching that it does but will clear it upon a little adjustment on a page or for everything or Bing hooks or stuff like that that is where the sweet stuff is that is where if you had your own Tech Team in your company managing this this huge website that's what they would be doing for you right and so it's it's amazing when you have it if you've seen it in action but it's very hard to do on your own if you're a small business or or just an agency so having a work through that plugin is it's crazy I I I wasn't aware of it before MH and I wasn't aware of the performance benefits before I used it but we were getting like non-cached page yeah everyone can know whatever the speed of a non-cached Pages even if you had a slow site there was this **[01:10:00]** particular very slow elementary site that that was like I don't know it might take 2 seconds to load MH right or or 3 seconds for certain pages when the plugin went through its magic the page load times were like 20 milliseconds MH or less and it was like what how how is this working and it and it would not have stale cach like it would just always be what you needed to see on the page so yeah that's the beauty of edge caching is that like in I if people don't really know so it's it's Cloud flare as an example and there's other CDN out there Bunny and cloudfront and stuff and they all kind of offer a similar approach to this but Cloud flare essentially has all these locations across the world and um let's say you're in Europe right you're in London or France or something like that and you want to request a a website that's like let's say a big scoots customer well in an old school before all this existed you would have to your connection would have to go all the way to Chicago then all the way back however many times right and that's where you would see those like 100 200 300 Ms load times to go across the world well what cloud flare is doing is they're caching your page at the edge so instead of if you're in Paris and cloudfare has a location in Paris you're getting the HTML from the website and other assets from the server cloud has in Paris so that that automation there and what we're doing with big scoots is we are telling that Paris location if there's an update to the page or whatever to clear out just **[01:12:00]** that URL or that element or that that asset just for that page that like that they that that visitor in France isn't seeing a different version of your site than somebody that's in America so we're just kind of automating all that um with our plugin and other Integrations we have with Cloud flare so we're we're we're like fully on board with Cloud flare we use them a lot but I mean you can do the same thing with other if you're not on there's other CDN all host us us have similar things some of them even have their own plugins and stuff like that but you know I just know like how our setup is it's very dialed in so yeah it saves you a lot of time as a consumer to have that and and of course if if you're somewhere else you could do this on your own it's good that you know that it exists so if you really want to make your site extremely fast using leveraging these things that cloud flare uh and other companies like like you saying like bunny or Cloud Florence offer you is is a great thing to do on top of what we've discussed before right you first want to make sure that your site is as Nimble as possible you don't want your site loading in 3 seconds just because even if there's no traffic right if that happens then there's probably a lot of things going on that are taking out a lot of resources how how long how fast would you say a typical WordPress like a very basic install of Wordpress with nothing on it with load on like without casing or like a couple hundred Ms right so so a lot **[01:14:00]** of people don't expect this they would think oh wordplace slow whatever because by the time they see WordPress set up for them it's typically already has a bunch of plugins doing a bunch of stuff right and and this is what one of the things I really like about the block editor and fullsite editing and all this that a lot of the the the blocks now don't load all of the CSS and JavaScript on every page they just load it on whatever it's actually the pl on the page and so this will slowly uh allow plugin companies to build in this way such that just having a form plugging on your site doesn't mean that every page in the site is going to load all the JavaScript for that right and so that is going to help which brings me to my next question so people often think plugins are bad like not bad but oh you have many plugins that's why your side is slow while it could be true it actually really depends on what the plugin is doing and how it's bu right so how how can I've plugin effect the page load time the page load time so it really it it yeah depends on the plugin um you mean you kind of already said it but like so say you have a a form plugin and it just it decides to load uh the form js on every page of your site but you only have the form on one page right um that's slowing down that's that's the amount of JavaScript that's loading in the in the in the uh visitor's browser is going to be increased increas your total blocking time it could affect your imp core web vital **[01:16:00]** there's a lot of things there that could affect so um but if you had a plugin that was smart like you said that or using the block editor but just in general like if you have a a a form plugin that knows okay the form short code's only on this page we're only going to load the CSS and the JS for the form on this page that's a better plugin to use because it's it's it's going to speed things up reduce the amount of assets that are being loaded right so you're just trying reduce the amount of things are being loaded and then like I said the plugin ecosystem is very big so it's kind of hard to like I'm trying to give a example like I said um that broken link Checker plugin right is example right that's a that's looking for like internal content making sure internal linking is is is working and like if you reference this URL and another article it's looking for that and that's a great plugin to have if you have like 8,000 posts and you're trying to make sure all your content's like always kind of working well and and and and your is good and that rard for internal linking and stuff but if you have like eight posts on your website you probably don't need that plugin right like it's it's it's is overkill right so um uh and also um for page load I'm trying to think of what else I obviously you want a caching plug in right like we're were talking about like you want to catch things um things that would negative I'm thinking of things examples that would negatively affect page load um I mean this is kind of a **[01:18:00]** a touchy subject but like a lot of these page Builders you see out there like you see Elementor divy Avada theme fusion um Beaver Builder all these things they are notorious for loading and there some of them are getting better I'm not trying to dog them all but but they're notorious for loading everything everywhere all the time you know and and and that can really affect your overall page speed your performance page load everything and trying to avoid I mean there there's a strength to them right because they're easy to use if you have a customer that just wants a drag and drop builder for their website it's kind of hard to beat it I totally get that but um you know if you're if you're building out a site that needs to perform very well those can really negatively affect your overall performance and Page loads so avoiding those um and then um because because if you use something like say Bas ex like genesis right or Cadence right those themes not saying every child theme of those is perfect either but generally speaking something built on like genesis or Cadence is only going to load what it needs on that page it's just the way it's it's built um and versus you know again Elementor divy all these other things out there they're kind of notorious for and they are getting a little bit better like they've elementors in introduced um some of its um uh page speed of their experiments and stuff like that so there's there's things there to fix it divvy has some options to improve things as well so they're getting better um and then uh getting a little bit off page load just talking about plugins real quick **[01:20:00]** like security is a big thing right like if you're not using a plugin don't keep it because all all it takes is that plug-in author getting like hit by a bus tomorrow not saying that should happen but like God forbid but uh and then all of a sudden that plugin is not maintained and then you've had it installed on your site for three years and it's never been updated and then all of a sudden there's uh you know something compromised in it and the plug-in author can't patch it and now your website just like wide open to the world for this exploit to happen uh and even on maintained plugins there is security exploits that happen all the time if you check like the word the popular WordPress blogs I mean there's every day there's an article about 30,000 sites were compromised blah blah blah blah plug in that that is definitely so the the less footprint you can have like just install what you need don't just have this there and if it's deactivated you still remove it like that's kind of like one of those things well that's that's that's important so everyone note this you don't only have to deactivate it because if you deactivate it yeah those functions might not work might they might not be initialized but the code is still there in those directories right yep yep better to delete them if you are not using them fortunately even core is starting to let you know of of some of these things uh you have some things that you don't need here get rid of this blah blah blah which is nice speaking of security and I don't I don't mean to ask something if it's another department that's **[01:22:00]** fine I do Delvin I'm not like the expert expert but I we do sell like our performance and Security package that's what I want to ask about so we've used word fence for for a very long time for many customers now we just use performance Security package which is great so what for for those who don't know word fence and may many of you do is a plugin that will scan your site for vulnerabilities it might scan the plugins for and compare it to to lists uh for with with current exploits and things like that and it might even if you have their service it might even patch uh the site itself before the the the exploit gets fixed in the actual plugin sometimes right and so it's a good tool to have but it is very slow sometimes so it if especially if you have a lot of requests coming into your site it might really slow down and and um affect your your performance and so there are alternatives to that right like big has their performance Security package how can aost provide that level of security uh where the person doesn't need a word fence or sucur or anything like that uh and instead have it be managed by the host how does that work uh so there's a lot of different variables this but um uh I'll start on the server level and then I'll kind of go there so on the server level like the host can have um like a security config of like saying these directories can run these files in them right so like your uh uploads directory like your image directory shouldn't have like PHP files in them that are running right so that's just a **[01:24:00]** really basic thing you can do and I I I think even like a barebone c panel install on like digital Ocean or something probably has a lot of those rules in there right so it's pretty basic stuff and don't quote me on that but I'm just saying like most site it's pretty common to have that um and like we expand on that like at Big scoots where we have kind of our own security rules that we added on to uh there and we even like whiteless plugins right cuz like we don't want um some randomly named plugin to like be able to run PHP on your site so we kind of uh have certain files that we we allow we have like this master list of plugins we allow on our service that's maintained by somebody else not me but um so that's kind of there on the on the basics and they could go into that way more depth than I can and then um on the um application Level like you said like you can use something like word fence um we prefer patch stack for customers uh because patch stack um actually virtually patches the code so rather than trying to catch it with a wa right it's it's preventing that malicious code from running so uh like instead of looking at a query right like like a wa is looking at a URL or a query and trying to block that this is actually like just not letting it run at all like you could hit it as many times for the exploit and it's not going to it's not going to happen and then um getting off that that application Level you have like Cloud flare or security or or **[01:26:00]** these other services that a lot of hosts provide as well which is a wa or web application to firewall and word friends has a wa and patchak has a wa too but essentially the the web application firewall is just looking for certain queries or or a multitude of things and blocking those from happening known exploits and they kind of have like a uh they set up a um it's been a while honey not Honey Buckets uh uh they set up a trap I forgot honey yeah Hy honey pot and they set up a trap on various sites and they see what what are these scammers or these exploiters doing to websites across the internet and then they see the rules and they kind of implement that in their W and that's like what cloud flare and security and these big security companies are doing uh so yeah as a host there's kind of a multitud level right like they got to offer on the server level right preventing certain files from running in directories they shouldn't uh make sure file permin and ownership is good right all the kind of really basic like sisam and type of level stuff and then you have your your kind of your plugins or whatever you want to run on that level and then you're off and the cool thing about Cloud flare right is you get the web application firewall now on their free plan so you could essentially deploy that on any site for free it's not like a like a you don't have to have a plugin it's not going to slow anything down uh so that's something that's kind of nice that you can do it's not going to catch everything but it'll catch a **[01:28:00]** majority of things uh you know we see I've seen personally have seen mult multiple sites where like they were not using Cloud flare and this plugin gets this list gets released on on uh some WordPress blog that says 5 million sites are exposed to this and I'll see all these sites that are running like Bare Bones GoDaddy an BNS or something and not using Cloud Flare's wa and they all get compromise and I'll see everything on cloud flare not even get touched even though they didn't have word fence they didn't have anything it just Cloud flare caught it like they they approach it so there's a there's a lot of strength there I'm not I'm not trying to turn this podcast into a cloudflare uh Sales Event either but but it's definitely they're good they they do well what they do they do well and I have seen it where even some customers have seen like I don't know they have this plugin that is trying to do a legit query but it's a weird query and it'll get flagged by Cloud flare so it's impressive because it's actually they're on they're admins they're on the site they're doing something in the plugin and it might be modifying Aquaria database query or something and it won't work and then you go into your Cloud panel with free Cloud mind you you go into the panel and you see that that uh that event and where it's blocking it it's say telling you why and what why it thought that was supposed to be block and yeah so and and you can you can whitelist that user or whatever which is a good idea instead of allowing it for everyone you just say okay for this **[01:30:00]** IP it's fine or or whatever but yeah you bring up a good point if if you can offload some of this to the hosting provider or the edge then you don't have to see all those so you don't have to have that internal audit with word or something like that that's constantly checking every visit because that's also some more processing that's happening on every visit whereas if it's just offloaded somewhere else you don't you you don't even this seos right so yeah and like I said I'm a big believer in patch stack um I I I I I've used in their product for a long time and also like I I was in the Work Camp in Port Portland and stuff and hang hung out with them and stuff they're great guys like they really know what they're doing um and Patch stack like they um I just like the fact that they're they're patching the vulnerability like at the at where it lies rather than relying on some scanner or W or something to catch it they're solving the problem I mean so that that to me is um uh is worth looking into if you're looking for some some more software like I said we include we include patch stack with our performance and security plans uh but you know I'm not trying to make this too much of a sales podcast but it works I I we that's what I use now uh whenever I have someone on big scoots I don't use word anymore I just use that because I feel it's faster but also I don't know I feel I feel a bit safer knowing that someone is monitoring and and Patch stack they they do very good stuff so **[01:32:00]** so I I think it's fine and I do like word fence like if you if I was hosting anywhere else I might do word fence just like that's the first thing I install because I don't feel secure right but if if you I think it's nice to feel secure out of the box like I could just have a manila WordPress install and not need to install security on it immediately because I trust the infrastructure I think that's that's nice but uh obviously you have some security but yeah and and on our even on our like our talk about performance security plan on our Cloud Floor Enterprise set up you have like an advanced wa that's even more the rules are way stricter than the free wa that you get with Cloud flare so it's kind of like something that we've kind of tweaked and made our own rule set and and adjusted things and and uh I I think cloud flare has a more um they add things from their honey pots and stuff more um proactively in their Enterprise setup as well so it's another layer of of protection that we offer and again that other hosts there other there's other hosts that have cloudfl Enterprise Integration as well like engine and stuff like that so but yeah there's a lot there's a lot of uh cool stuff out there cool technology so why why do some plugins you were talking about like the JavaScript which is okay that's client side and and and some of those JavaScript events are even going to send Ajax uh queries back to the the server and and that'll affect the maybe not the visit but the the the rest of the service experience but there's also the **[01:34:00]** actual PHP code that runs within the plugins so why do some plugins slow down the site just by like not even looking at the page but just server render time it slows it off you turn off the plugin every page loads faster turn it off it turn on again it goes slower and it's because it's processing all of these this PHP code everywhere like we were saying um but but some of them don't like there's some B massive plugins that don't affect performance at all but then there's others like woo that like just just Rings down like a second and a half uh so what uh is there a way for a plugin to not load all its code or or not run its code if if it shouldn't or like who's yeah or is there a way to if you already have pling that you know is slow to have it not load on every page because you know that it's just going to load on like checkout um or or is that just wishful thinking um this is like a it really depends on the situation too like um this is kind of going into like more hardcoree like engineering like software engineering stuff but um like that I'm not too versed on but um yeah I mean it really depends like I I I I know real world examples that I've seen so I'll talk about that right like um uh there is a plugin out there and I totally forget the name but it's because I'm you know uh I don't do a lot of podcasts but but uh uh so but uh there's a plugin out there that like if you visit the site it it dynamically generates the images **[01:36:00]** and optimizes them right right and this fires like an Ajax call and does all these things on the back end and the page can't be cached right um and this is like notorious plug-in that causes issues um it it'll like it'll it'll it'll present all the the image file names with like a query string on the end so Cloud flare bypasses them there's it it's just like a great way to overload your server right so uh just like we could identify that and figure out okay this plugin's causing that it's probably not the best example I'm just trying to kind of give an idea of like a of of how some plugins are more performant than others it just depends on what they're trying to do um if they're trying to process a lot of things or they're trying to um you know a w Commerce checkout there's a lot of things going on right right in the checkout I mean they got to write that data to the database they have to uh talk to stripe or whatever payment process processor is they have to um you know update the product quantity they have to do a lot of things when a checkout is occurring right so um that sometimes you can't avoid it um but what I find strange is there are plugins that do more than woocommerce y but that don't affect all pages so woocommerce being as great as it is and it's getting better especially with the blocks you just enable it or disable it and the whole site slows down considerably maybe 500 milliseconds or more and that just happens across the board and I wonder like why I mean obviously they they need to make it better but **[01:38:00]** uh it's it's one of those things where there has to be a solution you know perf matters the tool yes I very familiar with per it's it it has a very for those who don't know it has it's very good performance and hasn't tool um you have to tweak it quite a bit but it's very helpful especially for what what Sak was talking about earlier about JavaScript like you can get rid of the JavaScript on any page based on like I don't want this plugin to load etc etc the JavaScript in the CSS you can just make it not load the assets at all which is great but I've always wondered like if wouldn't it be nice if there was something like that but that would actually disable the the code the plugin code uh completely from from running and you know how the health and security health and troubleshooting plugin works yeah the the core one a little bit I mean it's it's it's a nice plugin because if you're having issues you just you as the admin you click on a plugin it'll disable everything and just keep that or you can enable five of them or 10 of them but it loads the pages and it it'll just load that code so I wonder why can't we do something like that where I could say in all these other pages I don't care about not loading this plugin at all like forget it exists and only load it at checkout or at a certain yeah I mean you can kind of do that like I said with a third party plugin like perf matters right so but they don't they don't disable the the whole plugins code they they take out JavaScript **[01:40:00]** and and some other assets but but the the code itself still runs not like the health and troubleshooting playing that one actually kills it completely so I don't know if it's just I don't know I don't know if it's possible if anyone knows that would maybe have a new product idea or something that that would be SW yeah because it's a lot of times like you actually really need that plugin and they're not going to change it anytime soon because they're a beast and but you you don't need the functionality everywhere else and so you could just turn it off you're talking about like I mean you do you run a lot like buddy boss sites and stuff like that yeah some some like body boss would be a good example notorious one for that yeah yeah and then work W Commerce learn that the events calendar Yes Man the events calendar you turn it on and just just brings it down and I like it I I like what what the company does but the it's just really really slow and not the event Pages it's just everywhere every page actually the event page slows fast but everything else that has nothing to do with it it it just slows it down so it would be nice if I could say no events calendar anywhere on the site except the event page the create event page or whatever I don't mind because we're expecting that but I don't know I've never heard of anything that does that so if anyone knows about that that would be that would be swell yeah um yeah there's a lot there's a lot of things that you wish you could do sometimes with WordPress and but you can **[01:42:00]** do a lot I mean it's way it's way more powerful even than it was five years ago so it's kind of crazy how things have evolved but um I uh you mentioned perf matters that's kind of like you know as one of the performance Engineers that's a tool that I find myself in like 6 hours out of my 8 hour day so I'm very familiar with with uh with perf matters um just cuz I optimize a lot of sites using it um so yeah I mean if you want to get into application I know uh level performance and improving page speed in core web vitals that's kind of like my bread and butter too so but yeah so how how does because I know for some sites you enable per miters and you just go in and tweak and remove anything that you don't need which is still a very big help but I've seen scenarios where where it's hard right so even for someone like your team it's like oh no but this s is too Dynamic it has too many plugins or whatever so it's very hard to actually set everything up in a way where it's going to be stable right so what what's the suggestion there should should we just try to use less plugins or in general well in general yes but um that's a hard one you know um there's there's different approaches to things so so um yeah I mean it really try to make your site as lightweight as possible I mean it's always the best approach but if you have a heavy Dynamic site um obviously there's SEO impacts to this but sometimes we can recommend um uh uh putting something on a subdomain right so **[01:44:00]** and just separating out entirely right because that can that that or in a directory a subdirectory right so like say you have a uh a form like or buddy boss something is you say you have a message board it'd be better to be like form.com and then you can literally put that form on a completely separate server from the from your static site uh and that way your static site with your blog articles and stuff that's like producing your inbound traffic is um uh you know fast as any other static WordPress blog would be and then your discussion form or buddy boss or learn Dash or whatever is separated out and then way um it's more or less like just running the plugins you need for that so you're kind of just separating things out that's something we kind of recommend sometimes but obviously there is the SEO impact there you know if if you have a private membership it's not really going to matter right because it's not like Google's indexing these pages but you have like a message board and you have all this inbound traffic for these message or questions or whatever you have on there you know that's not really our question our thing to advise you on but it's just something that we we we uh it could be an impact in why some people want to keep it all on one site and there's also like you know if if they have to separate things out I mean you're looking at like some Sometimes some major database Administration work that has to happen to kind of there's a lot of things that could happen there so it just depends on um on what you're trying to do uh every **[01:46:00]** Situation's different so yeah but I do see yeah that that actually being a good idea for some scenarios like you're saying private communities yeah would would that work let's say multi sites if you run a multisite and you have like the main site and then maybe a subsite has the body boss the community or whatever would the page loads on the on one of the sites be affected by by that not not obviously but the traffic yes but I mean the page load on one page of one site on the multi site does not load anything from another site in the multi site that is not part of that site right if they have separate plugins that are active yeah um I'm not a fan of multi-site personally but uh like for performance purpos purposes but um yeah I I still think it would be better just to have separate sites separate separate WordPress installs entirely on different servers I mean or or that that that would be the best the most performing approach I would ADV on and is there is there a an efficient way to keep users in sync such that people could just go back and forth without having to set up like yeah so I don't real I don't I've seen a lot of our um customers with certain like membership sites and stuff do have a little widget that they can put like in the top right of the site where where you can see if you're logged in and stuff like that to the membership portal um but it's it's for the the subdirectory site so or subdomain site so um it it's it's situational dependent but I have seen that work um and it's EI whether it's **[01:48:00]** a custom implementation or it's um uh something that one of those plugins offer I'm not entirely sure but yeah I have seen that happen and this is kind of best case I get it that some people have sites that they can't separate out and they just want it to be all in one and we we you know we we'll make it work we'll we'll put you on a a fast server and we'll optimize things as best we can tell can and tell you what plugins are causing problems and things like that so um like I said earlier in this chat it's it's all situational we'll just kind of we'll figure it out together so that's great I think that's what people should take from this it's when you're looking for a hosting company you should well first make sure your site is optimized on its own if you can host it locally and see that everything works and it's fast then okay now it's time to choose a hosting company and when you're choosing a hosting company make sure that you are getting what your paying for in the sense that you understand what they're offering or try to understand maybe try to talk with their with their sales team or even even uh support um and and see what level of support you're getting I think that's the most important thing after it working right but if it works support is the the most important thing in my opinion because if you don't have support from your hosting company then if something happens you're going to be in trouble and minutes off of a day especially a busy day like the one that's coming up um you get downtime on Black Friday and that's **[01:50:00]** ton of money that that's left on the table and so you definitely want a company that will give you the support that you deserve um at that point big scoots fantastic for for support um there are other companies as well that have good support but what sack has been talking about if you can find a company like what big scoots does obviously big scoots it's a great company uh but if you find just look for someone who actually considers you in their decisions for your site right like you were saying there there might be some adjustments that they can make to make your site more performant based on what you need there might be a different um configuration of a server for what you need you might not need a dedicated server or you might need a dedicated server based on your uh um particular scenario and what I've seen with with big scoots is you can talk to their team and let them know what the footprint looks like in your site and they will tell you H you don't need a dedicated server you need this or you do need or you need two redundant servers or whatever and I think that's very important to consider especially if you're growing your business through your site because a lot of companies will say it it might be a million dollar like multi-million dollar company and they still want to pay $50 a month for hosting you're like doesn't make sense like if you are selling make sure you're on something that will hold up if something happens because if not it's going to cost you a lot more yeah right so I think this this is all very interesting and we like you said **[01:52:00]** we could have gone into a lot of more technical stuff uh that we we can definitely go on uh on another podcast but I I think it's it's a a good portion of it to leave people with the understanding of some of the things that one needs to consider we talked about plugins and the how the queries work and why does it matter if your host has PHP workers or not or memory or why sometimes you might need a higher clock speed for your server and why sometimes you may not so I hope this has been helpful for for people and I want to thank you Zach for coming on and sharing your knowledge uh where can people find you if they want to reach out or or big scoots in general are you on Twitter or X or any other networks yeah Twitter has I I'm bad I'm not really on social media but um uh big scoots itself they um have on all the platforms I mean we have a live chat on our website you can just like hop in and talk to us we're you know we don't have chat Bots we're always human so uh you know anytime you can come in thing and if you're a customer you can submit a ticket like if you want us to your side or look at things anytime just let us know so excellent and I can vouch for that to um Katie and team uh it's like live chat always real people always happy to help um and sometimes they even recognize you which is always an an interesting thing to see from a hosting company and and supporting T yeah tickets um for those who haven't worked with big scoots **[01:54:00]** if you ever do work with big scoots um you might find it different that it you have to submit a ticket but I've had the experience that submitting a ticket on big scoots gets you a response faster from a person who knows their stuff than a live chat will on other so and the big thing it's amazing the big thing is like we can see your your all your history and our ticketing system of problems you've had and it just it gives us like a quick like we we can see like your entire customer experience and set up and everything when you submit a ticket not that live chat support software can't do that in certain places but for us it just like you submit a ticket we're like on top of it we know exactly what's happening we're verified like and for us personally the kind of the old school ticket thing ticket desk or help desk works for us for our the way we we run our business so well sack I really appreciate you coming on when I got the recommendation for big scoots I did not know who big scoots was I hadn't heard about the company now you hear about them more but uh but then I found that a lot of very high traffic and very performance heavy websites use big scoots so you're very big in the space but it's not like everyone knows Go Daddy right or or WP or kid or whatever and I I just feel it's a fantastic brand um excellent support and this is not a paid podcast by by any means but I I really have had the most Wonder experience with them um and so really recommend big scoot to anyone **[01:56:00]** who's