FAQ

After you place your order we will usually be in contact with you within 24 hours (during the work week). After we receive the site information form you fill out after you place an order, you will be put into queue.

From this point, the length of time in which your site is processed depends on three factors:

• a.) how many sites are ahead of you in the queue,

• b.) how quickly you respond to our request to send us the login detail to your hosting and your WordPress site,

• c.) if your site consists of any challenges that cause our work to take longer, such as an online store with many products, or a hosting company that makes things difficult.

In general, we are able to process your site within one week of receiving your login information.

If anything arises where the speed optimization will take longer than usual, we will be sure to inform you as to the delay.

If you take a look at our DIY WordPress Speed Optimization Guide page, you'll see a detailed list of exactly what we do to make sites such as yours run as fast as possible.

The difference between our Standard and Premium packages is only a few line items (image delivery network setup; Cloudflare installation, setup, and tweaking; and page-specific code loading), but we definitely recommend the Premium package for e-Commerce sites, larger websites, and for those that want to squeeze every last bit of speed out of their site, thus increasing SEO ranking and optimizing the user experience.

We strongly encourage all of our clients to perform a full site file and database backup (either manually, with a WordPress plugin, or in your cPanel or hosting backend) before requesting a Site Speed Optimization package from us.

We always make sure to do the same on our end before we touch anything on the site, just in case.

Regardless, sometimes things go wrong, and the site is adversely affected and/or is made temporarily unusable. In such cases we revert to the backup of your site as soon as possible, then diagnose what caused the issue.

We will notify you if any unexpected downtime occurs during the course of our optimizations.

Always make sure to notify us if you will be making any edits to the site, or if you have anything important going on where the site must remain 100% stable for the time being, and we'll resume our work afterward.

You can just do it yourself! That's why we provide our DIY WordPress Speed Optimization Guide for free to everyone.

You are welcome to read through the very steps we employ in making WordPress websites as fast as possible, and to try it for yourself should you wish.

However, many people are not comfortable doing it themselves, or don't have the time to perform all of the steps themselves. In those cases, you can rely on our years of expertise to get it done right without the hassle.

We will generally just need your WordPress login information (an administrator-level account), as well as the login information to your hosting company backend and/or cPanel.

Occasionally we may need your URL registrar information, your CDN provider (if applicable), or other such services. We'll notify you directly in case we need anything in addition to what we already have.

There is no hard and fast rule as to what constitutes a website that is "fast enough", but most familiar with the field of page speed measuring would agree that it is best if your pages load under two seconds, and great if they load under one second. Thus, we use that as a loose goal for the websites we work on.

Want to see how fast your website is? There are plenty of different services out there that measure website page load speed, but a recognized leader in the field is a service called GTMetrix. Go ahead and visit their site, enter your URL (try both your home page as well as one of your sub pages, as they can be quite different) to see how it stacks up.

Keep in mind though that this can depend on many factors, such as the amount of content on your pages or your web hosting--that can not easily be changed, or is not a part of our WordPress Speed Optimization service (although we can assist with things such as hosting migrations for an additional hourly rate).

It is a rare case that we cannot speed up your website, especially if you come to us with a page load time in excess of two seconds (with the higher the number meaning we have more and more room to help you out).

However, it does happen on occasion that we cannot make any meaningful budge in your page load speed, no matter how hard we try ("meaningful" meaning , at minimum, in excess of a 10% increase in load speed).

Usually these scenarios pop up when hosting the website on a very low-cost, budget host, which constricts our ability to move the needle much (we can assist in helping you switch hosts if needed, at an hourly rate—just let us know). Other reasons for this can include too many plugins (we've seen sites in excess of 50+ plugins operating at the same time), or a  poorly configured/broken server (if running on a self-managed VPS system, or in a Windows hosting environment).

In case we are unable to sufficiently increase your site load time, we offer a Money-Back Guarantee where we will refund you in full after notifying you of options available (if applicable), and you choosing to not proceed any further.

In the instance where we are unable to sufficiently increase your site load time (at least a 10% or more improvement based on initial GTMetrix speed readings), we offer a Money-Back Guarantee where we will refund you in full after notifying you of options available (if applicable), if you then choose to not proceed any further.

Due to a huge number of factors involved—many of which we cannot assess before we go into the back-end of your website and hosting— we are unable to state that we will improve your Google Pagespeed score to XX or above, or to say we will increase your page load speed by XX% or more. It just wouldn't be truthful statement given our lack of knowledge before delving into your site.

If any other website speed service makes  such promises, we wouldn't recommend doing business with them.

We do, however, have a Money-Back Guarantee, where if we cannot improve your page load time by 10% or more (based on initial GTMetrix page speed results assessed by our team and sent to you before the project is begun), we can offer you your money back in full.

Our expertise has been built on top of our work with WordPress websites over the past twelve years or so. Because of the nature of the WordPress ecosystem (including plugins), and the huge adoption rate throughout the world, we are able to offer this Speed Optimization Service at such a low price. With non-WordPress websites we are faced with much more manual labor, and  need to adjust our pricing accordingly (often double or triple what we charge for WordPress-based websites).

We will take a look at your hosting configuration when initially assessing your site (before making any alterations). If we determine that your hosting plan (or company) is a major issue that could prevent you from getting much further in regard to improving your load times, we will notify you of the fact.

From there it is up to you—you can change hosting companies/plans, or not. (Oftentimes in such situations, you can achive a noticeable speed increase just by switching hosts/plans.)

If you need help in deciding which host to choose, etc., just let us know and we will offer you our professional opinion. If you require assistance in migrating your website to a new host, we can help you for an additional hourly fee.

We have assisted many people and organizations with WordPress e-Commerce setups, including the very popular WooCommerce store plugin.

Note that you should always be choosing the Premium Speed Optimization Package if you are running an online store, as they require a bit more finesse in terms of properly optimizing them.

In most instances there is no need to visibly change how the website looks or operates in order to increase the load speed significantly.

There may be a very slight lowering of image quality (when we implement image compression algorithms in order to decrease file sizes), but it is not visible to the average website visitor.

However, in any case where we feel a slight change could improve things, we'll let you know and ask for your permission before changing anything.

Search engines such as Google are placing more and more importance on the speed and usability of mobile websites nowadays, so we definitely take that into consideration when measuring page load times and performing speed optimization.

However, there are still a good number of viewers who use desktop PCs and laptops to visit websites regularly, and because of that we focus on both mobile and desktop loading times when performing our services.

We do not anticipate any long-term outages during the course of performing our Speed Optimization service on your WordPress website.

However, short-term outages may take place when updating certain parts of your website or server environment, as well as during post-optimization testing.

Always make sure to notify us if you will be making any edits to the site, or if you have anything important going on where the site must remain 100% stable for the time being, and we'll resume our work afterward.

We perform a full assessment of your site using the GTMetrix online website speed measuring service before starting your optimization service. Once we have the results, we send you the results in PDF format via email for your perusal, then get to work.

After we have completed your website optimization, we'll perform another set of speed tests, and send those to you as well. Comparing the before and after results, you'll see that we successfully sped p your website.

We provide support in regard to fixing any issues we may have caused (but not noticed during initial testing) for a period of one month post-speed optimization service.

We are also happy to answer any questions you may have during this one-month period.

If you need any additional support past this period of time, we charge an hourly rate, billed in thirty-minute increments.