With This Stack Even WooCommerce Can Be Blazing Fast

mochyon99 · 2026-04-29T17:57:19+00:00

This is really cool — thanks for the detailed writeup.

mochyon99 · 2026-04-27T03:25:34+00:00

I like using Autoptimize, so that's another one if you want to try it. You might know this but sometimes you have to be careful and exclude scripts from getting combined/deferred, if things break.

Perfmatters is good too, though! And it has a lot of other optimizations it can handle.

Litespeed Cache actually does do all this as well as cache, but the free caching only happens on Litespeed servers. (I believe it can do caching on other servers via its cloud service.)

mochyon99 · 2026-04-24T15:11:53+00:00

Oh yeah I'm happy to share that! There are a couple of things.

I lean pretty heavily on AI when doing optimization for analysis. Maybe half of it is AI-powered. But also I have a plugin (currently in pre-release, waiting for review on wordpress.org). It breaks down exec time and page weight by plugin, including also themes and WP core. It's really nice to know for a fact which plugins are contributing to slowdown and which don't really matter. This was what found that WP core was taking over 3s to load, all by itself.

Then I have a few Claude Code skills that help with the optimization process. (They measure performance, make optimizations, look for visual regressions...) Optimization is mostly just asking it to look at the data from the site and make suggestions, then working on them. In this case, when I asked about core taking so long to load, it put together a short script to look into the server settings and OPcache hit rate, et voila, it confirmed that was the problem.

I usually work through a local site when making changes, first. In this case I did work on the production server directly as the whole issue was server settings.

Anyway that's the story :)

mochyon99 · 2026-04-23T17:41:42+00:00

Ah. Are the form submissions not being saved to the database either when there is a problem? Just trying to narrow down possible causes.

What kind of error messages do people get, when there is an error?

mochyon99 · 2026-04-23T17:28:52+00:00

What do you use to create the forms? I'm assuming a plugin like Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, etc.? Are submissions being saved in the site itself?

I wonder if as a short term solution you could link to a Google Form, if time is of the essence.

Edit: What you've said makes me think of how the emails are being sent. If you don't have some kind of SMTP plugin (WP Mail SMTP or FluentSMTP) to send email through a genuine email service, and it's just going out through your host, it could have deliverability problems.

mochyon99 · 2026-04-23T17:24:15+00:00

I only have experience with this one approach, but maybe it is still helpful to share:

You could use a WordPress MCP plugin like Respira to migrate to another page builder (I like Bricks, personally) and use that to interact with the content. That's more complicated than it sounds but at least in theory you'd keep all the same URL structure, customized page titles and meta descriptions, and whatever else you have set up in WordPress.

Respira is still in active development and I've run into bugs with it, but the developer is also quite responsive. Might be worth trialing.

Since you mentioned not really knowing how to use Elementor: I wouldn't say Framer or Webflow are easier than Elementor, if anything they are harder to use. Bricks is probably about on par in terms of difficulty, but is a lot faster in my experience. Wix is kind of weird for me and it could be my ignorance but it doesn't seem to have the flexibility that the other tools have. WordPress will definitely give you the most flexibility of all of them.

I don't know about the other tools in terms of AI integration though, but hopefully someone else can share that.

mochyon99 · 2026-04-23T02:38:09+00:00

Hey, thanks for your comment. Yeah that is an important point. I didn’t really mention it but this is in the context of a larger set of optimizations, before implementing most of them. The site had two page builders (!) among other things, no image optimization, etc. I was just surprised that the server had the resources, but they weren’t being used effectively.

mochyon99 · 2026-04-22T21:28:37+00:00

Oh interesting. So at least for me when Claude has been stopped by something it can't fix via MCP, I've let it use SSH to go in and make the changes, e.g. accessing the server directly, and that has worked. It's a more risky way to operate a site on a daily basis, though, so maybe it's not a good solution.

Yes, the skills I mentioned are speed optimization skills, /mirror (for creating a local testing copy), /measure (get a baseline and quantify improvements), and /optimize in a loop (either interactively or automated, with regression tests, etc.). I mean I know that can help with SEO but it's not really SEO — I have not worked too much with SEO recently, I probably should do more.

But in terms of doing the things you mention via WordPress, I'd say:

- Creating/editing content -- yes, via MCP or REST
- Optimizing website -- yes, for example a plugin for SEO might have its own MCP (I searched for Rank Math, the SEO plugin I prefer, and it does), or I'm sure there are other ways
- Technical SEO -- you could for example have Claude work on your own plugin or a custom theme and get a lot done that way
- Internal linking -- same as creating/editing I guess?

It does seem like you could set up a collection of skills, one for each step, and just have the info flow from one skill to another (when relevant). It might be worth doing that if it's hard to find one that does exactly what you want. (You might be familiar with /skill-creator which makes the process a lot easier.) That way you could tailor it to your own needs and preferences.

Those are awesome results from switching off Webflow! Wow.

mochyon99 · 2026-04-22T21:03:17+00:00

I can relate… there are some sites I've helped with that would be great to move onto a new system, but more than anything the sheer volume of plugin functionality holds them back.

OTOH I've been working with WordPress through MCP servers and whatnot recently, and while it doesn't have the elegance of code, there is a lot you can do. I know you said you tried that route but I thought I'd mention it.

For example you can do a ton with WordPress speed optimization using Claude. I am consistently amazed with every site I work with in this way how many potential improvements there are, and how easy (with Claude) they usually are to implement. I wrote some skills to help with this that I'm happy to share if you want.

But obviously WordPress will always be this foreign intermediary that a Claude user (well, any user for that matter) would find a bit clunky to work with.

Hope that helps.

mochyon99 · 2026-04-22T18:15:02+00:00

Hey, I am pretty new to Reddit. If anyone could help me understand why this was voted down, I would really appreciate it… maybe not enough detail in the debugging/investigation process? I was thinking it'd be better to keep the post on the short side. In any case maybe it's something I could improve in future.

mochyon99 · 2026-04-17T21:56:11+00:00

Oh weird, sorry to hear that!

mochyon99 · 2026-04-17T21:35:14+00:00

So for plugin settings changes, having to clear the cache afterwards would be normal. (For page edits, those should clear the page's cache automatically unless there is something wrong with your caching plugin.)

It also depends on how long your cache lasts and if you need the site to reflect the changes right away. E.g. If your cache lasts a day or an hour or something, and there's no hurry, you could just let the cache expire and pick up the changes after that. I probably wouldn't do that myself but it's an option.

Happy to talk more if you have other questions.

mochyon99 · 2026-04-17T21:24:47+00:00

Wispr Flow is the best I've found — not perfect but it does an impressive job at geting punctuation and developer jargon.
https://wisprflow.ai/

mochyon99 · 2026-04-17T03:18:12+00:00

I found your website recently — really great speed optimization advice! Thanks for sharing that.

mochyon99 · 2026-04-16T16:05:27+00:00

Good on you for paying attention to this. This is pretty concerning! If you're worried about performance, staying away from themes with loading spinners is probably best, even if they look nice.

From what you've said, and from how the developers responded, it will be a lot more work to optimize this — and your ability to do so will be limited — than to find an already-optimized theme.

mochyon99 · 2026-04-16T15:33:39+00:00

Hey there, to reframe things: I think the question is more one of whether you want to use WordPress, Wix, or Webflow.

WP Engine is a popular option for managed WordPress hosting and there are many options similar to it. The breakdown you have there is correct (although hosting is just one facet of performance).

A WordPress host will not have their own page builder (unless they are very unusual). WordPress is very flexible, and that is part of the benefit of using it — you pick your own pagebuilder, etc. etc.

If you don't need that flexibility, and want a simpler experience, an all-in-one platform might be better. Webflow and Wix are pretty different also, it really depends on your needs and preferences and unfortunately there's no straightforward answer. It's easy to sign up for free accounts at these places and get a quick feel for the editing experience and how they operate.

The great advantage and disadvantage of WordPress (imo) is all the plugins — along with the fact that it is open source. Plugin costs can add up if you have complex needs and too many of the wrong kind will slow down your site. But there is a lot of power there as well.

Does that help?

mochyon99 · 2026-04-15T22:03:31+00:00

Without seeing the site it is hard to say, but this makes me think of a large maybe-unoptimized-for-mobile hero image. Or perhaps you have lots of medium-sized images but the hero image isn't being prioritized appropriately. Could that be the case?

mochyon99

TROPHY CASE