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Learn How to Make your Website Faster

Photographers have two main choices with their websites: Bury your head in the sand and try not to think about it or Learn how to make your website faster.

How To Speed Up your Website

I’m Paul Tansley a UK documentary wedding photographer who is also part nerd/geek. I’ve spent the last few years digging in my own website trying to work out why it runs so slowly. I don’t trust other people much, I’ve always been hands on and preferred to do things myself if I can. Whether that be building a wall, plumbing, electrics or working on my website. I’m hands on. If I don’t know how to do something, I research it and learn. I still don’t know everything, far from it. But I try and find out the people that do and I latch on to them, follow them, listen to their advice etc.

Learning how to speed up your website is a bit like learning how to cook, by reading an Italian cookbook. First thing you need to learn is how to speak Italian! Seems obvious, but if you cannot even read the signals that the speed tests are giving you – how are you going to be able to even begin to cook the food? So the first half of my course is dedicated to teaching you the language. Once you learn that – and for most of my clients, part 1 blows their mind, as what they thought was true is completely turned on its head. Part 2 then teaches you how to cook, now that you can read the book.

The thing is, about any language is at first it looks daunting, as you don’t understand any of the words. But when someone tells you what those words mean, you begin to see patterns. Things are repeated over and over. It’s the same words after all. And the words can be read. It’s not like learning Chinese, where you cannot even read the characters. Website stuff is all understandable, once you start to learn the basics. You don’t ever need to code stuff – I don’t. I don’t know how to code. It’s not important. But I do know what code is – and have half a clue what it might do. That is important, because that code is what is slowing down your site (partly).

Will I Speed up your Website?

I won’t, but you will, with my help and guidance.

I’m a great believer in learning to do things yourself. The reason is, speeding up your website, in a similar way to SEO of your website is something that you should understand. It doesn’t have to become an obsession. But understanding the basics means you will be in a far better position to adapt in the future to any changes that happen. You install a new plugin and your site slows dow. Do you really want to be paying someone to fix that – or would it not be better to understand what to test, how to look for things that might be slowing down your site and learn how to easily fix them.

Do I need any experience?

Nope. So long as you know how to log into your wordpress site (I can even show you how if necessary), then we can go from there. My advice is mainly based on certain plugins that certain website testing methods, that will enable you to speed up your website in the easiest way possible. With reproducible and testable results.

Topics Covered

How to test your website speed properly
Core Web Vitals and why they are so important
How to avoid common mistakes
How to test your hosting company’s speed
What plugins actually work to increase speed and why they work
How to keep on top of things in the future

Sign up for a 2 hour Zoom Chat, where I will teach you everything you need to know to make your website faster. Understanding website loading is actually pretty simple. But most people only know parts of the problem and not how to put it all together. I will give you all the tools you need to not only improve your site now, but keep it fast in the future. The course is split into 3 parts.

Part 1
I will teach you about what makes up a website. How to test a website properly using various tools. How to then diagnose your own website speed properly. So that you fully understand why your own website runs slowly. What do those warnings in GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights actually mean?

Part 2
I suggest ways of changing how your website loads. We talk through caching of websites. What items are important to serve first, how to delay other items to load later. Once you know what you are looking for in Part 1, you will then know why you want to use these tools in Part 2.

Part 3
We take a quick look at your website and I will give you some pointers of what I think you should tackle first. I also give ongoing support in a private Facebook group. So you will be able to keep up with new things as they change and ask further questions to your fellow speeders.

How to Speed up your Website

Damion’s Review

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I spent over 2 hours with Paul going through a range of speed related elements, a lot of which I did not know, or was mis-informed about. He opens up his website and plugins and walks through how he has applied his knowledge to his own site. The only downside is, I have a ton of website updates to make off the back of the call! Really insightful and helpful workshop.
Damion Mower
Damion Mower Photography

Liam’s Review

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I reached out to my friend Paul Tansley from Tansley Photography who offers a fantastic service to help you get your website ready for the May 2021 Google update. His knowledge has been on point and as you can see from our results, our site is in pretty good shape.
Liam Crawley
The Crawleys