This is covering the spread part of the Fandall podcast network Pretty fun a slate of baseball games a four or two night over at Fandall sportsbook We're gonna go across a diamond all the way We're talking money lines strikeout props and even a couple of Home run props that I like for today two money lines three strikeout props to home run props all available at Fandall sportsbook And all ones I like quite a bit We'll break those down why I'm into them and what we should do with them over at Fandall sportsbook welcome on into covering the spread That's right here on the Fandall podcast network and number fire comm My name is Jim Sonnis. I am a senior writer and analyst for number fire here to break down this Monday MLB slave breaking down where my numbers are showing value over at Fandall sportsbook in my top bets of the night We'll dig on into the money lines first then go strikeout props Home run props and also recap last week But first a reminder to make sure you're subscribed to covering the spread wherever you get your podcast big week this week You're on the show our full NFL draft prop betting preview with Dr. Ed Fang is coming up tomorrow I've had on to break down his favorite props We have not yet discussed here on the show for Thursday's NFL draft on Wednesday Branding a do a little swing by talk about some golf Well, let's talk NBA playoffs here. We'll have NHL playoffs this week all of that right here in the same feed So just search for covering the spread wherever you get your podcast or find this over on the Fandall YouTube page Hit subscribe there They feel like what you hear leave us a five star rating or give us a thumbs up The NBA playoffs are here and you can get in on the action right from first tip with Fandall right now All customers can get a no sweat same game parlay every weekend when you bet the NBA playoffs That's right Just place a three-plus leg same game parlay or same game parlay plus on any NBA playoff game You'll get bonus bets back if you don't win There's no better place to bet all the playoff action than America's number one sports book head of the fandall app And get a no sweat same game parlay every weekend of the NBA playoffs Fandall official sports betting partner of the NBA must be 21 plus and president select states Fandall is offering online sports wagering in Kansas under an agreement with Kansas Star Casino LLC Bonus issued is not the trouble bonus bets that expire seven days after receipt Restrictions apply see terms at sportsbook.fandall.com gambling problem call 1-800 gambler or visit fandall.com Rg and Massachusetts hope is here gambling helpline MA.org or call<PHONE_NUMBER> for 24 seven support in New York 1-877-8 hope and wire text open why in Arizona 1-800 next step or text next step to 5334 2 in Connecticut 1-888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org slash chat in indiana 1-809 with it in Wyoming in Kansas 1-805-224-700 or in Kansas KS gambling health.com Louisiana is 1-877-770 stop in Maryland MD gambling health.org and in West Virginia go to 1-800 gambler.net let's dig in here to this nlb monday's play and start things off with the two money lines that I like the first one is in a tarantino I like the white socks at plus 144 taking on the blue jays here my model puts the white socks win odds at 44.7 percent their implied odds of plus 144 or 41 percent and honestly for me this was a bit of a surprise because my model was low on the white socks coming into this year it has not told me to bet them super often thus far so seeing them pop up as being a value did catch me by surprise I think it may be due to the disconnect between Lanslin's results so far this year and some of the underlying numbers now I say some intentionally there because not all of them are positive his era is 7.59 but quality strikeout rates not too many walks for Lanslin he is letting up too much hard contact which is why his expected era at baseball savannah 6.16 but that number takes a bit longer to stabilize than plate discipline numbers anything with bad at ball numbers will take longer to stabilize than plate discipline numbers chris bassett on the opposing side has had two consecutive good starts wanting it to try which you can discount other one though against houston which is a decent offense I think there's enough here for me to bite on the white socks at this number so the white socks money line plus 144 again I've got that at 44.7 percent win I think their quality better today so the white socks the first team I want to turn to for tonight the second one is actually going to be a bit later and this one is going to be the san francisco giants there plus 106 here against the st louis cardinals now this was even money earlier on this morning over at fan will for the giants it is moved a bit towards the cardinals but I think that was more so to get in line with the rest of the market because the giants typically plus 105 across the board regardless whether it's even money plus 106 I have value on the giants because my numbers have them as favored in this game 53.3 percent win odds here alex cob getting the start for the giants he has looked lights out with his new slider so far this year he's got a 2.90 skill interactive era across four starts he is letting up hard contact which we do not like but a lot of that hard contact is on the ground and the hard contact rate I'm using is baseball savants hard contact rate which means an exit below 95 plus miles per hour and 95 is bad regardless but it's less bad when it's on the ground and cob has a 59 percent ground ball rate across those four starts he does face a very tough offense and the cardinals for tonight even against righties are not as good as lethal as they are against lefties but they're still very good against righties a 117 WRC plus and the current active roster since the start of last year so they're definitely tough but again I think that cobs ground ball right helps keep things in check here they're at home I feel comfortable giving the giants slight edge here so it has moved to plus 106 maybe keep an eye on that market see if we can get maybe a little bit to 110 or so but even at 106 even if it goes back to even even money I still think there's value in the giants so the giants to me a good money line bet for today so the two money lines I like across baseball for today I got the white socks at plus 144 and the giants at plus 106 based on the current odds at fan dual sportsbook strikeout props there are three of them my favorite one is going to be in the tigers versus brewers game I want to check this one first to make sure it is still there because it was a different number in other books but it is still there as of right now that is Matthew Boyd under five and a half strikeouts at minus 148 now minus 148 is laying a pretty big number on an under at five and a half but I do feel really good in this one because you look at other books this number is at four and a half elsewhere it is plus money on the under but I think it should be four and a half versus five and a half Boyd has yet to have more than four strikeouts so far this year his max pitch count is 82 so that pitch count could spike in this game but he's on the road facing the brewers they've got some pretty solid right he's like William Petraeus quite a bit will be Adamus guys like that it's not the world's best match not the worst either but it's not the best Boyd has had some success moving back into the rotation but it's I think I think at least all been due to his suppression of hard contact that's a great thing to have as a pitcher because contact suppression is a skill it matters it's a great thing to have but it's not going to get you strikeouts he has been you know 344 so far this year I have Boyd projected to go above that at 4.20 for tonight but I still think that there is good value on the under at five and a half so again minus 148 is definitely a lot to lay if that were to go down to four and a half I do have him as a little bit as a favorite to go under four and a half as well so if this number moves down to four and a half or if you can't bet at fan duel I would see some value on under four and a half but I prefer to lay the juice at minus 148 under five and a half because to me having two strikeouts in wiggle room or 1.8 strikeouts wiggle room is better than having less than that at a better number so Matthew Boyd under five and a half minus 148 the first bet in terms of strikeouts for tonight the second one is in a rematch of a matchup we saw about 11 days ago that is Johnny Brito facing off against the Minnesota twins the first matchup did not go well for Brito and I like his under her tonight under four and a half for Brito is minus 38 in the strikeout department and it's not just that twins game Brito has had more than three strikeouts just one so far this year and this is at four and a half one of those poor showings was against Minnesota if you remember that game was one where Edward Julian made his debut and the twins have like 16 home runs in the first inning Brito went two-thirds of knitting no strikeouts one walk seven earned runs now he faces them again in this time he's on the road now the caveat there is it's extremely cold tonight in Minneapolis which does favor pitching versus hitting so that could aid Brito a decent amount but the twins have gotten Jorge Polanco back since that time there's an outside chance to be Alex Kurilak we back to I have Brito projected for a 3.38 strikeouts so you know kind of like Boyd it is a lot to lay minus 138 but I think that's justified here so Brito under four and a half strikeouts minus 138 hasn't had a ton so far this year repeat matchup on the road twins getting healthier I think we should lay the minus 138 on the under with Brito here the final strikeout prop is out in Arizona that's something that Brad Keller Brad Keller is a very different pitcher this year than he was last year if you look at his two starts he has gone over three and a half strikeouts twice in four starts so you see minus 112 and over three and a half you might think okay he's done it 50 percent of the time while I want the over here but the two games where he did go over he had six and seven strikeouts and that leads to a strikeout rate of 21 percent for Keller thus far and I put a lot of stock in that because he's a very different pitcher he is effectively taken everything he did last year where the results were pretty awful and put in the trash very different repertoire 20.7 strikeout rates I've got Keller projected for 4.46 strikeouts here so not a huge number but to get over three and a half you don't need a huge number other reason I can feel good about Keller getting to four strikeouts here is because of length he went 105 pitches in one of his starts 94 and another I'm projected at 95 right now which means I could be under what he ultimately winds up going he's facing out with Arizona here Arizona below average in terms of strikeouts versus righties a 20.2 percent strikeout rate versus righties since the start of last year so not a big strikeout team but Keller goes deep in games has been getting a decent number of strikeouts this year at least relative to previous years and I think with a respectable ground ball right may allow him to go deeper in the game as well be a bit more effective so Brad Keller over three and a half minus 112 third strikeout prop I want to go to so the three strikeout props Brad Keller over three and a half minus 112 Matthew Boyd under five and a half minus 148 and Johnny Brito under four and a half at minus 138 as mentioned though there are actually a couple of home run props that I like for today and one of them is actually in that exact same game we talked about with Keller with the Diamondbacks and the Royals I love MJ Melendez to go deep he is six to one right now at Fandall Sportsbook and I frankly don't really understand why this is the best game in terms of weather for tonight where temperatures would be in the 80s they typically leave the roof open at Chase Field when that's the case so that's a positive here and Melendez has gotten very unlucky so far in 2023 his Woba is weighted on base average is 280 but his expected Woba at Baseball Savant is 346 huge discrepancy there and the reason it's expected Woba is so high despite a big strikeout rate is that he has a 17.8 percent barrel rate with a 53 percent fly ball rate and a 62 percent fly ball rate he is or 62 percent hard hit rate so he's putting the ball in the air and hitting it hard that's going to lead to strikeouts eventually just striking out too much he's facing Tommy Henry here and Henry can get some strikeouts for sure so that's one concern but Henry when he made a short stand the majors last year led up a 39 percent hard hit rate with a 42 percent fly ball rate so Melendez gets a good park for home runs for tonight is facing a pitcher who lets up a lot of fly balls in hard contact and Melendez himself is due for some positive aggression I think that adds up to make him a really good value bet at six to one I was looking here at Rhode Island Sportsbook try to bet him here he is plus three seven so can't take that one that's annoying but if Andrews Sportsbook they are far more generous you can get him at six to one there the other home run prop that I like is also one a guy who barrels the ball a lot and that's going back to another game we talked about before with the Tigers and the Brewers the guy I like here is Kerry Carpenter Carpenter's home run home run odds at Fandall Sportsbook were plus 630 and they are still there plus 630 for Carpenter to go deeper today for the Detroit Tigers he's facing Colin Ray and Ray has always struggled with hard contact it's a 50 percent hard hit rate this year it's a very small sample just two starts but looking back to 2021 looking back to his first in the big leagues has always led up a lot of hard contact and Carpenter supplies it he has a 20 percent barrel rate so far this year it was 11 percent last year 11 percent is very good for a young guy like Carpenter so he took that number and it's almost doubled it Carpenter puts the ball in the air they're in the walkie first night I am guessing the roof will be closed there because it is pretty cool and like Melendez Carpenter's home run odds much shorter elsewhere again you know in the threes at some other spots but plus 630 at Fandall Sportsbook so both MJ Melendez and Kerry Carpenter in my eyes very good home run bets for today as you know home run that's my most not my most comfortable market but these are two I feel pretty good about for today so Carpenter plus 630 Melendez 6 to 1 the home run bets I am turning to for today so hopefully that sets you up for a fun night across major league baseball and you can get those bets in we'll see how they play out but I think all those look pretty okay as far as this week that's gonna wrap up our forward looking stuff for today but as always we do want to recap what went down here on the show in previous weeks to give you some transparency recap our bets and let you know how things went here on the show let's start things off and talking about last week and talking about the UCL the UEFA Champions League we had Dr. Ed Feng on last week to preview that the UCL quarterfinals you can find Ed on Twitter at the power rank and Ed's one bet that he liked a lot in the UCL last week was Benfica to win over into Milan at plus 240 and Benfica was down three to one in the second half in this match I think they were down three to one in like the 68th minute but they scored goals in the 86 minutes and in stoppage time to get a draw so no win there on the bet but they did make a close at the end Benfica did get the draw they made a close so not a winner no cash in our pockets but I think that Ed being behind them made a lot of sense just couldn't quite get the win there we'll add on again tomorrow to break down his thoughts on the NFL Draft and again follow out on Twitter at the power rank our golf guy last week was Brandon Gadoula as always you can find him on Twitter at Gadoula 13 previewing the Zurich classic the winners of that event were Nick Hardy and Davis Riley they were not on Brandon's card the outrides Brandon likes were Spawn and Buckley at 32 to one and Mitchell and in at 13 to one Mitchell and Imk in contention pretty much the entire week to finish six Spawn and Buckley finished 26 the non-outrides of Brandon were Robbie Shelton and Lee Hodges at plus 330 and that was for a top 10 and then he had Woo and Bramlett top 20 a plus 135 Woo and Bramlett did give it a good run just a couple of strokes off and finished 26 they were two strokes off Shelton and Hodges missed the cut so we'll bring it back on Wednesday this week preview the Mexican Mexico open so not Tuesday in the typical slot we'll add on there but we'll get Brandon's thoughts on the Mexico open next week and then we get back to some elevated fields for the PGA the following week after that in the EPL our guest this week was Austin cast you can find him on Twitter at Austin cast find his work over at numberfire.com and Austin recommended three bets all three wound up winning those were the Lester money line at plus 145 liver pool over two and a half goals at minus 130 and Mohammed Salah to score a goal at minus 134 or what minus 135 Lester won they beat the walls two to one liver pool 132 so I get the over two and a half goals and the guy who put them over two and a half goals was Salah he had a goal in the 70th minutes so a clean sweep there for Austin again at plus 145 minus 130 and minus 135 good calls by Austin there again you can find his full EPL betting guides over at numberfire.com find him on Twitter at Austin cast to see his great work there our UFC guest this past week was Austin Swain you can find him on Twitter at a Swain three he had a recommendation in the in the in the headliner for this week Curtis Blades he liked Blades by submission at nine to one so going out of a limb there and Blades did not win so couldn't get that one there but again when you're doing long long shot bets they're typically long shots for a reason and you're going to lose those more often than not but I think value is value so I like the analysis there by Austin at nine to one just couldn't quite get the win money lines for Austin we're on Dana Botcher-Gall probably butchered that pronunciation over Brady Highstand at minus 150 Highstand got the win there Matthew Semmelsberger money line at minus 113 he lost his event and then he had Lucindo by knockout or submission at plus 220 Lucindo did win but it was by decision versus knockout or submission so again you know you take some swings I like Austin's willingness to take the value where he saw it if it was on you know long shots that don't have super high probability of winning couldn't quite get the job done there but appreciate his willingness to seek out value where he saw it in that one in NASCAR I had three different outrides for this week one of those was in the Xinnody series that was Josh Bellicchi at 200 to one he was 40 to one podium 14 or 14 to one to finish inside the top five Bellicchi actually closed at minus one or at uh not minus oh that'd be great uh plus 125 or he was 125 to one to win when he was 200 to one we recommended him here on the show so did get some closing line value on that and Bellicchi hung out in the back for most of this race kind of mining his own business it was a pretty clean race the opening part of it and eventually chaos started to rack up as the race went along so Bellicchi you know because he had kept his nose clean worked his way forward and was inside the top 10 late in that race but then there was a wreck with a couple laps left and Bellicchi got caught up in it as Daniel Hemmerk wrecked so he went up wrecking uh he also took out the guys I had bet that after qualifying I'd brought Moffitt I'd taken post qualifying and Ryan Sieg they all got wrecked in the same wreck so that was a not a fun one for me Sieg and Moffitt were one two at one point to see them all wreck together was not super enjoyable but uh Bellicchi David Aron uh was hoping to get that 14 to one top five but couldn't quite get there in the Xfinity series in the Cup series the two outrides I had were Ryan Blaney at 11 to 1 and Eric Jones at 28 to 1 Blaney finished second and led most of the second half of that race he ran out front kind of controlled the thing he had gotten passed on a restart I thought he's gonna run out of gas uh so I thought I'd lose that way he got and passed on the restarts and he was running seconds behind Bubba Wallace and Wallace was trying to throw a block and threw too many blocks and Blaney got in the back of him and it caused a wreck now Blaney didn't get in the wreck but the wreck slowed him down enough where Kyle Busch passed him right before the caution so Busch justifiably won they made the right call Blaney finished seconds kind of a bummer to miss out on 11 to 1 uh the ticket for him but I think that with Talladega for me even if I have a guy who's leading entering the last lap you kind of know you're not in a position like you can't feel bad like you feel like oh yeah bad beat it wasn't a bad beat like it's always what could happen with Talladega so 11 to 1 couldn't quite hit that last same thing happened last year there were Jones I had if it's 71 twin Talladega leading in the last lap got passed by Ross Chastain finished sixth at least Blaney finished third but uh that's kind of things that go with Talladega does not count as a bad beat even if it might feel bad to have a guy lose the lead with two laps to go as far as Jones at 28 to 1 he ran a smart race he kept on trying to make the third line work which it didn't work the entire race he was the one guy who was able to kind of like be a catalyst out there and make his way forward but couldn't make it stick to get himself all the way to the front at the end of the race though was working his way forward he was good on fuel because he had topped off a couple of times and he was up in the top 10 that big wreck towards the end pushing him up towards sixth so I thought he ran a smart race just didn't quite have like the horsepower and uh the the cooperation he needed to get the job done finished sixth so two outrides for NASCAR in the cup series finished second and sixth kind of how it goes in super speed ways I'm okay with it you know I always want to win the bets but I thought there were good process bets and they both finished pretty well just couldn't quite get the win kind of the uh theme of the week between uh the Woo and Bramut ones for Brandon and then the Benfica recommendation for Ed as well so thankfully Austin Cass bailing us out by going three for three in EPL last week that is all that we have here for today here on covering the spread but as mentioned we are back once again tomorrow with Dr. Ed Feng talking to Menefell Draft that'll be up in the afternoon record uh sometime around three o'clock or so so expect that in your audio feeds in the afternoon we'll talk PGA and NBA with Brandon on Wednesday if you've got any questions for me I am on Twitter at Jim Sonnis J-I-M-S-A-N-N-E-S you can also follow the Fanduel Podcast Network at Fanduel Podcast and don't forget to subscribe to the show or subscribe to the Fanduel YouTube page we'll talk to you all once again tomorrow to get to you said for Thursday's first round of the NFL draft this has been covering the spread right here on the Fanduel Podcast Network


Hello again. Remkus is a heavyweight in the WordPress scene. He runs an agency in the Netherlands. He was co-organiser of different word camps and meetups and he's a weight lifter, physical and figuratively and as a WordPress veteran he knows how to tame WordPress and WooCommerce and he also has a newsletter which is not your default news but very opinionated, interesting and worth to subscribe to newsletter. So let's dive in and do WooCommerce but faster. I may need to do the mic a little louder. Is this better? Can everybody hear me well? Thank you. You had me there at... What was it? Heavyweight? I guess I am. The talk of today is WooCommerce but faster. Now before I start explaining what I mean with that besides the obvious thing I kind of would like to get a feel of who's in the room. So can I get a show of hands for people who own a WooCommerce store? Okay there's a few of you who works with WooCommerce a lot. That's a lot more of you who develops inside of WooCommerce and builds custom plugins and all that. Okay out of curiosity if you do nothing with WooCommerce... Okay there's a few. Okay all right. So my presentation is really very very simple. Here's how you make WooCommerce fast. You install a WordPress caching plugin.  That's it. That was it. Thank you. I'm sorry. I thought I'd try my version of April's Fools. It's not my thing and I make terrible jokes so but the the funny thing is for a lot of people this is the truth. A lot of people think by making WordPress slash WooCommerce fast all you have to do is turn on your caching plugin provided you're on decent hosting and you're done. That's it. You can just sit back relax and start seeing the money pour in. Unfortunately that is based on some misconceptions and this is something that most people don't really truly understand and this is what I'm going to explain today. Like what does make a site faster and when can we actually call it faster because caching is not making fast. That's the first thing that we need to make really clear and if you're already at the tip of your seat going like oh I have questions now I'm I'm so not I don't believe this this I have my own opinion and I have my own experience. That's wonderful we have question and answer at the end of this so write them down as we go along. So caching doesn't make a site fast. Here's another one. A large database won't make a site slow. Who here has read over the years the many WordPress tutorials where it said if you have a large database if you have post revisions you need to turn that off or limit it to three or something like that. Who has seen those tutorials? Yeah that's a that's a large percentage of you. So here's me saying that is false. Now are there reasons why you would want to have a slim down database? Sure but performance isn't one of them. I'll explain why later. Here's another great example of what I see happen a lot in terms of here's what you need to do and be sure to do this because if you have a memory limit make sure it's as high as possible because that'll make your site faster. Well spoiler alert it does not. Will it help in certain cases if code is not written correctly? Sure but you can kind of see where this is going. So memory limit does not affect speed and turning cash fragment off is probably the thing I see most happen especially when it comes to WooCommerce. Let's make WooCommerce faster. You know what we do? We turn off cash fragment. Does who here understands what crash fragments are? Not a lot. Okay so inside of WooCommerce there's a few functions especially around the cart experience that are written in a way that full page reload doesn't need to happen but maybe just a small section and that actually makes WooCommerce work smarter I would say. If you're on really bad hosting though you will see that that actually makes your site slower. Does that mean that cash fragment is bad? No it means you're on really bad hosting and that's something you need to fix. I hear myself a little bit. Is that me or does it is? Oh it's been the whole day. I'll try this. So how many of you have heard or seen these things and work accordingly currently? Don't be hesitant all the time. Yeah so this is quite common. This is mostly around not understanding the base principles and this is not me coming off of my high horse saying you don't understand what's going on. This is me saying we've been fed the wrong type of information for a very very long period of time in the tutorials that we find in the presentations we've seen and there is really no limit in terms of what is possible but you most likely need to start thinking in a little bit different way than you currently know what you've currently been doing. So there are some base principles you need to invest some time in to truly understand what it means to make WooCommerce faster. So you need to understand the layers. There's a way of working I don't know why they all went like this number two three and four they're supposed to go gently but I guess I'm not a gently person. I'm just fast there you go. The way of working so the things that you do how you do it how you start a project what tools you're using how you're measuring the success of your end result the understanding that there's a place and time for everything you do with your WooCommerce site and that boils down into having a foundation. So it's a little bit more than a template but you kind of get the idea that if you have a foundation of something that's been tested and proven for you and your clients then you can build off of that and move to a better version off of that in a continuous fashion. So that is essentially these are the four base principles it's all starts here. So let's start with the first one understand the layers. This is a really bad echo. Well possible try yeah I'm not gonna hold that. So your server stack your PHP and your database are the largest components to making your site fast. There is no other way around it. Does that mean you can discard HTML CSS JavaScript and all your other assets? Absolutely not. But the emphasis should be on the first portion right. So does this mean you then have to I have a WooCommerce store I love using WooCommerce but does that then mean you have to invest a lot of time into understanding server configurations? No it shouldn't. PHP no same thing and database yeah if you're lucky you never have to touch it that's fine. But it does mean you understand that these layers determine what is actually happening in terms of performance for your WooCommerce site. So HTML CSS JavaScript and assets if you've ever done any type of optimization in the browser you know what that is right. That's either Google Lighthouse or PageSpeed or any of those metrics. Not all of them are good. Not all of them are really telling you what you're supposed to be using or what the data says because it depends on where you are what you do what you're testing everything matters but that's relatively straightforward in optimizing what you are what I would say most of us are not built who's building servers for fun to try and optimize and do that and who's actually using them in production. Just Joe and Florence. So that's a relatively small crowd is what I'm trying to say right. I've built VPS's and I've had a lot of fun doing it I do not care to do that anymore. There's people much much smarter than me and way more dedicated and hardcore in the optimizing a server. It's a different it's a different trade and I'm grateful for having some experience in it but it's not something I want to fill my day with. So where do I focus? I focus on HTML and all the rest. So what does that mean for the first portion? That means I look at hosting companies from a different perspective.  What is it? It's also important but my main thing that I look for is a proven test where you can actually look into how it's performing under stress, under load, under a lot of whatever it is you're measuring and for that there are ways that you can do this yourself but it's much easier to look at a service that does this for you and that's called review signal. Review signal if you've not heard of it before. It is a yearly comparison of all not all existing WordPress hosting but it's hosting that has said you know I'm happy for you to test me and honestly test me all the ways you can possibly think of and if you then look at who surfaces on top that is the prime tier you should be looking at in terms of any time you have a site that needs performant hosting. Right so that means that a lot of your budget or cheapish type hosting and that's roughly in the range from five euros to 30 euros I generally avoid for the simple reason is not that I like to pay more but I know what I'm getting if I pay more. So that is one way to start and that's different than I like working with this host because X reason Y reason whatever we all have our reasons there are certain hosts I love there's certain hosts like I'm okay with working with it and sometimes the performance is better on the ones I am okay working with it's a small sacrifice if it means I don't have to worry about the next burst of traffic. So the second principle is your way of working so understanding your stack so that means you have spent some time investigating what your stack looked like and it's not just your PHP layer it's not just your database layer it's not that's your server but it's whatever you're using inside of WordPress as well everything has an impact so a common misconception is that if you keep on adding plugins to WordPress it'll become slow also not technically true it depends what that particular plugin does and if you're approaching about a hundred there's a fair chance your site is becoming slower but it's not a given I manage sites that have over a hundred plugins and it's fast like proper fast even under stress even on the load it just depends on what you're doing in those plugins so understanding your stack lightweight anybody get this reference by the way am I alone in this okay nice nice nice I'm a big fan of Ronnie Coleman that this means that whatever you're introducing in your stack needs to be lightweight first this is a big one because we like the fancy plugins that solve a lot of stuff for us but they read I need to stay away from those okay oh is that okay so the the the lost my entire train of thought so lightweight means you look at plugins mostly because that's what you're introducing to your stack and you're testing what it does before and what it does after and this is not a difficult thing you can do this on your own so what I'm not doing today is getting in high specificity on what you need to do exactly because that's too much what I'm getting at is there's a train of thought that you need to follow whenever you're doing something that has a performance requirement that's hard you can't not think about it so lightweight means your functions your plugins will do mostly one or two things that's it when you're introducing something larger you need to be sure that whoever introduces that larger thing has a performance mind has been thinking of how the code has been written is it actually done in a way that okay if I keep doing this over a million page requests is that performance going to be same or is it going to add up right so that's simple things as validation checks if the plug-in needs to be loaded at all so check out early exit early things like that impact testing this is literally testing what happens before I turn the plug-in on what happens after and there's even a difference between when I turn it on when I configure it and when I think I'm done right that means you need to do a little bit more than find the plug-in install it activate it that's the first step you then start measuring before once you're done activating once you're done configuring so impact testing needs to happen that is a way of working you need to make yourself familiar with automating is as simple as that whatever you can automate automate because if there's stuff that you don't have to think about anymore it'll be done and you'll see the results anyway so what is the thing you can automate if you install a plug-in on your either on your local site or on your production site there are ways you can automatically get services look at it and give you feedback on what the impact is it's a very simple very lightweight version but it tells you something so the third principle there is a place and a time I guess that's probably life as well but in terms of WooCommerce in terms of what you're doing inside of WordPress there is a lot of stuff that's happening that is not supposed to be in WordPress my first thing to mention here is security so security plugins and I know there's a whole bunch of them security plugins do not belong inside WordPress that is a black and white line for me I'll explain later exactly why caching is the same thing a plug-in inside of WordPress should not be caching as caching for WordPress like HTML caching they simply don't belong there and I'll explain you in the very simple example why that is every single page load on your WooCommerce site so when somebody has not put something in their cart yet you are you are able to fully cache the entire experience what most folks don't realize is that once they add something to cart you invalidate cash right you can't work with a cached WooCommerce site because you end up if we were to do that you would end up with somebody else's cart right there's more people on the site at the same time as you are or maybe not but it's been an hour and you're within that hour and voila and if you've ever had a badly configured WooCommerce cached site you've seen this I've had it once didn't make me happy so caching doesn't belong there why because every single thing that is happening inside of WooCommerce needs to go through the normal loading sequence so what does it what does that mean a page request by any one of you visiting a site that is powered by WordPress slash WooCommerce means it's loading the entirety of WordPress the entirety of all the plugins the entirety of the theme and all the functions that go with it then it needs to process the functions inside the plugins and I'm not this is not the exact sequence but just to give you an idea of how that works then the function needs to execute and then it needs to produce whatever is doing so if you're a caching plugin you need to do all of that so WordPress is still working your server still working other things loading everything is happening and then it needs to decide if you can it can serve this page in HTML but WordPress is already being loaded so I'll this is to the extreme that you can have a fully cached WordPress site being brought down because it's serving PHP powered HTML caching does that make sense Milan says yes the dobro so the same thing happens for security like you need to hold the whole stack before the security plugin can actually determine whether this is a legit visitor whether it should take any actions if it needs to take action it'll need to do some more so you can imagine that as you keep adding different stuff on that site more traffic maybe you sent out a newsletter burst 15,000 people and oh crap my site goes down I don't know why I'm cached I'm doing okay here aren't I no but you're doing so much you shouldn't be doing in there that invalidates caching all that and here we are so I think this is a hot take I think most people will reluctantly kind of disagree with me until they actually start measuring and when you are actually measuring you will slowly but surely find yourself on my side of the table it's just data that will tell you so your foundation is essentially the culmination of everything that you found to be working to be working efficiently to working fast and it is your template of stuff that you work with or don't work with so there's plugins I'll use that I am not happy about but given the yeah they're only doing this little thing over here relatively lightweight I can I can live with this because if the traffic explodes it's still doing that little thing in a little corner it's fine but if there's a plug-in doing everything and I add load this is not ending up in my foundation stack right this does not make sense for me to build my business on this is not sensible for me to say to somebody having a WooCommerce store hey you know what this is nice and easy it's great go ahead and use that because it'll solve all your problems so if a client asks me can I add this plug-in my answer will be yes comma but no that is my default answer and I'll just wait to see what they'll say but I really need this functionality I really want this I really need that great but let me see what the options are here and what are the consequences right if it if it is introducing stuff that I don't want it does not go into my foundation and I'm so I have clients who have like extreme high maintenance high volatility high traffic sites I can't just go and install whatever they like and they asked me nonetheless and they're making really good money with these sites and they'll ask me the same questions as well so this is this is not me saying I'm better or that but it's more of a thing of I understand this layer they're really good at their business and you hire me to do that part and this is my feedback so work with that this is what I include hosting your base theme fast plugins optimization where you do what all of that so when it is time to build your actual site how many of you who are building sites are using version control nice are we all using github or Bitbucket or anything like that yeah awesome so what the great thing about hosted version controllers which is git and then services like github and Bitbucket is that you have an opportunity to hook into whenever you're doing a deployment it's called continuous delivery or innovation or there's there's different ways of explaining the same thing but it's essentially about if I push code to the server new plugin update or or anything I want to do an automated test of what the impact of that is so this is something you need to have in there because I've seen I I've been called in the meeting like yeah but he just introduced or they just introduced a new plugin and now it's sites not working anymore well was that done any testing yeah we tested it before we deployed but did you actually test the impact and then it becomes a different conversation so testing is development if you're not including that in your current way of producing a site then this is the moment you start thinking okay what can I do to integrate any version of testing before I actually move on to the next so this is what you need to test at bare minimum uncached performance that means you're not testing the caching of your site that makes zero sense you want to test uncached you test checkout after each little change that you introduce on your site you will not be the first one to have a change move to production and then 48 hours later your client tells you I'm not seeing any money coming in anymore what's going on here and you're going like yeah but 48 hours that must be the client side because my deployment was done 48 hours ago can't be that this is why you test so checkout needs to be tested and especially check out on mobile mobile if you're not aware your phones are caching harder than your desktop machines are because caching not only happens inside your phone it happens at the carrier level it happens at proxies the carrier level uses depending on who you're using it there's way more involved and combine that with generally lower speeds on your phones you have something that is a high value thing to test because why high value do we know what the percentages of mobile versus desktop purchases are in general sorry 70 30 any others 80 80 80 yeah so it roughly depends a little bit on the the market you're in but there is there's known examples of almost 95 percent and if your client is one of those obviously you will know because you're doing hopefully some version of analytics that will tell you this but if you don't know and you just deploy and you make everything slower and fields and complicate it's not gonna help and for the record this is why Shopify is winning on a lot of people converting them in because they have that taken care of you don't need to think about having an optimized cart an optimized cart for mobile Shopify takes care of you for that so this is something we need to do extra when we're talking WooCommerce and what is that extra start with testing it's very simple so again testing is developing if you're testing test all the pages not just the product but the checkout and the shop pages you will not be the first person to only test the front page or maybe the shop page no you test them all because they all work together and you need to test the whole flow so this is generally so far me saying you probably need a different mindset than what you were doing and I'm not saying you didn't have the right mindset but I am suggesting that maybe there's some few things you're not currently using in how you're developing your WooCommerce sites now obviously most of this also works for WordPress in general but WooCommerce is finicky there's a lot more going on it's a complex thing you can't just treat it the same way you would treat WordPress because you have logged in people and you have commercial value with what those logged in people do so who knows what the edge is beside the band member from YouTube besides I you know what somebody said browser I don't that's not even in my world but that's a good point besides besides the guitar player from YouTube and that browser from those who we don't speak about this who knows what the edge means so this is too many sorry too few hands this is three people I see do I see that correctly one two three yeah four four people okay so the edge is essentially a term that has been introduced at the time Cloudflare became really really popular the they I think they coined it or somewhere around there but it essentially means anything you can do with your site before your actual server needs to do anything the the example we all know is a cdm right that is configured at dns level so traffic goes through your dns level so server and it is then controlled where it's get it its assets that's the one you all know what cloudflare but there are the players my favorite is cloudflare so I'm just going to stick with the word cloudflare for now but do your due diligence in terms of looking what is working for you but cloudflare introduces a whole layer of stuff it's doing on the fly meaning literally as your traffic is entering the stream to your server it has an array of stuff it can do one of the things I love that it's doing there is caching one of the things I love that they're doing over there is a web application firewall security one of the things I love that they're doing over there is image optimization on the fly um there's some folks from human made they built something in php is it still do you still use it tacky on is it written in node okay so that's something that's happening on server level but it's happening before it hits WordPress correct so cloudflare offers this on the large scale for anybody willing to shell out $20 a month or 25 it's as of today it's 25 now this is money this is real money and it costs you something but the level of optimizations that it provides just by having you move that off the server in front of the site means you get a whole array of extra sweets and candy and stuff that is just absolutely delicious because it makes your server do more what it's supposed to do it makes your WordPress and WooCommerce site do more of what it's good at so offload where you can um let the server handle your cron is a very simple one but essentially WordPress uses a cron to activate certain things it needs to do cleanup publish posts all of that sort of stuff this is typically handled by WordPress but you're smarter uh by uh well listening to me right now I guess a little bit maybe there's a way to move the cron away from WordPress you can turn it off in WP config and you can then set it up on your server and your server is better at this faster and efficient and more efficient than WordPress is if you don't know how to do it ask your hosting company because they should know do it how to do it in fact they should be telling you to do this um this is on the database level so an index adding to the meta-value database column if this doesn't mean anything to you ask your hosting company to service you with this but adding an index to your meta-value database column will make your WooCommerce site faster and I've seen cases where you go damn that's a lot faster an index is nothing more than this is my huge database and I have this table here that I want to go quickly at but I can't because I have to scout through the whole thing your index is an indexation of this big thing so the traffic to it will be faster if there's a middle index layer telling you here's where it's at redis if you have heard the name redis before it's a smart thing to use but you have to be sure to use it when to use it it is not something you turn on but by default you'll use it when it's actually providing a benefit and when you're using it you have to use it with object cache pro because that makes sense object cache pro with redis is one of the smartest you can do for high database volume going back and forth from the browser to the database itself use responsive images I don't think I need to explain this this makes no sense to download a image of 3mb when you're actually only using 100kb how am I on time by the way we have time so even more tips offload search elastic algollia are the two names you should probably want to investigate in if you have so one of my clients has an 18 year old database of 13 posts a day for 18 years long you can imagine the size of that database doesn't make a whole lot of sense to actually use wordpress to search within that I think the database is about 60 gigabytes doesn't make a lot of sense you can use indexes and all that and it'll be faster wonderful but this is a good example of if you can offload that outside of wordpress and make it more efficient do it it'll make your site faster don't use large plugins for small tasks so a cf who knows a cf that's a really popular plugin a cf recently introduced custom post type creation when they did I replied on twitter like this makes zero sense to me for the simple reason is there is that's not something you want to have in your database if I need to load the whole wordpress thing and then your database and then inside that database is something telling me to load a custom post type I think we're in the wrong place doing the right thing so custom post type declaration happens on php level in the file you can use the a cf to generate it but please use the output code and place it in your site plugin it's just a smarter way of doing it so many more tips so wp plugin manager is an actual plugin that when turned on it's one of the rare plugins where I site by adding another plugin you're actually creating something better because what it'll allow you to do is you're loading only what you need to load on which page load of your site so you'll get to be very specific like who's not seen uh contact form seven or gravity forms load there all of their assets on the front page and you have no contact form there does that make sense it's kind of stupid yes um I don't know about the second one but see what you do with that um block what you can so if you're using a web application firewall I highly recommend cloud for no I don't have shares um no I'm not being paid to say this but it's comes from somebody who's been optimizing sites for eight nine years quite intensively it allows you to block traffic you don't need uh Yoast default from Yoast wrote an article I think about uh six months ago where he explained if in your robots text you're not saying uh and your site is not servicing russian or or or uh mandarin uh then it doesn't make a lot of sense for those search engines to index your site so why don't you just block them any traffic that you don't need keep it out all the small things help final steps and this is this is the tldr you have to put in effort to keep your WooCommerce site fast it is not something you set and forget I see too many very smart developers thinking it's a set and forget because they paid attention at the beginning they paid attention while building it and delivering it to the client and then it's like here you go a client on it on their own will add plugins we know this who's not ever seen that there you go so make sure you're offering some type of retainer not just to get money out of but to help the client understand that your line of business is thinking for the client helping them do the smarter thing and that means there's a lot of automated testing that's not going to cost you a lot but you can charge for you know it's it's okay to make money with it but don't don't make that the main argument the main argument is I'll keep your site fast I'll keep your site lean I'll keep your site conscience of what it's doing what its ecological footprint is everything everything counts I think that goes um automated testing these are three things I highly recommend you look into uh deployment arc user flow and speed guard the last one is the WordPress plugin that if you really want to go low effort you install this plugin it'll tell you once you've done an update whoa we're seeing like a two minute increase of loading time per page this is probably not the right plugin it'll tell you it uses an external pinging service that checks what's going on um any of these three depending on what your uh proficiency is is something to investigate into um and that's it that's that's essentially what I have to say um yeah thank you no questions no questions whatsoever Milan yeah so um in terms of hosting do you have any recommendations you usually make or a specific coaster you pick in general this is this is uh that you're not getting paid from I'm currently not being paid by any hosting company so we're good I did work at a hosting company for two and a half years uh and uh it is not a very well known hosting company but it is one that I would recommend but it comes with a budget so that if you have high demanding clients there is no other thing that I would recommend other than servo bolt s e r v e b o l t servo bolt having said that there are more options out there of course um um I think Kinsta in general is solid yeah um I say in general because um rocket net is a good one seravo it's also okay um w p engine in some cases works wonders um but it's it's a very loaded question because my answer truly is it depends yeah Ramcus thank you educational as always you opened up a lot of topics and I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of questions and thank you so much but what is the one thing that you would never do on a wordpress or wordpress slash book commerce website what is the one thing that you would say like oh hell no I thank you um I think the thing you want to avoid most is um I think the combination of the security and and the caching that I cannot stress that enough um w p rocket is a plugin that I really enjoy using what do I turn off inside w p rocket the caching do I have a way to do that inside the UI I don't so I have a function that literally deactivates the caching I'll take have the server take care of the caching in a smart way and then have w p rocket do all the front end optimization it's really good at that's the way of using something smart so caching is doing that and for security I highly recommend you look into the web application firewall of of cloud 3 because it offers so many extra stuff that you're just not aware of that's of its existence uh it'd be ashamed to not look into that anytime you're running a site that makes money simple as that thank you any other questions oh yeah okay yeah yeah yeah I think you need to come over here and at what stage or from what load you would recommend to use redis um I don't think load is the right word uh redis is something that you need to understand what redis does redis essentially has two functions it allows you to queue stuff and if you have jobs if you for instance if there's stuff you build in Laravel and you need to have it interact with WordPress on a regular basis it makes a lot of sense to use redis because you'll then use the queuing system of redis so then load is a nonsensical thing to add um if you have properly configured databases MariaDB highly optimized the boundary for when load becomes the thing for redis to be used is quite far away so server both for instance uh has known cases where their database interactions are eight times faster than normal and that's high so that means whenever you need to introduce redis it's quite late but the things to look for are let's say you have a site that has a lot of comments and there's a lot of interaction let's say there's a site that is high traffic in terms of uh bulk WooCommerce uh newsletter going out right so 15, 20, 50,000 people jumping on that site wanting to get that fastest deal using coupons is a great example that's a high traffic thing going in and out of the database that's more of the the territory where I would look at okay now redis makes sense and when you're adding that absolutely add WP object cache pro those two go together do not install redis without that one that makes zero sense because WordPress will need to be optimized for that new interaction and there are other plugins but this is by far the best I'm also not being paid to say that but hey till how you don't uh yeah um if you need to optimize a website like a e-commerce website what is the thing that you do you think is going to give more impact in the performance and which which performance the the actual fastness of the site yes and which other thing is you think the most common people do it but you think no don't waste time here because it doesn't give you thank you so one of the things I mentioned in the beginning was uh if you if you if you think you need to remove data from your database to make your site faster you're being lied to so that's the one thing that I would say if your host is telling you or strongly enforcing you to remove post revisions and clean up this and that on otherwise their site your site won't perform as it should that's a red flag for me I will move my client away from that hosting company and and for the record I have a list of yes and no types of hosting companies the thing that will have the biggest impact is it depends on two things so in general sites are either really well optimized on the front end or really well on the back end I rarely see the combination of the two at the same time so it depends on what you need to do on the front end and for that I would say WP rocket helps you a great deal it's a simple solution for a rather complex thing what it is doing but turn off caching if it's on the back end side of things it's mostly poorly written php and by poorly I mean if you have a file that is I don't know 2000 lines and everything everything from line 10 to 2000 is executing a function and you didn't check before line 10 if it should be running at all that's those things I see the most in terms of oh wow this could save a lot because it's doing that on every single page load for every single person but that's not uh that's the best answer I can give one last questions yeah so um I play around with a vps which is a far too dangerous tool for me to play around with um for me as well now and um now I wonder because you speak a lot about server side optimization yep and I'm just trying to get the definitions right because if you make changes to your hdxs file in order to to speed things up is that on the side of WordPress or is that on the server side that is server side okay I am of the opinion that you generally shouldn't be concerned with server optimization I think that is the domain of your hosting provider and I am also of the opinion that your hosting provider should be proactive towards you instead of you chasing am I doing this right yeah so they're they're in total environment should be fully optimized for whatever you're adding to it and maybe they have an integrations plugin to activate a few things fine do that but that's that's that's how I look at it so I um I know my way around the command terminal I use it uh uh in a great many ways and deals and versions but I don't want to do that anymore because it's not my domain yeah I get that now yeah it is too much going on do I know how to install a web application firewall sure can I configure it fine do I want that responsibility no and it's as simple as that because the time that I don't have to spend there I can spend on optimizing and fine tuning and trying to get the lighthouse metrics on mobile as close to 100 as possible yeah yeah so it's just a matter of where do I put my energy thank you sure thank you very much we're at the time for the picture now so you can go outside to have you on a picture let's thank you very much thank you