Sabrina is fond of performance optimization, scaling WordPress, building WordPress Multisite projects, and swimming. She specializes in speeding up WordPress sites without affecting the looks and functionalities. She also loves to talk and write about all things related to site speed.
She’s also the founder at SpeedGuard, a WordPress plugin to keep an eye on your site speed using Google PageSpeed Insights API. She has organized several events for the WordPress community in Ukraine.
Mansoor: Hi, Sabrina! Thank you for taking out time for this interview with us. Can you please tell our readers about yourself? When did you start your professional career? What was your motivation behind choosing the WordPress industry?
Sabrina: Hi, Mansoor! Thank you for having me, it’s an honor to get featured on your blog again.
Like many others, I never actually chose WordPress, rather it just came into my life naturally and didn’t ever leave.
About 11 years ago I was a graphic designer who was trying to make a simple website for our agency. I tried a few solutions and they all seem to be so complicated and clumsy I just couldn’t stand it. And then there was something called WordPress that promised to be set up and working in 5 minutes or less. Of course, it took me much longer than 5 mins that time but I was happy to discover it was really intuitive and easy to use so I stuck with it.
As it was so easy to use it also seemed to be easy to customize things. This part didn’t go smoothly, things kept breaking, all sorts of errors and white screens of death happened. But it was fun to learn. With time I found out that I’m much more interested in creating new troubles on the website in order to troubleshoot them after than in designing stuff. So when the opportunity to do development work came along I didn’t hesitate.
I always liked how flexible and scalable WordPress is and then, after a while, I got to know about something that brings that scalability to a new level by letting you create a network of WordPress websites. I fell in love with Multisite at first sight (even though it was not that good-looking in its early years as it’s now. 😉
I was excited to build something cool with it, but when one of the networks I created and maintained reached over 100+ sites and the server started crashing every now and then I learned that things that could be let go in a single WordPress install could easily bring down the network. This is how I got into performance optimization which became my main area of work during the last few years. I had to learn how to optimize things, not just to make something work, but to make it work efficiently.
Mansoor: You have vast working experience in the performance optimization of WordPress websites. What do you think are the critical factors that are sometimes overlooked by the WordPress developers? What do you suggest to them?
Sabrina: The critical thing that is often overlooked by developers is trying to apply treatment without diagnosing a disease.
Imagine you called a doctor and he says “Okay, get those pills, I heard they are not bad”.
No real doctor would ever do that, right? They would never consult by phone, they won’t be jumping to any conclusions. Instead, they would ask you loads of questions, get you through a thorough examination and all sorts of tests (which you might not like of course) to find out as precisely as possible what is the reason you are feeling bad. Without understanding the reason they won’t be able to prescribe you any medicine. And after they do, they would be checking out how your state changes with it, right?
Luckily, site speed is a much less responsible thing to work on than someone’s health (both of my parents are doctors by the way and I never regretted I didn’t become one).
But the process still should be anything like merely trying out random things. I always do a performance audit first to define the current state of things across the entire website and main bottlenecks that slow it down, so with that information I will have an understanding of what needs to be done, and what results could be expected. Only after this diagnosis comes the start of treatment.
Mansoor: You have recently delivered a session “5 Most Popular Recommendations to Speed up Your Website That Doesn’t Work” during WordFest 2021. Would you like to elaborate on those recommendations for our readers?
Sabrina: Sure. If you Google something like “how to speed up my website” you would get tons of posts and articles with recommendations on how to do so, and there are a couple of recommendations that are repeated almost in every search result you would open. Like, prevent WordPress core from making additional requests, disable unused plugins, combine CSS and JavaScript files, use CDN, and of course, if nothing helps just move to another host. The problem is that those recommendations rarely work. I talk in detail about why it happens and what to do in that session at WordFest 2021, the recording and the slides are available on my website.
Mansoor: Thousands of users are creating their websites with WordPress every day. Would you like to share some of the tips and tricks that may be useful for them? Also, your favorite themes, plugins, and other tools, so they can make their choice easily.
Sabrina: I might not be the best advisor for new users. I have to confess I have never even used any page builder before Gutenberg. But there are few plugins that make my life so much easier both as a developer, and as a user: Advanced Custom Fields (all times favorite), WP Rocket (I’ve been a huge fan a long time before I joined the team), and WP All Import/Export. It’s not only the functionality they deliver but also because of how they are built and how the teams behind the work.
Mansoor: Since there are many CMSs available on the Internet but WordPress stands out from the competition. What do you think is the main reason for the success of WordPress? How do you see the popularity of WordPress as a headless CMS?
Sabrina: I think the reason for WordPress’s huge success is the way the customer journey goes.
Whenever you mention WordPress to someone who’s not familiar with it but heard of it, you would get “Ah, right! That thing you can make a small blog with!”, right? Because of this image of being a super-simple, super-accessible, easy-as-a-pie thing that WordPress has — even complete newbies are not afraid to try it out. This is the first step.
Then, when they are already busy making something with WordPress and they encounter any sort of issue, they go and google it, right? And because so many people before had a similar problem and already solved it, and a huge amount of information available out there, chances are they would find the solution before opening even a third search result on Google. So they can find the answers quickly, learn fast, and move on to more complicated things. Isn’t it a great reason to stick with software?
And finally, sooner or later you find out about the WordPress community, and go to a local WordPress meetup, and get to know there are real people behind all this, people just like yourself. And since then, there is no way back.
Mansoor: Sometimes the new version of WordPress comes with a major update that offers useful features. What features would you like to see in the next update? What is your favorite feature of WordPress?
Sabrina: If I had to name just one thing I’m looking forward to the most, it would be multilingual support out of the box. It always felt to me that this should have been provided out of the core.
Mansoor: WordPress Multisite offers extended functionality for those users who want to create and manage multiple websites under one network. Which tools you think are essential for a Multisite Network?
Sabrina: Query Monitor. Say, there is some task that is scheduled to be executed every 5 minutes on your website, and it’s not coded properly: it makes too many database queries, they take too much time to execute. So every 5 minutes your server suffers from the load. But it copes.
Now imagine you have not a regular WordPress install, but a tiny network of say, 10 sites. This is going to happen to each of them. What if there are 100 sites there? Or 10000?
The modular nature of WordPress provides us with great opportunities and flexibility, but it also means, anything can break at any point. Bad code in plugins, bad code in themes, all sorts of compatibility issues — everything that can go wrong in a regular WordPress install can go wrong in WordPress Multisite as well, of course. And the implications would be multiplied by the number of websites you have in your network.
Mansoor: Just like the WordPress Community, hosting providers are also playing an important role in boosting the WordPress ecosystem. What are your thoughts about it? Would you recommend your users managed WordPress hosting for their websites?
Sabrina: 100 percent. If you’re not a DevOps and you’re not going to become one, I would definitely recommend using managed WordPress hosting and let someone else have all the headache, while you focus on becoming a better professional in the area you’re already occupied in.
Mansoor: It’s very important to balance work and professional life. How do you usually spend your time when you take a break from your work? If you are an avid reader, would please share some of the books that you like the most?
Sabrina: A while ago I got some issues with my back because of the prolonged sitting for work. Though I like reading and listening to radio dramas as well, it didn’t seem like a great break in terms of changing a body position. So I looked around to see what kind of activity I could be switching to for breaks. Making a couch looked like a nice way to get some exercise and move around a bit more. So I made a couch. And then cabinets for the bathroom, and a dining table. Currently, I’m finishing my new kitchen.
My Twitter looks funny though, as it’s a mixture of site speed tweets and my DIY pictures with woodwork, but seems like my friends enjoy both.
Mansoor: Thanks for your answers, Sabrina. It’s really been a great experience to interview you. Just one last thing! Could you please share an image of your workstation for our readers? That would be all!
Sabrina: I travel a lot, even now, and work from my laptop from different places. But here is my gas station that I always bring with me, fueled by coffee.
Mansoor Ahmed Khan
Been in content marketing since 2014, and I still get a kick out of creating stories that resonate with the target audience and drive results. At Cloudways by DigitalOcean (a leading cloud hosting company, btw!), I lead a dream team of content creators. Together, we brainstorm, write, and churn out awesome content across all the channels: blogs, social media, emails, you name it! You can reach out to me at [email protected].
