Optimizing WP - is it worth it?

Oh it will help, you really need to optimize your loading speed and all that...

Loading speed is really not a ranking factor unless your site loads ridiculously slow. As in it takes 10 seconds and users are hitting the back button to get the hell away from it after losing patience.

Also if your site gets a ton of traffic, you might want to consider using some sort of caching to speed it up. Big traffic spikes can put a strain on the server and cause things to slow down, no matter how well you have optimized everything else.

Other than that, I wouldn't worry about speed too much.

Despite what you may read on forums, unless you have a really large website or a site with a lot of orphaned pages that wouldn't be found otherwise, you really do not need a sitemap. As long as your site's navigation structure is not a total clusterf@ck, Google will find your pages.

Optimize for sure. You wouldn't build a house on an incomplete foundation would you? WordPress without the right plugins is not a complete foundation for a blog or website.

Yes. all of it. slow site means higher bounce rate which means lower ranking on SERPs. Sitemap helps the bots crawl your page and helps google and other search engines know what your site is about and can serve better content to its users better. Optimize for onsite SEO. Build your schema markup to have a better SERP listing with rich cards and snippets. All of this will reduce your bounce rate thus raising your rankings on google. I would recommend optimizing for security too while you are at it.

I agree with Mike here. Speed doesn't matter unless it shows a time out.

Yes it does worth optimizing WP. speed does matter and a lot of other factors (on page) that need to be taken into consideration.

Yes optimize for sure. You need to add WP plugin and optimize for on page SEO. Optimization will help your blog or website to rank better.

Speed is King. After 1 second you lose 2.5% of new users for every 1/10th of a second.

Speed gets great QS scores in PPC marketing and is a major part of SEO ranking today.

At 3 second page open times you have lost 50% of potential clients or users.

The whole problem with IM is speed, WordPress core and shared servers. I put business on cheap GoDaddy shared hosting plans with 6 to 12 second page opens on my cloud network and get their open times under 1 second and it magically starts producing results.

SPEED IS KING

But to be sub 1 second with WP core and say 2mb to 3mb content means you are on a WPO guru network.

They cost way more than cheap shared hosting.

Think about it, people spend all day on fast big sites, FB, Twitter, Google. Then they need something, they Google what the need, usually on a dummy phone, first view is all PPC ADS, the companies converting have sub 2 second sites. The companies losing money are all over 5 second page opens.

Our network is closed, that means it's 100% WordPress sites we designed and admin, it is fast. It costs clients a lot to be on it, since it's fully admin network with professional high conversion ratio content. It has backup done right, every page and image is SSL.

We only take on clients in legal, medical and a few other professions.

The reason they pay us big fees is SPEED. Plus our content converts the most expensive ppc terms that usually have 50-100 buck CPC rates at 50% and higher ratios.

5% is considered good in IM, we get 50% ratios all the time for one reason, it's all sub 1 second page opens so almost 100% of PPC clicks see the page.

SPEED IS KING

Hey guys, thanks for all the replies. I had an old email set up, that I don't use anymore, and I wasn't notified about the replies.

I need to finish some stuff today and then I'll let you know what my plan is in terms of optimizing the site.

So, we need to add all four variants of our websites to Google Search Console.

1) http://
2) https://
3) http://www.
4) https:/www.

Do all of these need their own:
- linking to Google Analytics?
- Sitemaps?
- Preferred domain settings ("Display URLs as")?
- International Targeting?

Or do we need to set these settings only to our "primary" domain, which in my case is https://domain.com.