Topic: Optimize Your WordPress Website
John Peterson’s first taste of the power of the web came during college. He wrote an innovative grade distribution search engine that peaked at around 21,000 hits a day. Innovation earned John a scary call from the Dean, and later a Distinguished Student Award and a Services in Engineering Award. Don’t ever underestimate the power of crude Perl scripts and HTML! Today, John is the President at Develare and manages a team of five. John and his team love making the web work for small business, and his latest crusade is battling slow websites. In doing so, clients have had dramatic reductions in Cost per Lead (CPL) and big bumps in traffic. Whether you have 300 or 300,000 sessions per month John is happy to share tips to help you succeed. John is one of the Lead Organizers for the Houston WordPress Meetup Group and an Officer with SearchHOU. He enjoys sharing his WordPress knowledge and giving back to the community. He has spoken at the DFW WordPress Meetup Group, the Fort Worth WordPress Users Group, Houston WordPress Meetup Group, and SearchHOU.
How did you get involved in WordPress?
I first used WordPress for a client project and ended up using it for a website for my wedding. However, I got deeply involved after WordCamp DFW 2010. I met so many friendly people at that event and learned so much. Definitely a life-changing experience.
What do you do with WordPress?
My company, Develare uses a process driven approach to create and manage small business websites focused on their niche in the market.
What has your experience with the WordPress community been like?
Amazing. Everyone is so helpful and friendly. I used to be a full-time developer on the Microsoft stack, and their community is nothing like the WordPress Community.
Why did you want to speak at WordCamp DFW?
DFW has a vibrant digital marketing community. It will be nice to return and give back to that community that inspired me to get involved with WordPress back in 2010.
Why did you decide to speak on optimizing websites?
WordPress Optimization is a task that so many small businesses overlook. We’ve seen PageSpeed, and other optimizations reduce the Cost Per Lead (CPL) from $600 to $90. We’ve also seen PageSpeed optimizations double traffic for others. PageSpeed is an important metric that Google uses for ranking websites. No matter how much traffic a site gets, a speedy website is necessary for a pleasant user experience.
What do you hope the audience gets from your talk?
Fantastic take-aways to optimize WordPress and improve their PageSpeed score. I’ll give lots of free methods and recommend some premium services.
I hope they’ll understand the why with a research-driven business side and then be able to take action on what they learned with the developer-driven implementation side.
Tickets are now on sale for this year’s WordCamp DFW held on Nov. 11-12. There are also plenty of opportunities to sponsor the event or help run it. We hope to see you there!