Mike Andreasen is a WordPress expert and performance enthusiast who has been in the WordPress industry for more than 16 years. Throughout his journey, he has served and completed almost 1600 projects. To know more about him, let’s read from the man himself!
Farhan: Hi Mike, thank you for joining us today. Please introduce yourself and walk us through your journey with WordPress?
Mike: Thanks, Farhan! I am a WordPress performance enthusiast who strongly desires to optimize every website on earth. I started with WordPress while building a media server tutorial website that became popular, leading to issues with crashing and scaling the site. I am highly motivated to help clients avoid the pain of a slow or crashing website.
Farhan: As a WordPress specialist for over 16 years, what motivates you to continue with WordPress?
Mike: There is always something new in WordPress which keeps it interesting. It dominates the web because it is user-friendly, flexible, and can run businesses and projects of any size.
Farhan: What type of WordPress projects do you prefer? What workflows and tools do you choose to achieve the desired results?
Mike: We specialize in performance troubleshooting for WordPress or WooCommerce stores. These projects are particularly rewarding because we can quickly identify the issues causing the website to crash or become painfully slow.
We begin with a forensic, exploratory audit of the store’s backend and frontend, analyzing everything from the server to infrastructure, hosting, theme, and plugins. We use a combination of custom-built in-house tools and services like New Relic, GTmetrix, CrUX, and WebPageTest. Once we analyze, we experiment and test repeatedly, monitoring to see what new patterns emerge until we achieve the desired results.
Farhan: You work at Codeable as a WordPress developer & run a WordPress agency (WP Bullet) that offers services like performance troubleshooting, database audit, Google Core Web Vitals and more. Would you like to share any interesting anecdotes about your career?
Mike: We have so many anecdotes from our happy clients it will be hard to choose! You can read a lot of them in our case studies.
Most recently, a client was hesitant to hire us, even though their site was crashing when they ran marketing campaigns via their newsletter, Facebook, and Google ads. Shoppers were frustrated, seeing errors instead of their carts.
We built a special plugin to help cache logged-in users and handle the visitors coming from the paid traffic channels. After just a few weeks, the client sent screenshots showing a 6x ROI since hiring us!
He joked that the biggest mistake they made was not hiring us sooner. They had tried to resolve the issue themselves for 6 months, costing them at least €360,000. Often, the best investment you can make is in the performance of your website; it pays dividends for years and years!
Farhan: How did Codeable come into the picture, and how does it help you get projects? Are there any specific projects that make you proud of yourself?
Mike: Codeable is one of my most favorite places on earth. The people who built Codeable are just on another level.
The co-founder, Per Esbensen, also a fellow Dane, has a beautiful vision of how WordPress outsourcing should work, and the community there is amazingly supportive and helpful. I have worked on many projects that I am proud of, but the most rewarding are those that solve problems clients have struggled with for a long time.
Farhan: You have completed over 1600 projects at Codeable & serving more than 470 customers. How challenging is it to achieve such high overall ratings with a 100% completion rate?
Mike: Oh wow, is it almost 500 customers already? When you put customer satisfaction and quality of work first, the challenge of making 500 customers happy becomes much easier. We find communication is absolutely critical, and setting expectations before we begin working together and keeping clients updated during the project to be essential. Nobody likes being in the dark!
Farhan: It is good to see that you have expertise in WordPress/WooCommerce performance & it won’t be wrong to call you a Speed Expert. Would you share a few tips and tricks for WordPress newbies interested in speed optimization?
Mike: My biggest tip is to understand your website’s limitations. Many online resources claim to improve website performance but can sometimes worsen your site speed worse.
Measuring your site’s performance is crucial to optimize its speed. Tools like GTmetrix, Webpagetest, and CrUX can help you make intelligent, informed decisions about whether a new optimization will benefit your site or not. While synthetic testing tools are helpful, but analyzing real user metrics (RUM) helps ensure that your site provides an excellent user experience.
Farhan: Website speed is vital, and I believe a well-optimized WordPress hosting provider can significantly improve website performance. What type of hosting you recommend for smooth WordPress performance?
Mike: Ideally, clients should have dedicated resources on a server, whether a VPS like Cloudways or a dedicated physical machine. In both cases, you want to reduce the possibility of noisy neighbors affecting your website’s performance.
With tools like an Analytics dashboard and SSH access, you can monitor and debug any issues that arise. New Relic is another tool that can help you identify performance bottlenecks and fix them quickly.
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Farhan Ayub
Farhan is a community manager at Cloudways. He loves to work with WordPress and has a passion for web development. Mostly, he spends his time interacting with the people in the WordPress community. Apart from his work life, Farhan spends his time gaming and playing sports. Feel free to contact him at [email protected]
