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Hummingbird for WordPress is a tremendous all-around caching plugin with a robust feature set and a variety of positives, including Uptime monitoring. While the pricing lets it down slightly, we’d still recommend Hummingbird for your WordPress caching needs. Have you used Hummingbird before? Or perhaps you have a preferred caching plugin? The hummingbird plugin is the first WordPress plugin that has been able to standardize the sites speedfully. Hummingbird Migration Map for 2021 – listing of 2021 hummingbird sightings and migration patterns (Spring & Fall). View map & download species guide. Like a lot of birds out there, hummingbirds migrate in the colder months to a warmer climate.

Hummingbird Migration Map for 2021 – listing of 2021 hummingbird sightings and migration patterns (Spring & Fall). View map & download species guide.

Like a lot of birds out there, hummingbirds migrate in the colder months to a warmer climate. In North America, hummingbirds tend to spend the winter months in central America or Mexico, and they will not start to migrate until around the month of February.

The migration pattern might differ from year to year, but the birds pick up on a number of things to really trigger their move back up north. Below is a detailed guide on what to expect out of hummingbirds, and when they might be in your particular area. Teamviewer 11 free download for mac os x.

Hummingbird migration patterns

Spring migration

When the days become longer and the weather becomes a little bit better, hummingbirds make their way back up north through most of the United States. This migration process usually starts around the end of February, and by March people will start to notice hummingbirds in different areas.

The males will be the first to arrive, and as one might expect, they first can be spotted in southern states along the Gulf Coast. It is very dependent on the weather that year, but by the beginning of March people in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida should all be seeing hummingbirds. Since the ruby-throated is the most popular breed in that part of the United States, chances are that will be the hummingbird seen.

They can take hummingbirds a full month to get about halfway up the United States. Most people in the Midwest will not see their first hummingbird of the year until April. This is due to travel time and weather. They also go off of the abundance of flowers and insects in the area.

Those in the north, as well as Canada, probably will not see hummingbirds until the month of May. As things start to spread out a little, there are going to be fewer hummingbirds in the area in the first place. Download flock for mac. It might not seem like the best news for those who like to watch hummingbirds in the area, but it just puts more of a focus on having a good feeder set up. As the saying goes, if you build it, they will come.

Fall migration

During the summer months, hummingbirds will enjoy the weather in all different parts of the United States. Around the end of August and September, they start to move south, looking for slightly warmer temperatures as well as abundant food sources.

Since this can be some of the hottest weather of the year, hummingbirds usually eat in the early morning, and then travel during the day. By the late afternoon, they are once again eating, trying to maintain their body weight as much as possible. Keep food levels at a pretty high level in order to bring them in during their migration.

Those looking to catch their final glimpses of hummingbirds in the fall should check out the southern coast of the United States in the month of September. They are usually gathering to make one final flight south, either to somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico or in Mexico itself. There are some that will end up staying in the United States, but they are certainly not as prevalent.

Each year, people should pay attention to the overall weather patterns. It is becoming a little bit more common to see hummingbirds either wait out the migration, or stay in the United States altogether. This seems to be a little bit more common in the western part of the United States, especially with Anna’s hummingbirds.

When and where do hummingbirds migrate?

The most common dates to keep in mind are March 1 and September 1. In that window, people all around the United States have a good opportunity to see some hummingbird activity. It is worth having a feeder out, especially if the weather is doing well. Being one of the first to have food out for the hummingbirds can give a person and edge over other yards in the area.

Different species of hummingbirds are going to be in different parts of the United States. The most common hummingbird in the United States is the ruby-throated hummingbird, and they usually stick to the eastern half of the United States. Black-chinned and Anna’s hummingbirds are going to be found in the western part of United States, and Rufous hummingbirds stick to the Pacific Northwest.

The most common species of hummingbirds

To a lot of people, or hummingbirds look relatively the same. While some do you share a lot of similar characteristics, it is interesting to tell the differences as well. Here is a look at some of the most common species out there, as well as where to find them in the United States.

Ruby-throated hummingbirds

For most people, ruby-throated hummingbirds are going to be what many people considered to be just a generic hummingbird. They are the most common in the United States, especially in the eastern half.

These hummingbirds have a very strict routine, often returning to the same area each and every year. Their body allows them to realize when it is time to migrate north, and they will stay around depending on the weather.

Anna’s hummingbird

On the west coast, this is one of the most common hummingbirds out there. They span the Pacific coast, and even go in towards Arizona and Texas. Due to the weather in the area, they tend to be permanent residence instead of migrating to other parts of the world.

They are able to handle colder temperatures by gaining weight during the day. They do that by converting sugar into fat. They also have some beautiful markings and colors on their head, making them easy to distinguish in the wild. They are the only hummingbird with red on the crown.

Rufous

Found in the western United States more towards the Pacific Northwest (and Canada), the Rufous is orange/red in appearance. They are very aggressive, and people should be a little bit worried about that overall if they try to get too close. They tend to get aggressive with other hummingbirds for the most part, but they are feisty and territorial.

A bit on the small side, most of these hummingbirds are only going to be about 3 to 4 inches. Their Rufous back is one of a kind, and the reason it has the name. Since they like to hang out in colder temperatures during the summer months, they do tend to migrate a little bit early. Make sure to catch a glimpse of them before it is too late.

Black-Chinned

The black-chinned hummingbird stays in the mountains of the western United States, usually in lower elevations. In the winter, they can be found along the Gulf Coast as well as in Central America.

They usually can be spotted due to their black chin and a violet throat. They do look pretty similar to ruby throated hummingbirds, but one way to tell the difference is the shape of they are big. Black chair and hummingbirds are going to have much more curved beaks compared to the straight bill of a ruby-throated hummingbird.

Violet-crowned hummingbird

These hummingbirds are great to spot, and they are a bit rare overall. If a person is to spot them, they usually can be found in California and west Texas. Other states they tend to be in include Arizona and New Mexico.

The name once again explains how to spot this hummingbird. The violet crown is a heavy contrast to the white throat and red/orange bill. It is one of the most striking hummingbirds out there, and most people consider it to be a huge find when they actually stop by.

White-Eared hummingbird

Technically speaking, the white stripe behind the eye is not the hummingbird’s ear, but the name makes sense in a lot of ways. Not only are they easy to spot when a person sees that stripe, but their red/orange bill with a black tip is also very distinctive.

Unfortunately, these are becoming a lot more rare than in the past. Mostly spotted in the Southwestern part of the United States, the best way to look for white eared hummingbirds is to stop by in the summer months. Most of the documented spottings in the last few years have been in the state of Texas.

Costa’s Hummingbird

Anyone in the deserts of the southwest United States should be able to spot Costa’s hummingbirds during the summer months. These birds really do like their hot summer days, and the Sonoran and Mojave desert have a lot of these birds hanging around.

The males are going to have a deep violet head that is very distinctive. Females are going to be a little less vibrant, but they have a white throat with violet feathers.

These hummingbirds are a bit on the smaller side, and they like to hang out in woodland areas.

Allen’s hummingbird

This is another hummingbird that seems to really like the state of California. They tend to hang out on the coast, coming up during the summer months and staying until the beginning of winter.

These hummingbirds are going to look very similar to the Rufous hummingbird, but they do not have as big of a range. The best way to tell between the two is to look at the throat area. Males are going to have an iridescent red throat, while females will have a dull white look in their throat area.

Calliope hummingbird

This is the smallest hummingbird found in North America. They like to hang out in the Northwest United States when they come, simply due to the high elevations in the mountains.

Their most distinctive feature is a streaked throat. They usually have some red in the throat area, and it really stands out in flight or standing around.

Optimizing a WordPress site for speed can seem daunting even for advanced users. Here is a complete guide on how to make your web pages load incredibly fast with Hummingbird, our WordPress speed optimization plugin.

Make your WordPress sites blazing fast with Hummingbird

One thousand and one…one thousand and two…

That’s all the time you’ve got to ensure that your pages load on a user’s browser before half your visitors lose interest and decide to leave your site.

Optimizing WordPress pages to load in under two seconds can be a complex and challenging task. Many factors contribute to your site’s speed, like your web hosting, media file sizes, third-party scripts, the number of plugins, and the theme you’ve installed on your site.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use Hummingbird to take a slow-loading site like this…

And optimize it for faster loading pages like this…

Hummingbird is a powerful plugin that optimizes WordPress sites to deliver faster-loading pages to your visitors’ desktop and mobile browsers using an intuitive and easy-to-use interface with one-click automated optimization features.

Hummingbird also gives users complete control of their site optimization with advanced fine-tuning settings and options, detailed explanations of technical recommendations, score metrics to help you understand what you are doing, continuous monitoring of performance issues (with recommendations on how to fix these), unparallelled 24/7 plugin support, and ongoing plugin development.

This guide will show you how to get the most out of Hummingbird’s speed optimization features and keep your web pages loading fast. We’ll cover the following sections:

We’ll also explore how Hummingbird addresses various factors that contribute to page speed and provide you with links to relevant tutorials and resources to help you get the most out of the plugin.

“Hummingbird is so easy to use. I thought it wouldn’t change my speed much because I already made improvements. I ran the scan, it gave me recommendations, I pushed a button to apply them and it made my site even faster!” – Camilo

We have a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started…

1. Why Use Hummingbird to Optimize WordPress Site Speed?

There are a number of free online tools you can use to test your site’s performance.

The most popular and recommended tools are Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Tools, and Gmetrix.

Although all of the above are great tools for showing you how fast your website pages are loading, we developed Hummingbird to follow Google PageSpeed Insights recommendations because:

• Google PageSpeed Insights focuses on the end-user experience.
• It provides recommendations for optimizing your page speed by fixing areas you have control over, like images and text-based resources and code files.
• Since Google uses page speed as a ranking metric in search results, Google PageSpeed Insights gives a clear picture of what Google prioritizes when setting search ranking.

As stated on the plugin’s description at WordPress.org,

Hummingbird makes your website faster and optimizes site performance by adding new ways to boost Google PageSpeed Insights with fine-tuned controls over file compression, deferring CSS and JavaScript styles and scripts, minify for CSS and JS, Lazy Load integration and world-class caching.

When you put this all together, you will see that Hummingbird’s approach is to:

1. Improve your page speed with the end-user experience as a priority.
2. Help you fix areas that you have control over, namely images, and text-based files and code. As you will see, Hummingbird works seamlessly with Smush — our award-winning image compression and optimization plugin — to help you easily fix Google PageSpeed Insights image recommendations (e.g. optimize images, resize images, defer off-screen images, encode images, and serve images in next-gen formats, while taking care of text-based issues, such as eliminate render-blocking resources, minify JavaScript and CSS, remove unused CSS, enable text compression, use efficient cache policy on static assets, and preconnect to required origins. And most of this can be done either automatically, or by clicking a few buttons.
3. Do all of the above, and help your site boost its search rankings by following the exact speed optimization criteria that Google looks at and prioritizes when analyzing sites.

Hummingbird uses Google PageSpeed Insights results but provides customized and WordPress-specific recommendations to fix issues and improve performance.

Something worth keeping in mind as we explore Hummingbird’s speed optimization features is that Google PageSpeed Insights is designed to gauge your user’s experience. Scoring a result of 50 represents the 75th percentile. This means that if you score 50 or better, you are already in the top 25% of all websites for performance.

To understand why aiming for a Google PageSpeed score of 100 is the wrong goal, subscribe to the form at the bottom of this guide.

2. The Hummingbird Dashboard – Your WordPress Speed Optimization HQ

WordPress speed optimization begins in Hummingbird’s dashboard.

Note: if you’re a WPMU DEV member, you can install Hummingbird from The Hub, our central management console.

Just select your site, click on the Performance tab, and click the Install button.

Once installed, you can use The Hub to monitor how Hummingbird is performing on your site for desktop and mobile users without having to log into the site.

The Hummingbird Dashboard provides a snapshot of your site’s current optimization status. It consists of an Overview section and Quick Access panels to all of the plugin’s modules.

Here is a quick summary of the Dashboard sections and how they contribute to faster page loading speeds. We will expand on each of these areas in a moment. You can also click on the section links below to visit the plugin’s documentation for each section.

• Overview – The section at the very top of your dashboard displays the results of your latest performance tests and lets you quickly determine if the site is performing within acceptable limits.
• Performance Test – Hummingbird scans your site, assesses its speed and efficiency, and creates a report with recommendations on ways to fix issues and that improve performance.
• Caching – Activate and configure Page, Browser, and Gravatar caching. We’ve written a detailed post that explains how caching works and how it speeds up your site.
• Image Optimization – Hummingbird works seamlessly with Smush — our image compression and optimization plugin — to make images on your page load faster, thereby improving overall page speed.
• Gzip Compression – Gzip speeds up the transfer of page data by making server files smaller and faster to send to users’ web browsers.
• Asset Optimization – Asset optimization improves page speed by making your code more efficient and optimizing the delivery of your assets to improve performance.
• Advanced Tools – Here you can make a number of additional tweaks to help further reduce page loading times.
• Uptime Monitoring – This is a Hummingbird Pro feature that alerts you immediately via email if your website goes down and lets you know when your site is up and running again.
• Reports – This is another Hummingbird Pro feature that lets you automate and schedule sending daily, weekly, or monthly Performance Test, Database Cleanup, and Uptime reports to help you stay on top of potential performance issues.

You can also access of Hummingbird’s sections from the plugin menu.

Let’s go through the main sections of the plugin that affect your site’s page speed and how to use Hummingbird to improve speed in each of these areas.

3. Assess Your Site with a Performance Test

We recommend running a performance test after installing the plugin on your site.

Just click the Run Test button on the Dashboard to start.

Alternatively, you can also run a Desktop or Mobile speed test from The Hub.

As well as score metrics, Hummingbird also delivers your site’s test results in the Audits section in three different areas:

• Opportunities: This section identifies opportunities to improve your page loading speed and estimates how much faster your site will load if these improvements are implemented.
• Diagnostics: This section provides additional information about how your page adheres to best practices of web development. While improvements made in this section may not directly impact load speed, they help to improve the overall performance score of your page.
• Passed Audits: This section lists audits with a score of 90 or more. Any area scoring less than 100 represents additional opportunities to improve your site’s overall performance score.

Wordpress Hummingbird Plugin

Hummingbird’s performance test results also use intuitive color-coded scores to help you readily identify issues that need fixing and areas that need to be improved on.

Scroll down the page and you’ll see what score and color was assigned to each of the key performance areas of your WordPress site.

Click on the recommendation and it will expand and provide you with detailed information on what to do to improve your score.

In the Opportunities section, for example, if you expand on each item, you will see recommendations on ways to improve your page load speed and estimates of how much faster your site will load if these improvements are implemented.

Many of these improvements and recommendations can be implemented within Hummingbird itself.

Follow the instructions provided, make the updates to your site, and then re-run the test to see if those improvements helped increase your performance score.

Please note:

• If you run both Hummingbird’s Performance test and GPSI test directly, you may notice different results. This is because HB always pings the same server, while GPSI pings the nearest server.
• For the most accurate results based on your end user’s experience, use GPSI directly. However, for WordPress-specific recommendations and in-dashboard tips for improving performance, use Hummingbird PRO’s scan and results.

4. Deliver Faster Pages and Content with Caching

Caching makes pages load faster. When we think of performance plugins, typically what we’re focused on is page-level caching.

Hummingbird takes this a step further and offers many types of caching, which you can easily activate and enable by clicking in the plugin’s Caching screen.

Hummingbird’s caching abilities include page caching, browser caching, Gravatar caching, and RSS caching. Additionally, Hummingbird integrates seamlessly with CDNs (e.g. Cloudflare) and if your sites are hosted with WPMU DEV, site speed is further enhanced with Object Cache and Static Server Cache.

Once activated, Hummingbird immediately begins caching your pages and files.

The plugin also gives you complete control over every aspect of its caching functionality. This includes selecting which types of pages to cache, enabling or disabling preload caching, configuring cache intervals, expiry dates per file and server types, integrations with third-party providers (e.g. Redis) and CDNs, and other cache-related settings.

CloudFlare Integration

A CDN can significantly enhance performance and boost speed in WordPress sites. Part of the way in which it does this is through caching.

If you’re a WPMU DEV member or are hosting your sites with WPMU DEV, you can activate the WPMU DEV CDN in Hummingbird’s Asset Optimization screen to optimize the delivery of static assets such as JS and CSS files.

If you’re currently using CloudFlare CDN services, Hummingbird enables CloudFlare users to connect their account in order to manage those browser caching settings from the plugin.

To learn more about each of the above caching types, check out our post on different types of web cache and visit Hummingbird’s caching documentation section.

5. Reduce File Sizes for Faster Serving with Gzip Compression

File transfer from server to browser can be a major problem when you have a lot of bulky files (or even just a lot of files, in general) to transmit. This is why Gzip compression is an ideal solution to have in place. In sum, it uses an algorithm to store your data as a single bit. In so doing, it makes the size of the files you need to transmit much more compact.

If your server doesn’t already have Gzip file compression enabled, you can use Hummingbird to take care of it for you.

Hummingbird’s built-in Gzip compression makes your WordPress web pages load faster by bundling and compressing your site’s text-based resources into smaller and more compact files that reach your visitors’ browsers quicker.

If you’re not hosting with WPMU DEV, you can configure Gzip compression to suit your server type (e.g. NGINX, Apache, IIS) and follow the plugin’s instructions to activate it on your website.

If you need help with Gzip compression, check out our documentation or click the link inside the plugin to start a live chat with our support team (Hummingbird > Gzip Compression > Enable compression).

6. Turbo-boost Page Speed with Asset Optimization

Running Hummingbird’s speed test from the plugin’s Dashboard or Performance test screen creates a list of recommended optimizations that will help your pages load faster.

You can address and resolve many of these recommendations within the plugin itself.

Just head on over to the Asset Optimization screen and choose whether to use our automated options or manually configure each file.

Hummingbird lets you choose from two automated asset optimization options by clicking on the Automatic tab:

• Speedy – This provides a higher level of optimization and is the recommended option. It automatically compresses your files and ‘auto-combines’ smaller files with identical attributes, helping to reduce the number of requests made when your pages are loaded.
• Basic – This option automatically compresses all of your unoptimized files, generating a newer and faster version of each. It also removes clutter from CSS and JavaScript files, helping to improve your site speed even further.

For more details on how these asset optimization methods work, click on the ‘How does it Work?’ link in the plugin or see our documentation.

If you plan to optimize assets and configure each file manually, you will be instructing Hummingbird’s Asset Optimization engine to compress, inline, combine, defer or move your files so visitors make fewer requests to your server when they visit your site.

The process of cleaning up excess space in files, removing unnecessary elements, and rewriting code to reduce file size so they’re smaller and more lightweight is called minification. This excessive use of space can come in many forms, but Hummingbird looks for things like unnecessary white space, characters, or carriage returns. When you do away with these, HTTPS requests to your site will transmit more quickly to visitors, resulting in faster load times.

Hummingbird lets you perform various functions to optimize files manually, such as compress, combine, move the file to the footer, insert the file as inline CSS, and prevent the file from loading.

Hummingbird not only lets you minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript files but you can also combine those files and reposition them on your site so they load more efficiently. Moving scripts to the footer, for example, helps to eliminate render-blocking issues.

The indicator buttons in this section will let you know if a file has already been compressed (gray button) and if it can be combined with another file (blue button). An option to force load the file after the page loads is also available for Javascript files.

Manual mode also lets you perform bulk update operations by selecting multiple files. Please note, however, that when optimizing files in manual mode, we recommend making changes one at a time and verifying that each operation is successful before moving to the next. Only make bulk changes to assets if you’re confident that you know what you’re doing.

After applying all the updates you want to make to each file, click on Publish Changes. Be sure to check your site after this is done to ensure that nothing has gone awry as you moved your files and scripts around.

7. Keep Your Site Lean and Users Keen with Advanced Tools

Hummingbird’s Advanced Tools section lets you make additional tweaks to increase page loading speeds.

Some of these tweaks include:

• General – Removing URL query strings from proxy caching servers and some CDNs can help to increase speed. You can further reduce your page load times by disabling cart fragments on non-WooCommerce pages if your site is powered by WooCommerce, and by making additional tweaks such as removing default Emoji JS and CSS files, and pre-resolving DNS for specific domains if you use third-party services.
• Database Cleanup – Clean your database of unnecessary data which could be slowing down your server.
• Lazy Load – Sites with lots of comments, iframes, and images can slow down over time. Enable the lazy loading comments feature in this section to delay loading of comments and boost your page speed on pages with lots of comments.

8. Monitor Site Downtime with Uptime

The worst possible page speed outcome you can experience is having a site down with pages not loading at all.

Uptime monitoring is a Hummingbird Pro feature that alerts you immediately via email if your website goes down and lets you know when your site is up and running again.

Learn more about Uptime monitoring. Python selenium chrome web scraping.

9. No-risk Optimization – Boost Your Page Speed or Get Your Slow Site Back

Hummingbird does not change anything in your database, allowing you to revert all changes you make, at any time.

If you perform a proper plugin uninstall, it will also remove all traces of the plugin and revert any changes you have made.

Note that Hummingbird cannot fix performance issues for scripts that run on 3rd-party servers. These include social media feeds, media embeds (e.g. YouTube videos), essential scripts that you may rely on (e.g. Google Analytics), or even resource-intensive plugins and themes that call functions externally.

Hummingbird Plugin

Make Your Site Fly with Hummingbird

Since becoming a part of our superhero plugin family in August 2018, Hummingbird has been outperforming every other WordPress optimization plugin on the market.

As mentioned at the start of this guide, optimizing WordPress for speed can be a complex and challenging task. Hummingbird simplifies this process greatly by giving you a powerful ‘all-in-one’ WordPress optimization tool that lets you implement Google PageSpeed Insights recommendations and fix most issues causing your pages to load slowly right within the plugin’s dashboard, or externally via The Hub if you’re managing multiple sites.

You can further boost page speed on your site by combining Hummingbird’s built-in tools with Smush for image optimization and hosting your sites on our fully managed WordPress hosting service, which is also optimized for speed with features like a blazing fast CDN, page caching at the server-side using FastCGI, and more.

Wpmu Dev Free Plugins

For in-depth information about using Hummingbird, refer to the plugin’s documentation and check out our roadmap to see all the exciting new features and improvements coming soon. And if you need any help at any time using Hummingbird contact our support team. We’re available 24/7 for all your WordPress needs.