How To Speed Up Your Website In 5 Easy Steps
When I first launched my blog, I was super excited about my layout choice. My theme looked exactly how I had imagined.
However, there was a problem. My website page load times were terrible. I desperately needed to speed up my website.
I’m sure you’ve experienced this same problem at some point in your blogging career. So in this post, I’m going to discuss what I did and what you can do to speed up your website page load times.
Why Should You Care?
Not only do users not like slow loading websites, but Google doesn’t like slow websites either.
This infographic from Quicksprout is a bit old, but is still just as relevant.
Ironically, by including this infographic on this page, I’ve slowed down its load time. There are some cases like this where you’ll just have to weigh the pros and cons for your audience.
My Slow Website Page Load Time Woes
After clicking around just a couple pages on my website, I noticed that the load time was slower than most sites I visited.
I thought maybe it was just me, that I was imagining that my site was slower because I was paranoid.
Then I thought maybe it was just my internet service provider. Or maybe it was because I was signed in to my site as a WordPress admin.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe it was because of my theme.
If you take one glance at my homepage, you’ll notice that there are a lot of “boxes” that contain posts, much like Pinterest. If you resize your browser window, those boxes will rearrange themselves to fit the screen.
While this is a cool effect, it also takes lots of code to execute. All that code means that the website is a bigger file for users to download.
I came to the conclusion that my theme was fairly taxing for browsers to load.
I decided that I had two options.
- Scrap my beloved theme and use a simpler one, like so many other blogs.
- Do research and work hard to optimize my website for speed.
I didn’t want to be just like everyone else. I wanted my blog to have a unique feel. My theme was chosen for a reason, and I wasn’t going to throw it away without a fight.
So I picked option #2.
In this post I’m going to let you in on the steps I took to improve my website’s load speed.
What You Can Expect After Making These Updates
Before making these changes, my website averaged at least 5 seconds to load. Most of the time it was between 5 and 15, sometimes as long as 30.
After making these updates, my site consistently loads in under 3 seconds, sometimes even under 1 second. In this test, the site loaded in just 723 milliseconds.
If you want to see how much the following tips improve your page load times, go ahead and run a few tests through tools.pingdom.com.
I recommend that you click the settings drop down and switch it to the city nearest you. Then run five tests to get an average page load speed.
The great thing about all of these updates is that besides the hosting cost, they’re free!
Most of the services that I’m going to talk about have a “pro” plan, but it isn’t required for what we’ll be doing.
Now let’s get to it.
1. Sign Up For Bluehost & Install WordPress
To take advantage of the tips I’m going to talk about, you need to use Bluehost and WordPress.
Bluehost is a great, reliable hosting service that’s also super affordable. It comes with an easy to understand user interface, and one-click WordPress install.
If you’re not already using Bluehost, you can easily signup for Bluehost hosting and then use their one-click WordPress install.
Please note that the link above is an affiliate link, so I do make a small commission (no extra cost to you) if you wind up signing up for Bluehost. So thank you in advance for using my link! I am running this website on Bluehost, and definitely recommend it whether you use my link or not.
Signing up for Bluehost and installing WordPress is a fairly simple step-by-step process, but definitely contact me if you have any questions.
2. Update Your Bluehost PHP Settings
If you’re not very technical, this step may seem intimidating. But trust me, it only takes a few clicks and can make a world of difference in page load times.
If you followed step 1, you’ll have signed up for Bluehost and your website is now running on WordPress. Now it’s time to sign in to your Bluehost account.
At the top in the navigation, click the “cpanel” link.
This will take you to the full cpanel page, instead of the abbreviated version on the homepage.
Now you can scroll down until you find the “software/services” section.
Click the purple “PHP Config” icon. This will open a new interface. The interface might take a minute to load.
On the page that appears, you might have one of the PHP 5.2 options selected. If so, you’ll want to switch it to PHP 5.4 (FastCGI).
If you’re working with a brand new Bluehost and WordPress install, you should be able to make this switch without any problems. However, if you’re on an older site that has had changes made to the .htaccess file, make sure to heed Bluehost’s notes to back it up first.
After you’ve switched the setting to PHP 5.4 (FastCGI), make sure to scroll to the bottom of the page to save your changes.
3. Setup CloudFlare
CloudFlare is a great free service that can really help to speed up your website.
CloudFlare’s features include DNS management, CDN (Content Delivery Network), optimization settings, and security settings.
If you don’t know what those terms mean, that’s completely fine. Basically, CloudFlare will just help your website load way faster.
In fact, CloudFlare says that on average a website using CloudFlare loads twice as fast, uses 60% less bandwidth, and has 65% fewer requests. All great things.
So to get started just go to the CloudFlare website.
Sign up and walk through the easy to follow steps. There’s even a video for you to watch that explains exactly how CloudFlare works.
Once you’re signed up, you’ll be able to choose the settings you want to use.
Following are the settings I use, but feel free to test to see what works best for your website.
Firewall
Security Level: Medium
Speed
Auto Minify: JavaScript, CSS, HTML
Note that we’re minifying here instead of with W3 Total Cache in the next step. I just like how CloudFlare minifies. Make sure that you only minify with one or the other.
Rocket Loader: Automatic
IP Geolocation: On
Maximum Upload Size: 100 MB
Caching
Caching Level: Standard
Browser Cache Expiration: 5 days
Always Online: On
Development Mode: Off
Again, these are just the settings that work well for my website, but experiment to see what works for you.
4. Install & Configure W3 Total Cache Plugin
This is a very important step, but it is also a little complicated. W3 Total Cache is a great plugin, but it takes a few settings configurations.
Go ahead and download and install the W3 Total Cache plugin to your WordPress website. This is typically done by following these steps:
- Login to your WordPress admin
- Hover over “Plugins” on the left bar and click “Add New”
- Use the search bar to search “W3 Total Cache”
- Click the “Install Now” button
- The plugin should install and activate
After you’ve installed the plugin, you’ll see a new “Performance” section on the left bar in your WordPress admin.
Go ahead and hover over the “Performance” section and click “Extensions”.
Click “Activate” for CloudFlare (if you completed step 3 above).
Once you’ve activated, you should be taken to the General Settings page. You can either fill in the CloudFlare information now, or scroll to the top and follow along with my notes below.
Following are the settings that I’ve found work best. You can try turning these on and off to see what works best for your site.
All of these options are in the “General Settings” interface. You can click into each section in the navigation bar for more detail, but you shouldn’t need to.
General
Toggle all caching types on or off (at once): Off
Preview mode: Disabled
Page Cache
Page cache: Enable
Page cache method: Disk: Enhanced
Minify
Minify: Disabled (don’t want to overlap with CloudFlare, see step 3 above)
Minify mode: Auto
Minify cache method: Disk
HTML minifier: Default
JS minifier: JSMin (default)
CSS minifier: Default
Database Cache
Database Cache: Enable
Database Cache Method: Disk
Object Cache
Object Cache: Enable
Object Cache Method: Disk
Browser Cache
Browser Cache: Enable
CDN
CDN: Disabled
CDN Type: Generic Mirror
Reverse Proxy
Enable varnish cache purging: Enabled
Varnish servers: Leave empty
Monitoring
New Relic: Disabled
API key: Leave empty
Application name: Leave default, leave empty
Network Performance & Security powered by CloudFlare
CloudFlare: Enable
CloudFlare account email: Input the email you used to sign up for CloudFlare
API key: Click the link to the right to find your API key
Domain: Input your website domain
Security level: Medium
Rocket Loader: Automatic
Minification: CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Development mode: Off
Licensing
License: Leave blank
Miscellaneous
Enable Google Page Speed dashboard widget: Disabled
Page Speed API Key: Leave blank
Verify rewrite rules: Enabled
Enable file locking: Disabled
Optimize disk enhanced page and minify disk caching for NFS: Disabled
Enable Edge mode: Disabled
Debug
Debug Mode: Non selected
Once you’ve made all of these settings changes, click the “Save all settings” button.
5. Compress Image File Sizes
Image file size is a major factor for page load speed. The fact of the matter is, the bigger the image files on your page, the longer it will take users to download them in their browser.
I recommend compressing your images if you have an image heavy theme like me, or even if you are just using featured images for posts.
Most of the time you can easily compress images without a noticeable decrease in quality. It’s a quick task that can greatly improve your page load times.
There are a few free WordPress plugins for image compression. However, I’ve found that they tend to slow down my workflow as they process the images.
In addition, I like to have control over the compression of my images and the resulting files.
Therefore, I use Compressor.io.
Compressor.io is a free tool that lets you easily compress images and see exactly how much bandwidth you’re saving.
Simply upload your image file, let the tool work its magic, then download the compressed file.
From there you can upload the image to your WordPress site, use it in emails, or anywhere else where download speed is a factor.
Run Your Own Speed Test
Now that you’ve completed these optimization tasks, it’s time to check your page load speed.
Note that the traffic from Pingdom will be counted in your Google Analytics reports as direct traffic. So don’t get too excited when you see a spike in traffic if you run a lot of tests.
If everything has gone well, your website page load times should be much faster.
If not, keep experimenting with settings to find the combination that works best for you.
Summary
Website page load speed is a big factor in user experience as well as Google rankings. Therefore you should follow the steps above to speed up your website. By using several free tools, you can vastly speed up your page load times and delight your users with a page that loads nearly instantly. Not only is it great for the user experience, but it looks very professional as well!
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Originally published at smartwebsitemarketing.com on May 15, 2015.
