Here are a couple of the steps that are free and will improve your website’s loading time by many seconds in most cases with a few minutes of work.
Website speed has been a concern for me since the end of 2010. I can’t remember exactly when but at some point Google said that website speed is now a ranking factor and ever since everytime I would get some sort of ranking decrease I would often believe it was my website’s slow loading speed that was the reason. WordPress blogs usually start at a disadvantage on this compared to normal html blogs or websites that simply have less lines for a web browser to load.
How to measure your website’s speed
To start off with, to analyze my website speed I have used both http://loads.in/ and http://gtmetrix.com. The first one is really detailed and allows you to setup a region and browser to test your website’s loading speed. However, it keeps the results for 24 hours for a specific region/browser so I usually have to note the time and test it again the next day (or use a region test that is very close with the same browser). I love http://gtmetrix.com because it if you clear your caches (more on that later) you can immediately see the difference in speed after your changes.
The four simple steps that make the biggest difference
1) The first thing you want to do is get the plugin W3 total cache if you do not have it already. In it, you want to enable page, database and object caching. Before I use to also enable minify but a few days ago I changed my mind after reading this blog post on improving your site’s speed. The minify optimization will instead be done as part of step 2 now which has actually helped my website load faster. The only tab you want to change the options for are the browser cache, make sure to check the first 3 boxes which are not by default currently. Also in the page cache, you might want to double check that the option don’t cache pages for logged-in users is check’d. Since you are a logged in admin, you want your website to always reload.
2) Install Cloudflare, use the free version to start with, I still have not had a need for the pro version but considering it if it provides additional speed ups… If you use hostgator you probably noticed it in your cpanel menu.
I have been using it for a few months now to help against hackers and help speed up my website. The setup is quite simple. You add your website to the service and then go to namecheap (or if you have some other domain registrar…) and use the name servers cloudflare will give you. Cloudflare basicallymakes it so visitors go to cloudflare which shows a static image of your website. It also helps protect you against hackers because it can detect them from a known list or if they do not behave like normal visitors and give them a captcha to solve to make sure they are human. 
They have a 4 step process but I always just do next next next until I get the name servers and never got a problem (the first time I took my time and looked at it but they do a really good job with it so I trust them now). After the nameservers are updated, click on “settings” and go to cloudflare settings and put a green checkbox and rocket loader as “automatic” as shown in the image below. This basically replaces the W3 total cache.
3) Get the plugin wp smush.it to reduce the image size of the pictures on your website. Every time you add a new image it will compact it automatically.
4) Finally, one that should be obvious, the plugins you do not need anymore make sure to disable/remove them. Some of them might have an impact on your site’s speed especially if they have to load java script or other such things.
Final step before testing your new site’s speed
Make sure to purge the page cache in W3 total cache (you will probably see it warning you of this at the top) and do a cache purge on cloudflare too before testing for website speed’s at http://loads.in/ and http://gtmetrix.com
This is what I do on all of my website’s nowadays and I really appreciated the additional configuration tips I got from the previously linked impact blog post about cloudflare. If you want to check out the post he has a few other things that he explains but I don’t bother with them since I doubt it would make a difference for my adsense site. Though I did remove the default gravatar image for people without any email images (add one dammit!). I figured this might really help loading speeds on the pages with 100+ comments from the guide.
Thanks Alex for this post! I tried it one one of my adsense sites… going from 12 sec. to 3 sec loading time 🙂
Question: Would I have to constantly clear the cache from WP and from Cloudflare every time I make a new post or tweak the site?
no it will do it automatically after a while. As a logged in user you might see the changes immediately but visitors will have to wait a bit of time.
I’ve heard that w3 total cache can cause problems with adsense in that it won’t allow adsense to be dynamically generated – is this true or a myth or is there a certain setting in total cache i should use for it?
I never saw a change in adsense earnings after enabling caching plugins. Also I think adsense behaves differently. Either way, they are very popular and if adsense had problems with them I’m sure Google(most likely) or the owner of the plugin would let us know.
Hey Alex,
This is not the post to ask this question but I tried to ask this on your step 3 in the guide and nothing happened…
Have you ever submitted an article to ideamarketers.com? If so, did you have positive results?
Thanks!
I replied to your email on that subject but for others wondering, I can’t remember them so I’m not sure if I did ever submit articles there. Either way, if you can submit articles there for free I don’t see why you would not. Just check if they easily get indexed a week after the article is approved and if it is keep on using them.
So I was looking at the compilation of the last manual articles I submitted and ideamarketers.com were on it and I check’d a few of the articles and they were all indexed, so definitely recommended.
My opinion? get your own dedicated server or VPS (XEN base). Shared hosting is slow, thats why i got me a VPS. A VPS doesn’t really cost that much anymore and you can tweak it in many different ways.
If you have knowledge of linux that is 🙂
Alex.Becker just a random question…do you know when you add some content to wordpress and every paragraph is changing it font size in the article after submitting…..do you know how i can make sure that all my articles stay in the same font size for all over the articles, form some reason its always do this problem for me…
On the page for “W3 Total Cache” I have a red warning box:
“Page caching is not available. The current add-in /home/drama/public_html/wp-content/advanced-cache.php is either an incorrect file or an old version. De-activate the plugin, remove the file, then activate the plugin again.”
I tried removing and installing the “WP Super Cache” plugin, but no avail.
Thoughts?
ya I had similar issues on a few of my websites, I tried disabling and deleting both plugins and re-installing/updating wordpress. If it doesn’t work just contact your hosting provider. Or just put cloudflare for now, that speeds your site up a decent amount by itself anyway.
Hostgator was extremely quick to fix that issue. Cheers!
Hey, do you guys have any suggestions for preventing hackers from attacking your site?
That would be an awesome post and one that could be extremely useful.
I’ll think about it but despite getting websites hacked 4-6 times by now it’s not that big of a deal if you are using hostgator thanks to the automatic backups. Either way, my own tips that I’ve been following is spread out your sites, getting a shared account hacked SUCKS when all your adsense revenue is tied together. Ideally just get a reseller account, $20 and all your sites are not connected, I use hostnine a lot now because they also usually get you different ip’s which is good for the blog network I’m building.
Anyway, never use “admin” as a username.
Hmm actually I do remember a way to configure your htaccess file so that only select ip’s can change it, it’s not useful for me because I access my websites from a lot of places but maybe it will be for others so I could mention that in a security post.
Cool man. Thanks for the tips.
I’ll look into hostnine too.
The next site I create will be on a different adsense account.
So, Alex you have your adsense sites with a shared account on HG and a reseller with H9?
most of the adsense sites are still shared on HG because I don’t bother moving them out. Also, I check them regularly and HG is very quick with backups. H9 I I love because I do a lot of seo testing with many domains on them and not only do I get different c class ip’s, but a reseller account is very convenient to install websites on and it has the advantage of not hacking an entire network of sites if I do get hacked.
Hi alex,
I done some tests on gmetrix and they come out at 80% and 90%. I guess 80% would be ok.
I have a reseller account with host nine as well. This is for a blog network and for lots of sites that i am targeting for similar niches(don’t want them to seem as if they are from the one source). Have you had any issues with page speed and downtime with your reseller acount, my sites so far dont seem to be great
Regarding Cloudflare, I don’t see the settings menu that you are showing in the guide. I followed the directions and changed my DNS nameservers
Check out this image, http://screencast.com/t/rllYFS3r. after clicking on the dropdown menu click on “cloudflare settings” (1 of 3 options)
Man Alex, I must be retarded because I don’t see that in my settings page of wordpress or in the Cloudflare edit page. I click Cloudflare under settings, but it only shows me a page to enter my API code and email.
Yo Drama,
I had the same issue as you.
Go to Cloudflare interface on cloudflare.com
Log in, and go to ‘websites’.
You can see the picture alex uploaded there.
Cheers,
Romano
Thanks man!
i use cloudflare with my websites and they’re a bit quicker now.
what i don’t understand is why does cloudflare show different unique visitors than google analytics does.
unique visits yesterday on my new site:
58 Unique visitors (cloudflare)
14 visitors (analytics)
any ideas?
Cloudflare might be blocking some of them to even access your site. Look at the security reports, cloudflare blocks a lot of suspected infected people that might be trying to hack your computer.
Cloudflare might be blocking some of them to even access your site. Look at the security reports, cloudflare blocks a lot of suspected infected people that might be trying to hack your computer.
Hi Alex
your post is very informative and helpful…it is my first website so I’m very newbie in this issues..i followed your steps till the fourth one where i got hesitated to change my current name servers to the one specified by cloudflare.i have pointed my name servers from my registrar to a different hosting agent ( after they instruct me to do so), now i have to redirect it again from the hosting agent to cloudflare . does this will affect my website in a way or another …i’m not sure
i will stop proceeding with step four till i get your kind advice
best regard
All you do is change the name servers at the registrar again. Replace the name servers your host gave you.
whoah this blog is excellent i really like studying your articles.
Stay up the great work! You know, many persons are hunting round for this info, you could help them greatly.
Thanks for the post . Tried those methods. Can you tell me if i put jpeg files as is ? The file size comes out to be too big and does this affect the loading time on my wordpress blog ?
I am using both blogger and wordpress. which one is better..
Best Regards
Paromita
For compressing images even futher I would suggest you use riot which you can read more about in this post. http://thelinkback.com/reduce-image-size-faster-website-loading/.
It’s free and I love it, it compresses more than anything else I’ve tried especially if you play around with it and decrease the image quality/size up until you actually notice a difference to the human eye.
I remember when I step on this website when I first came to source-wave. Sucks that this has been left in the dust. Such great information on the link back.
Thanks for the nice comments, maybe one day I’ll continue this blog …