GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 27 - February 2014

Faster sites have a smaller bounce rate, lead to more pageviews per user and have a higher conversion rate. Studies have shown that if your site (or any individual page) takes 2-3 seconds to load, you’re already in the red zone and are stretching the patience of your poten- tial customers. Two seconds should be the target. Test your site on tools.pingdom.com and then it’s time to start improving. And if the results aren’t good, don’t be daunted. Some of the strategies that offer the biggest benefits are the simplest to implement. Loading speed has three components: The quality of the server, the nature of the con- tent and the efficiency of delivery of the content to the visitor. Content is actually the least important, or at least is the last one you should be targeting in your quest for more speed. Use a content delivery network A content delivery network (CDN) opti- mizes the delivery of content from the site to the visitor, and also uses a network of servers which hold a copy of the site. It’s something every webmaster should use without hesitation. Any site not using a CDN is in the Stone Age. Data doesn’t always travel smoothly from the server to the customer, as it needs to be routed numerous times, and errors do hap- pen.Without going into toomuch technical detail, let’s just say a CDN is the equivalent of driving to the nearest mall instead of the farthest one, never making a wrong turn and hitting every green light on the way. There’s a free CDN called CloudFlare and it has the added benefit of being one of the best. It provides an array of features such as blocking threats, monitoring traffic and geolocation among other things. It takes five minutes to sign up, then you change the DNS settings of your domain, and af- ter 24-48 hours the changes kick in and your site gains all the benefits of a CDN. The site will still be hosted on your serv- er, but all incoming traffic will be routed through CloudFlare’s network. On aver- age, a site will load twice as fast with this one simple change. To avoid conflicts, any WordPress add-on which minifies JavaScript and CSS, com- presses the page with gzip or caches the site should be switched off. CloudFlare already does all that. While you can do all these things yourself, there’s no need to minify CSS, use gzip or cache content if you first use a CDN like CloudFlare. Choose a good server Although a CDN will speed up the delivery of the content, the server is the only thing capable of running a WordPress database query, therefore providing the content for the website visitors. The bad news is that shared servers are the worst when it comes to dealing with MySQL queries. PHP/MySQL is a very slow combination, and that’s the price WordPress users pay for the site’s usabil- ity. The only way to cope with this is to host this inherently slow framework on a fast machine. Most webmasters use shared hosting plans as they are cheap and “unlimited.” The resources are in fact very much lim- ited by the specifications of the machine which can be hosting dozens or even hundreds of different sites, all compet- ing wildly for those limited resources. Dedicated servers, where you own the en- tire machine and can take advantage of all 35 Speed up your WordPress site