Website
loading time is an important factor to improve website’s position in search
results. Slow pages may irritate visitors and makes them to leave immediately,
This will increase bounce rate which makes major drop in search results for
your keywords.
Refer
the below posts that describes major factors effecting page load.
»
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
»
https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/rules_intro
Performance testing tools:
You
can always use the below tools to test your website performance and suggestions
to improve .
»
Gtmetrix ( It shows results of both google page speed and Yahoo! Yslow )
»
Pingdom
»
Webpagetest ( You can customize browser and location )
»
Google Page speed
»
Yahoo!YSlow
»
Load Impact
Improve wordpress performance :
Optimizing
wordpress manually is not an easy task for beginners and even for experts
alternatively we can use some automated
free resources to improve the performance .
1.
W3 Total Cache
2.
W3 Total Cache + Cloudflare
My
results:
Before
Optimizing:
After
W3 Total Cache :
After
W3 Total Cache + Cloudflare
1. W3 Total
Cache
W3
Total Cache is great plugin used by various wordpress blogs and it is the most
trusted plugin to improve wordpress performance . W3 Total Cache helps you to
eliminate major factors affecting load time such as cache, minify ( CSS and
HTML ),Gzip and more . Just follow the steps to install and activate W3 Total
Cache plugin.
Step 1: Login into
wordpress blog dashboard as Admin. click “Add new” under Plugins menu and
search for “W3 Total Cache” , plugin will appears very first in the results
and click “Install now” .
Step 2: Click the
“Performance tab” in the side menu after activating the plugin . Now you can
see the “General setting” , just enable Page cache, Minify, Database cache ,
Object cache and browser cache and
Click “Save all setting” in any of the
column.
Note:
For shared hosting , always choose cache method as “Basic:disk” or “Disk” in
all columns.
Step 3: Goto “Minify”
tab . Enable “Disable minify for logged in users“ in general column and enable
HTML minify settings along with Inline CSS minification and Inline JS
minification in HTML & XML column and Click
“Save all setting”.
Step 4: Goto “Browser
cache” tab. Enable Set expires header , Set cache control header and Set entity tag (eTag) in general column and
Click “Save all setting”.
Step 5: Now Click
“deploy” in the highlighted text shown at the Top ( Before deploying the settings, just check
your website performance using Gtmetrix and recheck after deploying ).
Additionally
you can use WP smush.it to optimize images. it has bulk optimize option that
helps to optimize all images with a single click.
Another
method: if you don’t want to use smush.it then use the one below.
You
can visit Yahoo! www.smush.it and do it manually and upload images to your
blog. You have to move javascripts manually from header page to footer page.
W3 Total Cache +
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
offers content delivery network (CDN) and domain name server service. It offers
free service for small business which includes CDN, Content caching, DNS
management, Analystics, Security, Comment spam protection and more. Let’s start
Step 1: After completing
W3 Total Cache implementation. Sign up with Cloudflare and add your website in
the very next step and click “Add website”
Step 2: You need wait
for cloudflare to fetch your site’s current DNS settings and click “Continue”
upon completion.
Step 3: Now you can see
all your current DNS records and also accelerated and bypass traffic details
.please make sure www traffic is accelerated by cloudflare and click “I have
added all missing records, continue”
Step 4: In the next
screen choose “CDN + basic optimizations ( faster ) ” for Performance settings
and “Medium” for Security settings and click “Continue”.
Step 5: Now your domain
name servers has to be replaced with cloudflare name servers shown in the page.
Just Login into Domain registrar account and change your name-servers to
cloudflare servers.
Step 6: Now go back to
cloudflare account page and click “i’ve updated my nameservers, continue”. It
will take some time to update nameservers.
Step 7: After few hours,
you can see your site is live with cloudflare and content will be delivered
from cloudflare servers.
Step 8: Just one more
step to increase performance to the MAX, Goto “cloudflare settings” of your
domain and find “Rocket Loader” under “Performance Tab”, just switch it to
“Automatic”.
That’s
it; we have done configuring cloudflare CDN for your blog. It’s time to test
performance, just check your blog with Gtmetrix. You will see better grade and
load time. (Recheck twice to see the performance)
After
W3 Total Cache + Cloudflare
Bypass
wp-admin pages from cloudflare cache :
Now
we need to prevent wp-admin pages from being cached by cloudflare .
Goto
“Page rules” of your domain and create a new rule for”
http://www.krizna.com/wp-admin/* “(Replace with your domain name ) this pattern. Choose Bypass cache for “Custom caching” and
choose “off” for rest of the settings and press “Add rule”.
Control
cloudflare settings from W3 Total Cache:
We
can control cloudflare setting like “purge cache” and swicthing to “development
mode” from W3 Total Cache settings
Login
into wordpress dashboard, Goto “Performance Tab” > “General Settings” find “Network Performance & Security
powered by CloudFlare”. Type your “cloudflare account email”, API key and
Domain name ( without www ) and click “Save all settings”
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