Introduction

Who doesn’t want a fast website? According to a study, 25% of your visitors will go away from your website if the site loads in more than 4 seconds. The mobile visitors are increasing day by day as well. These two add the importance of the fact that not only your site needs to be fast, but it also has to be mobile ready as well! I am discussing in this article a few basic steps that you can implement to make your sites fast.

The following are the major factors that decide the speed of your website.

1. Start with DNS

DNS plays a major role in deciding the speed of your website. Your DNS server should be able to resolve quickly and return the IP address to which the browser or the application that needs to be connected. You can look at the fastest DNS servers here https://www.dnsperf.com/. According to the DNS pref, Cloudflare is the fastest DNS provider.  We also recommend them, not only because it’s free, but it also has a lot of other nice to use features, which will be discussed in upcoming posts.

2. The WebServer matters

Once the DNS is connected, the next action is done by the web server and it plays the next crucial role.

We at FlexiCloud use a Litespeed web server, which is much faster ( at least 500 % ) than Apache, which is used by most of the shared hosting companies. You can read a bit about the official benchmarks taken by LiteSpeed itself here.

If you’re not using a control panel and are building your own server, we suggest using Nginx web server, which is as fast as Litespeed, and you need to enable the FastCGI or proxy caching ways. We will be discussing how to set those up in a different article in length.

3. PHP 7 or Higher for the Best Performance

The PHP version that you use on your website will play another crucial role in determining the speed of your website. We at FlexiCloud Hosting know how important this is and we provide multiple versions of PHP for your hosting.

If you are on a WordPress framework, we strongly recommend you to use the latest PHP version, that is PHP7.2. FlexiCloud will be releasing the 7.3 soon and once that is done, you can upgrade your PHP from your cPanel.

4. Caching

A caching tool will keep the compiled output of the pages to a file and delivers that to the visitor, without taking the requests through the PHP and database over and over. So having a caching plugin is too good for a WordPress site so that the website will use fewer server resources, and the pages will be faster for the visitor.

Since we use the LiteSpeed web server, The FlexiCloud users will be able to use Litespeed Cache for WordPress, which is one of the best caching tools that are available in the market. You can read more about the LiteSpeed Cache installation and configuration for WordPress in our blog and This can be used for free for FlexiCloud Clients.

5. Image size is Important

The size of the images plays a very important role in the page speed. Large images will definitely slow down your site, while very small images will take away the user experience. So you need to find a balance between the image size and quality.

Ideally, you should use JPEG (or JPG) for images with lots of color and PNG for simple images. Because the compression in JPEG is much better than that in PNG. There are a lot of image compression plugins available which you can use. I sometimes use Canva and I have seen it is easy to use.

If you are using nginx, by enabling image compression in nginx for increasing site speed, you can use the gzip module to compress images and other types of content. Here’s how you can configure it.

6. Use a CDN

CDN stands for Content delivery network. CDN is a system of servers located in different geographic locations, designed to deliver content quickly and reliably to users. By placing servers closer to the users, a CDN ensures that data, such as web pages, images, and videos, can be accessed faster and with higher availability. This distribution reduces the load on any single server and speeds up the delivery of content, improving the overall performance of websites and online services.

There are mainly two types of CDN. A traditional CDN, where you configure to host just the static content, and the Reverse proxy CDN, where the entire site is being reverse proxied and cached.

Key CDN, Max CDN etc come in the first Category, while Cloudflare and Sucuri are the examples of the second type.

If you’re using the reverse proxy, you will need to point your site towards their IP or change the nameservers to theirs. They have a strong firewall and caching rules to speed up your site content and they provide various analytics.

One disadvantage of having a CDN is that you have to keep your images in your server, and the CDN providers have to query the static content as their TTL expires. So if you have a large amount of them you may end up in a slower image delivery site.

Instead, you can offload your images to Amazon s3, or to Digital Ocean spaces or to Google Storage.

You can use the following plugin to do that for Amazon s3. While they have tools to sync images to spaces too, we would prefer the official plugin which can be found down there

7. Control Your Cron Jobs

WordPress has an inbuilt cron to handle the repetitive jobs, and over time, it can lose its sanity.  It’s always preferred to disable the inbuilt cron and add a manual cron job.

Add this line in wp-config.php just before the line that says  “That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. “

define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

 Then you need to add a cron from your cPanel so that the file wp-cron.php will run every 15 or 30 minutes. You can also use plugins like Wp Control plugin to check and see what the cron jobs are running for.

8. Remote Contents

The number of remote contents that your site loads when a page is fully loaded is another important factor. If you have a lot of remote content, loading from third-party service providers can slow down your site.

Fonts, advertisements etc are common examples. Many of the ad networks sites are heavily overloaded and they are slow, so you need to be very careful on the ad network you are using in your site because that could be the one-stop reason for your sites to be slow.

You can use plugins like these to load google fonts locally, which can improve your page speed considerably as well.

9. Delete unused plugins

When it comes to WordPress plugins, quality is more important than quantity. Each plugin is like a small program on your website, and having too many can slow down your site. Even unused plugins can use up resources and affect performance. It might be time to reduce the number of plugins you have.

Start by turning off any plugins you know you won’t use again. After turning each one off, check your site to make sure it still works, then delete the plugin. Next, turn off other plugins one at a time to see if your site speed improves. Look for simpler, lightweight alternatives to replace any plugins that slow down your site.

Conclusion

These are definitely not all of them, but these cover the most of it. There are a few others like the quality of theme and the plugins that you install also factor into the page speed.

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