WordPress Speed and Performance Suggestions

While we are constantly working to improve our systems and speed things up on our end, there is always something that can be done on your end too.

WordPress out of the box is not optimized for speed, so we suggest a few different options to help speed things up.

Here are some tools of the trade that we love and use often….
Pingdom Speed test – https://tools.pingdom.com/ (Test the load time of that page, analyze it and find bottlenecks.)
GTmetrix – https://gtmetrix.com/ (GTmetrix gives you insight on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it.)

To get started, the first recommendation is to use a cache plugin like WP Super cache (Free – https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/), or WP Rocket (Paid – https://wp-rocket.me/).

What is caching? Cache is an area in the computer’s memory that stores recently used information. When a site is cached, it means the site’s pages, images, files and Web objects are stored on the user’s local hard drive. This in turn means that when a user opens a frequently accessed file, the browser will have most (if not all) of its files cached.

When a browser doesn’t have to retrieve new information every time a site is accessed it results in faster page load times. Caching plugins work the same way. They save dynamically generated HTML files in the cache and serve them next time a request is made instead of re-loading all of the PHP scripts from WordPress.

Next, we suggest the use of a CDN. Some options are Cloudflare (Free – http://www.cloudflare.com), MaxCDN (Paid – http://www.maxcdn.com)

If you are just getting started and do not have the budget for a premium CDN system, we suggest you start off with cloudflare. They offer a great system at no cost to you.

All of our hosting plans have this pre-installed in the cPanel system, you just have to activate it.

And Lastly, the use of image smashing plugins is also very helpful. Some that come to mind are WP Smushit (FREE – https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/), And EWWW (FREE – https://wordpress.org/plugins/ewww-image-optimizer/)

These systems will take all the images on your site and will compress and optimize them while keeping their quality intact.

We would be happy to go through your site and help you come up with ideas on how to improve your sites speed and performance. This also goes for any other questions you may have about your website or our services. Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in doing so. http://www.rfehosting.com/support

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