Does your websites load at the speed of a 90 year old grandma driving down the highway?
I have to tell you my websites sure did just before I made a simple tweak that cut my loading time by more then HALF!!
I want to talk to you today about how I was able to speed up my wordpress blog and how you can do the same as well.
Now if you are thinking that the speed of your websites DOES NOT affect user experience you got another thing coming!
Not only does it affect your readers experience on your site, Mr. Google also takes into account the speed of your website when ranking your blog. So if you are going after Search Engine traffic you definitely want to pay attention.
Check the Speed of Your Website
Here are few sites where you can do for free.
- http://loads.in/
- Pigdom.com (http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/)
- https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/
Plugins for WordPress
- WP Smush.it … Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API within WordPress.
- W3 Total Cache … Improve site performance and user experience via caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.
Sign up for Amazon Web Services
Most of the web hosting companies like 1and1 will host your site but you will be a in a shared environment. Plus they give some little resources, I think they give 32Mb of RAM. Displaying large images with amount of memory will painful. And if your site is growing it will get slower and slower, like a covert engine in a tractor.
So, why do we store images, media, files to download, in the cloud. I recommend the following services plus it will be very inexpensive ($2:50/Month or less). My first month was $0.17.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) … Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.
- Amazon CloudFront … Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.
NOTE: Both Plugins for WordPress works with Amazon S3 and CloudFront.
Look at this YouTube video and it gives a basic overview of the entire process.