How to make your site load like a Rocket

Hi,

I am not a Wordpress developer or expert, just a fellow black hatter trying to speed up my site. With the new Google Page Experience update coming its more and more important for the site to be ultra fast.

This is how I achieved this



Pagespeed Insights

Desktop



Mobile



This is for my home page which has lots of images and elementor stuff and also elementor epic news elements. There are few more things I can optimise to improve it even further, but I am ok with having a slowish site then have a bad user experience.

This is my own experience and trying to get the speed up without being too technical and how I achieved that step by step

Stop using Shared Hosting

With new and easy cloud hosting solutions, stop using shared hosting for your sites. You will have some issues adapting to new interfaces but if it means faster site, so be it.

This site is hosted on Vultr $5 droplet with Runcloud, if you want more support can go with cloudways, if you have multiple sites can look at gridplane for good support. I have only used runcloud, its plan with unlimited servers is around $15 pm.

These are the steps in short what I did to achieve such speeds

1. Cloudflare DNS (I only use DNS and not their CDN)
2. Runcloud + Vultr $5 Droplet (you can use high frequency droplet with NVMe for even higher speeds at $6)
3. NGINX Native + FastCGI - don't worry about technical terms its just click and go with Runcloud, its Runcloud hub plugin automatically does cache
4. Redis Object Cache - Do this only if you have heavy DB frontend like woo commerce or your backend is slow and you want to speed it up
5. WP Rocket - This plugin is great, I have used Lighspeed cache plugin earlier, which was also good, but it doesn't cache on NGINX. If you have litespeed server try litespeed cache instead of WP Rocket
6. Statically.io Free CDN - This website does not use this CDN, but I have used it on another site and it increases your score, especially if you have worldwide audience. Its really simple to integrate and have easy to use plugin with few options

Thats it. other than that you know general guidelines for having a fast website i.e.

1. Use Fast Theme - Currently using Kadence, Astra is also fine, I am also digging Neve as it doesn't require jquery
2. Use Minimum Plugins - Self explanatory, I am using elementor and pro and few block plugins on this site

Other Plugins for Optimising
1. Perfmatters

Additional Service Required
1. Mxroute - For emails. I use $45 per annum plan to handle all emails or all domains
2. Rackspace Email or any other email provider if you are ok with paying per email

I hops this is helpful

That's a great detailed guide to achieve site speed.
Will try on my next project.
Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sharing this guide, it is quite helpful for us. Though I do not consider WordPress for websites. I prefer HTML for the websites, get your website coded in the HTML and it will become a rocket from the initial phases. For an example in my website, I will not share the link as it is out of the policy of the forum. Still helping you with the screenshot.



I have achieved this speed without any CDN, without doing browser caching, without doing minification of CSS and JS. Still the site is booming, what else do I need, this test has been done with Google Speed Test not with GT Metrix. So go for HTML avoid using WordPress and CMS's, raw is good.

@ranga - what are you doing for image optimization?

did you try other wp-rocket alternative plugins?

Great post op. Gave some good ideas on things to tweak.

build it in the right way and it will fly without any plugins and stuff

bartosimpsonio said:

Great post op. Gave some good ideas on things to tweak.

Click to expand...

something just hit me: i have never seen you sharing any trade secrets with us!!!!!!!! WTF?!

so what optimization methods you use?! what plugins? what setup?!

notNewB said:

build it in the right way and it will fly without any plugins and stuff

Click to expand...

hmm... yeap... ok

fb3003 said:

something just hit me: i have never seen you sharing any trade secrets with us!!!!!!!! WTF?!

so what optimization methods you use?! what plugins? what setup?!

Click to expand...

I've shared lots of secrets, especially in between the lines


e.g. this is a secret in between the lines


But my scandalous tabloic nutty threads get all the attention.

Nice share, I'd never considered MXroute before for emails.

ankur0535 said:

Thanks for sharing this guide, it is quite helpful for us. Though I do not consider WordPress for websites. I prefer HTML for the websites, get your website coded in the HTML and it will become a rocket from the initial phases. For an example in my website, I will not share the link as it is out of the policy of the forum. Still helping you with the screenshot.

View attachment 170674

I have achieved this speed without any CDN, without doing browser caching, without doing minification of CSS and JS. Still the site is booming, what else do I need, this test has been done with Google Speed Test not with GT Metrix. So go for HTML avoid using WordPress and CMS's, raw is good.

Click to expand...

I used to build html sites year before, but for some serious stuff nowadays Wordpress is must especially if you want to do it yourself. I use aawp plugin and other plugins which is difficult to replicate in html sites unless you hire a coder and pay him good money.

fb3003 said:

@ranga - what are you doing for image optimization?

did you try other wp-rocket alternative plugins?

Click to expand...

I did try litespeed cache, its good if your server is litespeed. It is an all in one plugin with Image Optimisation built in so don't need separate plugin for reducing image size.

Forgot to mention if you are using statically.io they themselves do image compression and server scaled images to users depending on their device. You can control the level of reduction in quality in the backend

I want to try flying press, its a new plugin but created by a great developer, I am sure it would be better than wp rocket. Read this if you want to look at it https://wpspeedmatters.com/why-i-built-flyingpress/

MisterF said:

Nice share, I'd never considered MXroute before for emails.

Click to expand...

They have a really good email sending system, where they keep a rotating ip pool to ensure the email gets delivered and not marked as spam. Not used it for sending mails yet, but looks promising

bartosimpsonio said:

I've shared lots of secrets, especially in between the lines

Click to expand...

I have found a lot of them but I am sure many more are hiding in the maze

I use nitropack on magento 2. Yes, it's a bit of a hack in terms of the way it works, but I haven't found anything for Magento that comes close. Scores 93 on mobile and 100 on desktop.

Thanks for the detailed guide mate.

This is my website load speed. It is a wordpress site (TUTO Theme) with shared hosting (Namecheap) and 12 images with 2 youtube videos. I've only use wordpress rocket so I am happy with these resuls.

wayne1977 said:

Thanks for the detailed guide mate.

This is my website load speed. It is a wordpress site (TUTO Theme) with shared hosting (Namecheap) and 12 images with 2 youtube videos. I've only use wordpress rocket so I am happy with these resuls.

View attachment 170686

Click to expand...

Could you do the same test on pagespeed and tell us your result?
Clue: it won't be that good.

Amazing share, website speed is very important now a days!

wayne1977 said:

Thanks for the detailed guide mate.

This is my website load speed. It is a wordpress site (TUTO Theme) with shared hosting (Namecheap) and 12 images with 2 youtube videos. I've only use wordpress rocket so I am happy with these resuls.

View attachment 170686

Click to expand...

great result for a shared hosting

Great guide
Looks like I've got a lot to implement
Will test this out!

Meanwhile, one of my shopify stores is slow as shit with barely anything and an ultra fast theme....

ranga said:

I have found a lot of them but I am sure many more are hiding in the maze

Click to expand...

The most valuable insights I got on BHW weren't explicit.

You won't find a gem just lying there on the street. You find hints of what to do and experiences which may work.

Remember the same trick does not work twice the same. But the ideas can be tweaked and worked on.

A single method I shared here years ago, switching IP's from abandoned Amazon instances, yielded me my most powerful PBN to date (back then). It's obsolete now as IP's are no longer as strong a signal, especially with cloudflare and so on, but the idea remains that reusable and disposable cloud resources can be leveraged just like expired domains. There might be new ideas hiding in plain sight using cloud hosting, who knows. There's always new methods to be explored, that's the beauty of this business.

ankur0535 said:

I have achieved this speed without any CDN, without doing browser caching, without doing minification of CSS and JS. Still the site is booming, what else do I need, this test has been done with Google Speed Test not with GT Metrix. So go for HTML avoid using WordPress and CMS's, raw is good.

Click to expand...

no database queries, no php queries, just a static file,
can be very useful for a couple of pages website, but not pratical for a bigger one

bartosimpsonio said:

e.g. this is a secret in between the lines

Click to expand...

I have to post this
that's dissapointing for white theme users tho

wayne1977 said:

Thanks for the detailed guide mate.

This is my website load speed. It is a wordpress site (TUTO Theme) with shared hosting (Namecheap) and 12 images with 2 youtube videos. I've only use wordpress rocket so I am happy with these resuls.

View attachment 170686

Click to expand...

any good traffic and it will go up for 10 seconds
VPS all the way since most of them are basically at the same price as shared hosting but way better

ankur0535 said:

Thanks for sharing this guide, it is quite helpful for us. Though I do not consider WordPress for websites. I prefer HTML for the websites, get your website coded in the HTML and it will become a rocket from the initial phases. For an example in my website, I will not share the link as it is out of the policy of the forum. Still helping you with the screenshot.

View attachment 170674

I have achieved this speed without any CDN, without doing browser caching, without doing minification of CSS and JS. Still the site is booming, what else do I need, this test has been done with Google Speed Test not with GT Metrix. So go for HTML avoid using WordPress and CMS's, raw is good.

Click to expand...

Your overall score looks good, but please remember that at this time google only consider 3 metric as Core Web Vital : LCP, CLS and FID. And unfortunately, you don't pass the CLS threshold....