How to make your site load like a Rocket

fb3003 said:

mind sharing your configuration in w3 total cache? thanks

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ranga said:

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

View attachment 170641

Pagespeed Insights

Desktop

View attachment 170642 View attachment 170643

Mobile

View attachment 170644 View attachment 170645

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

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DigitalJedi said:

Hi, I have to do speed optimization for one of my client. THe issue there is the landing page has a lot of images, and all of them come through API because of which we cannot compress them. Can someone give me a solution to this. There are other standard things which i am working on anyway but i am not too sure how to work around this issue.

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ranga said:

Some thing which may help:

Use a prefetch to the website sending images from API, it will help make connection at start of page loading, which should increase the speed at which images are visible. Also, if image display size is decided you can use either a placeholder or specify the dimension to reduce layout shift. Other than that you can do not much if the images are dynamically changing and loaded from third party

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DigitalJedi said:

Thanks a ton, i was thinking of something like, storing the images in a DB and then compressing them before using it on the website, so the website sends requests on the API regularly and cchecks if there is a change in the image(they usually changes once or twice a week) everything there is a change, we can update it. This way we will have latest images but at the same time we will be able to compress. Do you think this will work? How can i implement something like this. Have i made myself clear?

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ranga said:

I am not a technical person, but I think it can be done easily if images don't change frequently, you need to just download a copy somewhere, create a script that runs every minute through cron job and check image hash, if it matches does nothing, if it doesn't it download new image and replace it in cache folder. Your website loads images from that folder always, so the website will be atmost serving old images for one minute.

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Monymony said:

Great post! I use Siteground now. Do you think there is a big difference between sitegorund and Cloudways/Vultr

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Monymony said:

I've tried most of the things you mentioned in your guide. Probs for the amazing guide btw. My desktop speed went up to 96 which I am very happy with. My mobile speed is stuck in the 50s though, and statically.io actually slowed it down further(Could be because of Cloudflare CDN. I am using Elementor Pro with the Astra theme on a site that runs woocommerce. Did you do anything specific in order to increase the speed on mobile?

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Monymony said:

Have you also experienced AMP messing up the custom headers from Elementor?

Click to expand...

ranga said:

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

View attachment 170641

Pagespeed Insights

Desktop

View attachment 170642 View attachment 170643

Mobile

View attachment 170644 View attachment 170645

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

Click to expand...

seoedi said:

How many sites are on the server your site is on?

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seoedi said:

Shared hosting - what you mean?

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