WordPress hosting: it needs to be as fast as you can get!

Google in the past 2-3 years have consistently stated that page load speed is something that is very important. Here are out thoughts on speeding up your WordPress site.

WordPress
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There is a lot of competition on the web.

To stand out, to get noticed, to get your message to cut through – it’s a difficult and challenging problem. Launching and running a website has many more facets to it than many people first imagine:

  • the design
  • the layout
  • a good call to action
  • the ability to get your key message across
  • getting conversions (be it a sale or a lead)
  • managing content, regular, fresh and engaging content
  • optimising your site for search engines

This is just a back of the envelope list of to-dos!

In fact, when the website launches it’s the start of optimising the site and its content to reach your goals. Here on our blog we often write about SEO as well as the importance of regularly adding content to your site. There is however something else that is very important: the speed of your website.

Google is often very mysterious about how its ranking system works but in the past 2-3 years they have consistently stated that page load speed is something that is becoming more important. SEO is certainly a bigger problem than just getting a good keyword strategy and implementing it within WordPress, in 2015 the time it takes to load a page in your site is very important too.

What’s involved in getting your website to load quickly?

There’s no one size fits all solution to this but there are some common things to consider.

Start with your WordPress hosting

Chance are if you’re reading this then you might be a DMA client. In that case we’ve got you covered. Behind the scenes we’re running a significant WordPress hosting setup. When we develop sites we also think a lot about how the site is going to perform and make decisions during a WordPress project that will make the site as efficient as possible.

What makes hosting faster or slower?

Well it’s a question that has a lot of technical mumbo jumbo in the answer. Suffice to say that things like:

  • a solid connection to the internet
  • scalability of resources
  • server side caching
  • client side (in the browser) caching
  • good clean HTML & CSS code

….all make a difference.

Level up your WordPress hosting

There are other technologies that can take the delivery of your WordPress site to the next level. We’ve been working recently with two CDN (content distribution network) solutions for improved performance on client’s websites.

Delivery of images over a CDN

We’ve begun using the Photon CDN on some of our client’s sites in the past few months with some very good results. In short; when you upload an image to WordPress in the background that image is pushed to a number of web servers around the globe. The servers, in around 30 locations on 5 continents, then serve the images for users visiting your site. And here’s the significant point: the content is served from a server that is geographically closer to the user. If they are in Sydney they would get the content from a server in Sydney, if they are in New York they would instead have the content served locally from there.

A full blown CDN option

Serving images from a CDN is generally a good thing, however you can also choose to serve other content like CSS files and Javascript files (all WordPress sites have these) from a CDN too.

During 2014 we expanded up our WordPress hosting capabilities and now can offer both of these CDN solutions for our clients. The best things about our solution is that it’s transparent to the user once it is setup. You just keep using WordPress as you normally would and the magic just happens.

In summary; speed isn’t everything but it’s definitely an important part of the puzzle.

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