WordPress Cache Plugins Increase Page Load Speed

WordPress Cache Plugins Increase Page Load Speed

Page Load Speed

I just slashed my page load speed by 50% !

I have been posting and publishing new content and I was testing blogs posts on my own pc, which has a fast internet connection so I thought my page load speed was ok.

I was told about Cloudflare which protects and speeds up website for example CDN, DNS and DDoS protection.  it was fairly easy to implement but means messing with DNS and Nameserver settings for your domain/host.  So not for beginners i would say however google it, there are lots of good tutorials.

So today i just tested my page load speed and it was a massive 9.2 seconds.  I wasnt impressed.  With page load speed being a factor for ranking it is something you would want to improve.  Also the faster a page loads the more likely the reader will stay and read your site so faster = better !

I heard you can use dedicated WordPress hosting sites however these cost more than shared hosting but I would definitely look into this is host resources start getting used up or you have lots of content and traffic.  Something for the future maybe…

gtmetrix test page load speed

So I used these two free online tools to test my page load speed:

Pingdom

GTMetrix

If you want to run multiple test for example like i did trying out different plugins then use GTMetrix, once you have made all your changes then compare with Pingdom.  Each one of these tools analyzes your website and will advise on how to make improvements so its really useful.

So first i did a bit of research.  I found this useful website.  It is clever in that it tested and compared several popular WordPress cache plugins.  It found this invaluable, as id only really heard of WP Super Cache.  So having looked at that site they said Cache Enabler plugin was the best.  However the problem is different WordPress sites have different themes and different settings/hosts etc…  So what works for one blogger might not for the other!

So what i did was try the compariison myself.  I tried all the cache plugins they tried and couple others.  I also found that Cache Enabel plugin was the best in that it gave consistent faster page load speeds.  It decreased the page load speed from 9.8seconds to 4.8 seconds!

Thats like a decrease of about 50% so well worth the time and testing.  But i did do few more things and you can also try the following:

Do some diagnoses and find plugins you have installe that may be slowing down you site, some do lot of background work slowing down the user experience.  So if you dont need these plugins deactivate them then test your page load speed.  Here is a useful site that lists some common slow plugins.

If you have lots of images make sure these are not overly big in size.  For example if you only show it as a scaled down image then scales down the original image(s) and then reupload and use those.  Use jpeg instead of png as they load faster and have smaller file size, but note the quality wont be as good and also jpeg dont have transparency.

Try minify tools, if you have long posts of advanced WordPress themes try looking for minifying plugins.  These will compress the sites code so its loads faster.

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