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How to Speed Up a Website Like a Rockstar!

What to do and how to improve.

By John CantlinPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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John Cantlin

Reasons:

1. Customer experience. This is a big one for me. When a customer is shopping online, they want to have the best possible browsing experience. Haven’t you ever been on a companies website and were annoyed by how slow it was loading? It’s a terrible consumer experience. I leave a slow site and move onto the next company offering similar products or services. With all of my startups, I lead with customer experience. My team members are always finding new ways to improve customer experience, and you should focus on that as well.

2. SEO, SEO, and more SEO! Site speed and performance has a direct correlation with how a website ranks. Google favors fast websites, and the reason is that Google wants to provide the best search results to its customers.

When we started doing the speed optimization for our Puppy Business Preferable Pups, the site was loading in about five seconds with a low page score on GTmetrix. After our optimizations, we had the site loading in under two seconds with an A score on both Yslow and PageSpeed. This was a big win for that project as we knew our customers have the best possible experience.

Another great example is a personal site I created, John Cantlin, with an average load time of a whopping 1.2 seconds.

So how did I do this? I’ll list out the steps I took to make this possible.

1. Pick a theme that is already optimized for speed.

When looking for a website, I consider three things:

  1. Does the site come optimized out of the box?
  2. Does the site have a great design?
  3. Can you easily tune it to perform better?

You might fall in love with a theme, but if it doesn’t have these three traits, keep looking until you find one.

2. Install WP Rocket.

WP Rocket is hands down the best cashing plugin on the market. They will help your users see the fastest and latest version of your website. WPRock also improves your GTMetrix score dramatically. You can do some file optimizations with this plugin, but I would leave most optimizations to the plugin Humminbird Pro.

3. Setup Cloudflare.

One of the GTMetrix page score metrics is CDN. Cloudflare will automatically store your files on their servers. Cloudflare is excellent since if your site were to crash or have downtime, CF would keep a cached version of life for your customers.

4. Install Humming Bird Pro.

This plugin is a lifesaver for us. You can defer scripts, move to the footer, or even disable slow loading scrips that are not necessary for your website. Humming Bird Asset Optimization has given every one of my companies a fighting chance online. Use with caution as some scripts can break the look and feel of your site.

In conclusion, no matter what steps you take, be sure to get that page speed down so that you will perform better, and your customers will be happier. Lead with customer experience!

We had to update with a new project I took over called Furzly. Furzly is a media and publication company that is very heavy and has user-generated content. Furzly is going up against the big players like The Huffington Post, Forbes, and many more major publishing companies.

Here is how Furzly stacks up against the most prominent players in the game. This is our advantage since Google gives a huge SEO boost to sites that deliver the best customer experience.

Unfortunately, I must keep my secrets to how I achieved this level of success with the website. We have also made this possible with PawFax.

If you would like to speed up your Wordpress site, my team will do it for $2,000.00. Reach out to me on Linkedin if you would like to discuss it.

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