- Now, in today’s fast-moving environment, when everything moves so fast and we get used to such a high pace, a website must open fast. Your visitors are not going to be patient and wait for it to open. So, in this video, we will learn how to make your website faster.
- Why, if it is not yet obvious, and how, too? So the number one reason is why. Well, the first one is pretty obvious. It is for your visitors. They are not going to be patients, they’re not going to be waiting around. Everything happens fast. Your website also has got to happen fast.
- Now another thing is actually for SEO, search engine optimization. Now the faster your website loads, the happier the search engines are going to be about it, ranking you higher. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry.
- In the next blog, we will be talking about SEO and the installation of a plugin for that. But for now, let’s just know that the faster the website is, the happier will your visitors be and the search engines will be too.
- So, how do we speed up your website? Right, well we’re going to use something called caching. And caching is taking all of your big files on your website, such as the header, such as pictures, maybe possible videos, whatever it might be.
- That’s heavy. Images weigh a lot, especially when you have quite a few on your website. What we’re going to do is that we are going to take all those, compress them into smaller sizes, and throw them into what’s called cache. You aren’t going to have everything load instantly.
- Well, instead of this, you’re going to save that cache on the computer of your visitors so that they just pre-load it, right? They don’t have to download all this stuff and make it appear. Rather, it will be saved on their computer and they can just appear much faster, which is going to give them a better experience.
- So that is what caching is, and that is how you speed up your website. Now, I already have a cache plugin of course, like always that I use myself. It’s super easy, and I strongly recommend it. We’re going to install it and go through it. But in case you decide to do your research, here are the top three things to look for.
- First, extra home page checks: a lot of people are going to be spending a lot of time on your home page. Likely, even if you have navigation, great navigation, people can be returning to your home page.
- So, having a cache plugin that is going to do extra checks on your home page is going to be great to ensure it is not slowly loading. If that part of your website is slow, then that’s where their experience is going to be heavily deteriorated. Next, number two is content delivery network support; this is called CDN support. That means anyone coming to your website is going to load the files from where you have your files.
- In other words, this may mean that if you are using Bluehost, and you have your files in the US, then it means that wherever they come from, they are going to load these files, your images, your articles, header, videos, etcetera from the USA.
- What this CD does, and what this support does, is take all of your cache files and put them onto different servers around the world. For example, if you are living in Australia, then it would be downloading all of the files and the contents of your website from Australia, which will load so much faster.
- That’s what a CD network is, and it’s one of those things that makes your website so much faster. And highly using a plugin that features it, I do recommend. Third is a pre-load. Now, first-time visitors coming to your website or first going have to visit the website, and then they’ll be caught. Of course, that means that everybody’s first time would be slow, which is no good.
- You want to have a plugin that has a pre-load setting, meaning you can pre-catch everything and then put it to your visitors. So even their first-time experience will be great and fast. Remember High Society, our website, and our business need to match this. So now that we understand how to speed up our website and what it does, let’s go ahead and do just that.
- So I am in the ad plugin section at the back end of our website. I’m going to go to search plugins and I’m going to search for WordPress super cache. And looking to the left, here it is. It has a lot of installations and even though it is not updated, so it’s untested with the current WordPress, we can trust this one.
- This one is created by Automattic, which is the same. A bunch of guys who helped create WordPress dot org and created WordPress.com. So these are part of the program for the platform that we’re currently using. So this plugin has been around for a long time and I expect it to stay around for a long, long time as well.
- So we’re going to go ahead and install it and then just click on Activate and there we go, it’s installed. So now all we’re going to do is move over to settings, which is where it resides, and go to the bottom where it says WP super cache. And then it’s pretty straightforward.
- All you’re going to do is click on catch on and then update the status and now it will be on and working. So there are a couple of things that we want to set up here and all you need to do is follow along with me. It’s super easy. We’re just going to use the recommended settings. So first, let’s move on to advanced here.
- What we’re going to do is we’re going to remove this one. Don’t cache pages for non-users, which is great. In case you’re doing updates for frequent visitors, then they and you won’t be able to see those updates. So you don’t want to catch the page for those known users. And then we have compressed pages so that they serve more quickly to visitors, which is also great that more compressed and faster. They’re going to load.
- We’re just going to go with the recommended settings here that work great. Scrolling down, we have the super important setting I was talking about earlier, extra home page checks. I’m going to check that one as well. Scroll down and click on update status and then we’re going to move into the CDM and we’re going to be enabling that support.
- And then we’re going to save the changes again and let’s move over to content. And in here you’re going to be able to see everything that’s been cached, how heavy they are, how much there is, but there’s nothing for us to do here.
- What we could do is we could delete the cache, which we can also do from up above here, should we want to reset it because we’ve done some major updates or just to test the speed, for example, they can all be deleted up here and then we’re going to move over to preload and here we’re going to set in so that the refresh preload the cache files for every I like to put 1440 minutes because that’s a day so we’re going to refresh the preload the cache files every day.
- So this is a standard setting and I recommend you use it as well. Now we’re going to make sure that we have preload activated by clicking here and we’re also going to go ahead and preload tags and categories and other taxonomies.
- Now, we’ve gone through tags and categories already and we will be making sure to be using those. And then we’re going to click on Save Settings. And once we’ve done this, everything is set up. It’s on and running and it’s making your website faster.
- However, since we just recently started this website, there aren’t going to be too many things on it, so you’re probably not going to notice any improvement right now. But as you continue building your website, building your business, then you’re going to be having a noticeable effect working in the background.
- We’re just going to make sure that we set this from the beginning so that your website is always as fast as it possibly can be. Now, if you want to test the speed of your website, what you can do is use this age-old tool. It’s called Kingdom.
- So what you might want to do if you are unsure about this plugin for some reason is go over to plugins in here to your installed plugins, scroll down to your WP Super catch deactivated test the speed of your website, and then reactivate it, test the speed of your website and you’re going to see the difference. Now again, you’re probably not going to see the difference in the beginning. Your website doesn’t have too many things, but as time goes on, it’s going to be a huge difference. It’s just one of these things we want to get right from the beginning.
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