Speed Up Website to Load in Less than 1 Second

Akhil S Kumar
5 min readMar 29, 2018

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Are you searching for solutions to Speed Up your wordpress Website. Website speed tests reveal that more than 72% of the websites load slower due to a range of factors including old theme, plugins and high size images. Google search algorithms reward websites with increased site speed, page speed and cache. You can use compression to speed up image loading and reduce loading time of website. Users will be able to browse website faster if you speed up word press websites to make web pages load faster. Follow the step by step guide to Speed Up Website to Load in Less than 1 Second.
As you can see from the below image the load time of the website is 614 ms. This is a wordpress website with Newspaper theme.

Check Current Page Loading time using GTmetrix or Pingdom

Theme: Newpaper latest version 8.7.2 with TD composer

Plugins added: Wp fastest Cache (Premium), Perfmatters and reSmush Image Optimizer.

Few other ways are;

Perfmatters plugin allows you to disable any scripts that you don’t use on pages.

There is a chance that your website speed will slow down once you add Google ads. Still these plugins will surely help even if you add 6 Adsense ads, 2 direct ads and a search box.

Smushing your images will save server space as well as reduce cpu usage. You can use WP Smush to reduce the size of images.

Plugins > Smush Image Compression and Optimization > Install > Activate > Bulk Smush > Keep clicking the button to completely smuch all images and keep the page open for the process to complete.

Browser caching enables webmasters to tell till how long they have to keep data on images, CSS and JS locally. By leveraging browser cache, you can generate make visitor’s browsers to load less data. This will improve page speed of your website and reduce program and script executions. You need to add the following rule in hta access file. In case, you do not have experience in such things, contact SiteGround team via chat and ask them to add browser caching in your site.

## EXPIRES CACHING ## <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg “access 1 year” ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access 1 year” ExpiresByType image/gif “access 1 year” ExpiresByType image/png “access 1 year” ExpiresByType text/css “access 1 month” ExpiresByType application/pdf “access 1 month” ExpiresByType application/javascript “access 1 month” ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “access 1 month” ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access 1 month” ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access 1 year” ExpiresDefault “access 2 days” </IfModule>

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

Gzip compression allow you to compress the requested pages and deliver webpages with lesser size. gZip compression can be added very easily to your website. You need to add the following rule in hta access file. Request Siteground team to add it for you.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

</IfModule>

SuperCacher is available for GrowBig and GoGeek plans. For StartUp plan, you can use the static cache service under SuperCache. You can activate supercacher to handle executions generated by legitimate high traffic using Dynamic Cache Option.

Static cache service For StartUp For less account executions

The Static Cache option caches all static content on your account that includes images, CSS files, javascript, flash, and more. Once enabled, all requests of future visitors to your pages will be answered from the cached content and not directly from the server thereby reducing Exceeded Script Executions on SiteGround. Activate Google Page Speed, Dynamic Level Cache, Memcached and HHVM For GrowBig and GoGeek plans. Install SuperCache plugin after activating the SuperCache service in CPanel.

Plugins > SG Optimizer > Install and Activate.

CloudFare is a content delivery network that provide free and paid plans to deliver your content seamlessly fast and free SSL for custom domains.

CPanel > CloudFare > Activate For Free

You can contact Siteground team to activate it for yourself in case you are find it hard.

How to Activate CloudFare in CPanel Siteground For wordpress

Setup CloudFare CDN To Decrease account executions wordpress

If nothing works and still you are getting low speed, I recommend to change the theme. Get a paid theme from Genesis or Themeforest. Ensure the theme is WordPress Blog friendly and not a theme for e commerce or other type of websites.

Some themes are very resource intensive which makes it execute high number of executions resulting in less page speed. So changing the theme can ensure less number of executions and less CPU usage.

cache

I have been searching a lot to add cache control to html of template in blogger but Google does not give adequate information regarding this. When I tried to check my speed of website in page speed by Google, it suggested a better cache control can do a lot. So I was eager to add it to the site. But all I got is about info about servers and other junk info. Later I found it and added it the site. So I thought maybe I could share with you and increase your site speed.

Leverage browser cache is the technical term used for cache. The codes below mainly instructs the browser to cache diverse static resources like images, JavaScript, flash, and social network icons for a specified period of time.

Browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera cache diverse static resources like images, JavaScript, flash, and social network icons for a definite period of interval resulting in reduced page load time. This ensures increased number of visitor’s time on site. Visitors view more pages at the same time. Ultimately improving the performance.

The cache tags are listed below. You have to copy them add just below the <head> tag. You can find it by ctrl+F in the template section.

<META CONTENT=’never’ HTTP-EQUIV=’Expires’/>

<META CONTENT=’PUBLIC’ HTTP-EQUIV=’CACHE-CONTROL’/>

Originally published at www.shipmethis.com on March 29, 2018.

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