TIP 1 > Choose a Fast Host! (Speed Optimisation)

byMarketeer1

5.8K followers

Updated 5 years ago

Hello and Good Morning, Good Evening or possibly Good Night, depending on where you are in the world right now. Welcome to the start of a new series of posts where I'll be investigating and providing tips on how to speed up your WordPress websites. It's nice to be back, writing for the tremendous community of WA.

Before we get started, I'd like to make something clear. I'm writing this series of posts in a way that anyone can follow, but you’ll only be able to take full advantage if you're already familiar (or comfortable) in using WordPress.

If you are new to WordPress, then I suggest that you go through WA's excellent WordPress video tutorials. They should bring you up to speed.

Another essential pre-requisite that I suggest you adopt in order to follow these posts effectively is to create a child theme. A child theme will help you make changes to your website code without risks. The changes you make will also not disappear when you update your theme.

If you don’t know how to create a child theme, there is no need to worry; there are a number of tuturials on this subject also within the WA site.

For some of the optimisations, I'll share code snippets that you'll have to place in certain files. I could of course recommend plugins to do the job for you, but that'll obviously defeat the purpose of this guide! I may recommend plugins for certain optimisations, but that's because the code would be far too complicated to replicate manually.

If you feel uncomfortable with code or the general idea of editing your WordPress files, please don’t worry – I'll do my very best to provide consise instructions along with codes you can simply copy-paste into your website.

Now we've got that out of the way let’s get started with Day One's post:)

Tip 1 - Choose a Fast Web Host

I thought I'd get this one out of the way fast and up front. It's the most obvious tip of this entire series...not all webhosting companies are made in the same mould..some work much harder than others!

Choosing a fast web host is the easiest and one of the most impactful decisions you can take to improve your website speed.

Let me firstly clarify, I'm not at all suggesting that you up sticks and move your hosting provider if you are currently hosting in house with WA. Especially as a newbe, when you're learning the ropes and getting to grips with the learning process there are many benefits to having your hosting in house with readilly accessible support at your fingertips.

But as you become more knowledgable and experienced at your craft, you can begin to make informed decisions based on your newly aquired education and skills.

Using a slow host is similar to building a large tower block on a shaky foundation. Your business being the tower block, a continuous work in progress, growing ever taller. You’ll never quite know when it’ll fall!

Free and unlimited hosts sound great on paper, but in the real world, nothing is ever free and/or unlimited. You already know this deep down in your gut! A great starting point is to never choose a host that makes these outrageous promises...because nothing is ever free...or unlimited, the host has to make a profit somewhere...and it's often made at your expense!

Several factors make an excellent host and some of these are (there are many more but these are the basics):

a) Server Response Time (or time to first byte)

b) Technology Stack

c) Customer Support

The most common way to measure the quality of a host is to check the TTFB. TTFB or "time to first byte" is the time it takes for the server that hosts your website to respond to a request, which basically represents how quick the server is.

To test the TTFB visit, ByteCheck dot com (a free service) and enter your URL there. I've been using this free service reliably for quite sometime and their tool/service will break down the response time of your website, quickly and in an easy and understandable way.

I cannot over emphasise how important it is that you do your homework when looking for a host ...after all, it forms the very foundation of your business.

Look for recommendations on independant blog sites and a good tip is to check if the WordPress organisation themselves recommends the host...there will be no better indicator of the quality of their service.

If you want to IM me outside of this blog, I have done some comprehensive research of my own and will be only to happy to recommend a host based on the three factors mentioned above, for websites of all sizes.

I hope that you've found todays first post informative...I would love to hear your comments and feed back below.

I look forward to seeing you tomorrow where I'll be discussing themes...and their importance when it comes to speed optimisation.

To our success!

Anthony