Before I start with how you can speed-up your site I will tell you how a slow website undermines your efforts to create an online business.


If your website is slow you compromise your online business in the following ways:


  • Your rankings in Google and other search engines are negatively affected.
One of the few factors that Google over the years, have officially announced as a contributing variable to their complicated ranking factor, is the page load time. It goes without saying that a descent speed for your website, will bring you a lot of SEO benefits compared to your competitors. Search engines want searchers to have a specific level of quality in their searching experience and page load time highly contributes to that.


  • Your targeted potential customers will be discouraged, get bored and won't convert as easily.
When your website's pages load quickly and efficiently, you make sure that your visitors won't get bored and leave. By keeping your readers on your website and by decreasing your bounce rate, you also increase your conversion rates. In other words, you sell more! It will also increase your authority as an online marketer and you will have the chance to build a list of loyal readers much easier than with a slow website.

  • It takes more time to administer your Wordpress website, create your content or troubleshoot it when needed.
As webmasters we spent a lot of time administering our Wordpress websites as well as writing posts, creating pages or shaping the looks of our babies! A faster loading website will help us do all these duties in a faster, more efficient and less frustrating way.

You can check your page load time at sites like Pingdom and GTMetrix among others. These sites will also help you identify specific elements of your websites that act as a bottleneck when a visitor requests your content. That way you can steer your corrective actions accordingly.

Whatever your bottleneck is though, all websites respond significantly to the ways I will talk about in the following pages. They are all easy to implement and anyone can apply them regardless of technical level. They will noticeably speed up your website no matter what hosting plan you are using (shared hosting, VPS or dedicated server).
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Pobman Premium
I would not suggest most people run with W3 Total Cache, unless your server is setup right you will not see all the improvements from this plugin and you can actually make things worse. If you install it and you only have options for Disk caching, i.e. no APC etc. then I would just jump ship to Super Cache which pretty much works out of the box.

Running with the CDN though is a massive improvement for most people, I now run most sites with static content on cloudfront and the difference is out of this world.

FYI Cloudfront have added Sydney Australia to their CDN... makes them a winner in my book!

Nice guide though.
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Viterbi Premium
I agree: W3 Total Cache, works even better with APC. For those who don't know, APC stands for Alternative PHP Caching and it's an opcode running on the server side which offers a more efficient caching model. In other words, in some hosts you cannot enable it and you have to use the Disk Caching option in W3 Total Cache. For those cases, I fully agree, it's better to use WP Super Cache as your caching solution.

As far as the CDN and CloudFront is concerned, I also think it's one of the best CDN providers around.

Thanks for the comment Pobman!
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Denisara Premium
smush it doesnt appear to work. it does nothing if I 'mass smush' and if I do them one at a time (and I have 364 pics) it times out. any suggestions? here is the error message I am getting: Automatic smushing has been disabled temporarily due to an error. Operation timed out after 20071 milliseconds with 0 bytes received

i tried a few more pics to "smush" and now they show up "BLANK" how do i get them back? this does NOT work
case in point:
http://bonestrivia.com/bones-season-eight-begins/bones-season-eight

this is one pic "smushed" out of about 12 that i tried this on. how do you reverse this ??????

i guess i have to redo that work completely if I want pictures to show UP
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Pobman Premium
smush does work... some of the time.. the problem is the service is totally overloaded and Yahoo clearly dont care to improve things... it works like 1:10 times it would seem... a shame.

However other than getting the error I have never actually had an issue with it damaging a site.
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Viterbi Premium
Sometime Yahoo's server gets overloaded from users doing the same thing as you do. The reason is that Smush.it sends a COPY of your image to Yahoo's server -> It optimizes this copy -> And then downloads it to your website. Next time you try it, it should be fine.

Regarding the problem with the blank picture, I also never had any issues and I also cannot find any similar incidents online. It's very safe, especially because of the way it's working (described above: copy is sent to server, optimized and then downloaded). Even if the process get's stack in the way, your original will stay intact.
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Pobman Premium
There are other plugins which do similar things, though they all seem to require certain resources to be installed on your server which makes them unlikely to work for those on shared hosting.

If you need to 'fix' a whole site and the bulk change tool is not working then using the multiple upload tool at smush.it is almost as easy. Just FTP all your images down, smush and upload. The advantage here is you do get to check each image first. Thinking back to the problem of SmushIt breaking images I have now and then had issues with PNG and transparency...

A lot of people will just rely on the CDN though, because at the speed the CDN works at even large images come down lightning fast. This of course is not solving the problem, just going around it.
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Denisara Premium
funny, I was told that W3 Total Cache is a mistake to use unless you get like over 10k visitors per month by either Jay, Kyle or Carson...among others. The rest of what you say to do does not make sense to a newb such as myself but thanks for the article...maybe it will help someone else
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Viterbi Premium
W3 Total Cache is a really complicated plugin and you have to do your homework if you want to start playing with the advanced options it provides.

I also agree with the opinion that W3 Total Cache might perform even better in more popular sites (sites receiving more visitors). For less popular sites, WP Super Cache could be more efficient and easy to use.

Bottom line: Each site is different and you can test both options (or even other ones as well) to see what works best for you. The point here is that your website would be far more efficient and optimized if you integrated a caching solution to it (whatever that is).

P.S. I tried to make this training as "newb-friendly" as possible :-)
So please let me know where you need support and I'll do my best to help!
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Viterbi Premium
Thank you Roger!
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morlandroger Premium
WOW this is very comprehensive! Will come back to it and look at some of my sites again with a view to speeding up load times. Thanks for this
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