speed up wordpress

Speed Up WordPress Using Cloudflare and WP Fastest Cache Plugin

Speed Up WordPress using Cloudflare and WP Fastest Cache – This is my experience working with the client’s website. While other sites might give you general ways to speed up your WordPress site. In this post, I gave you a very specific requirement to speed up WordPress.

About the website: My client website is a comic publisher for children in Indonesia, the main market is Indonesian, but sometimes we got traffic from Malaysia and Singapore as our language is in Bahasa Indonesia.

The website has quite a lot of pictures, the posting content is about the comics we just published and general knowledge about children’s world and parenting.

 

Speed up WordPress By Choose The Best Hosting Provider

My hosting company is Hostinger. Actually, I accidentally using this hosting provider. My first objective is to choose Jakarta based server as majority traffic will come from Indonesia and we have a national backbone across the country.

The Hostinger address is www.hostinger.co.id and the website is in Bahasa Indonesia so I thought they must have Jakarta based web server.

Later I found that they don’t have Jakarta based web server yet ( July 2018) and until now they still don’t have servers in Jakarta. The closest location is in Singapore. Singapore is actually quite close to Indonesia but my worry is when the undersea fiber optic cut off by vessel.

Hostinger is actually a good hosting provider but I have a little bit serious problem. Many times ( 1-2 times a week). Our website cannot be accessed from several ISP, I noticed from 2 different ISP the website cannot be accessed at a certain time (random).

I already asked this problem to Hostinger but they argue that the website is accessible from their end and they suggest us to contact ISP for this problem. If I asked ISP they will also argue that other websites are accessible ( although I have traceroute record to trace the problem).

Website (WordPress) Settings

I am using WordPress version 5.2.2. and PHP version 7. I also using 17 plugins, yes this is too many, the least you install plugins the better. I hope you can use as minimal plugins as possible.

Speed up WordPress By Choose The Best CDN

As the problem with our website that cannot be accessed from certain ISP at certain times continues I have an idea to change the ISP company to others. However proposing a plan to Finance dept is another problem, they will not approve without good justification.

As I know that the problem with DNS I have another idea to use Cloudflare as they have distributed DNS across the World. Cloudflare also gives protection to DDOS attack as well as CDN.

I know about Cloudflare a long time ago but what held me back from using it because I worry that the traffic will decrease after changed. Fortunately, my traffic getting better after I implemented this.

Cloudflare setting

cloudflare speed tab

On the Speed section, choose the Optimization tab and scroll to Auto Minify. Make sure you check Java Script, CSS, and HTML minify, because this is better than WP Fastest Cache.

Speed Up Wordpress Using Cloudflare and WP Fastest Cache Plugin 1
my profile
View and copy API key from Cloudflare as you will need this to be filled on WP fastest cache settings.
Cloudflare API

Make sure you save your Cloudflare API to be entered to WP Fastest Cache plugin.

Speed Up WordPress By Choose The Best Cache Plugin

I am usually using W3Cache plugin but I also seek another caching plugin to use. Finally, I found Wp Fastest Cache plugin, the interface is much simpler than other cache plugin and the best part is it work great with our website.

WP Fastest Cache Plugin Settings

On WP fastest cache settings make sure you uncheck minify HTML and minify CSS because we already activate this on Cloudflare.
Speed Up Wordpress Using Cloudflare and WP Fastest Cache Plugin 2
On the CDN tab make sure you fill your email address and API from Cloudflare. This step will integrate WP fastest cache with Cloudflare.
 
Speed Up Wordpress Using Cloudflare and WP Fastest Cache Plugin 3
 
 

Speed test result

Below I show you Test speed result using Google Pagespeed Insight and GTMetrix. The result below is pretty good considering I have 17 plugins installed, many pictures on the website, Facebook Pixel code, Histats code, Mailchimp code, Google fonts, slide show.
 
Every component above contributes to the slower speed of our website.

Google pagespeed insight

pagespeed insight desktop
The score of 97 out of 100 for Desktop version is quite impressive, I am satisfied with the score.
pagespeed insight mobile
The score of 78 out of 100 is pretty good for me as I am only using free version of WP Fastest Cache plugin. The premium version will cache mobile version and other cool versions that will speed up the score. Most of the visitors are coming from mobile devices, so I recommend maximizing score of the mobile version. Sometimes I got a better score up to 89.

GTMetrix

GTMetrix is one of the most used to test website speed, using GTMetrix I am glad that fully load time is 2.2 seconds. This score varies sometimes I get 2.8 secs.
gtmetrix test result
 

Traffic after Cloudflare Implementation

I am glad that I was wrong, the website traffic is getting better after Cloudflare implementation.
histats traffic after cloudflare implementation
 
 

Sorry that I canot give you Score before using Cloudflare, Cache plugin but trust me it was bad.
I hope you will learn something from my case to speed up WordPress using Cloudflare and Wp fastest cache plugin. Let me know when you have questions on the comment below.

Tweaking Website Sep,4 2019

To fix broken link
I use Broken Link Checker plugin by ManageWP. This is very good plugin to check and fix broken link that bad for SEO. For blogger I use Brokenlinkcheck.
I also remove website column on the comment by adding the script below on function.php

add_filter(‘comment_form_default_fields’, ‘website_remove’);
function website_remove($fields)

if(isset($fields[‘url’]))
unset($fields[‘url’]);
return $fields;
}

This will reduce broken link when someone add non exist website on the website comment section.
This also will decrease spam bot which try to add link via comment.

Try to decrease bounce rate
Our current bounce rate is 83% this is not good. I add script <base target=’_blank’ /> on footer.php this script will open new tab everytime visitor click any link on the website. Update Feb 2020: This trick no longer works.

Update PHP version
I update PHP version to 7.3 from 7.0 for security reason.

traffic increase after tweaking
Traffic Increase after weaking

Speed up WordPress Without Cloudflare

Several days ago I tried to speed up my other client’s website that did not use Cloudflare. The website industry is a print shop. They print wedding cards, calendar, banner, memory book and many more.
Initial speed test according to GTmetrix was very slow, fullyloaded time 12.7 s, total page size 6.25MB.

speed up wordpress
Website speed before optimized

Below is current speed after being optimized:
Fully loaded time is 5.3s, total page size is 2.14MB. I cannot make the size smaller because it using elementor, also the are many images on the website.

optimized website
Website speed after optimized
wordpress optimization without cloudflare
Inner page speed that did not have many pictures

On google speed insight the score is 90 for mobile and 99 for desktop.

Below are steps and plugin I used.

1. Autoptimize version 2.5.1
This plugin will speed up your site by optimizing CSS, JS, Images, Google fonts and more

Autoptimize settings
Autoptimize settings CSS options
Autoptimize settings HTML options
Autoptimize settings Misc options
Autoptimize settings extra tab

2. Lazy load by WP rocket version 2.3.2
This plugin will defered images on your website, it will only show the image when user scroll the display.

lazy loads settings

3. WP fastest cache version 0.9.8.9
WP fastest cache in term of setting is the most simple yet the performance is good.

wp fastest cache settings
 
Part of this post section is inspired from https://www.hermanyudiono.com/cara-mempercepat-loading-blog/ Thanks Kang Herman.
 

Update 26 April 2020

 
I have another website that has ads installed, histats code, DMCA banner, and Feedburner banner on every webpage. Remember that the more code you have, the speed become slower. I hosted the website with Hawkhost on shared plan package.
 
It’s already cloudflare activated. I already tweak the speed to make it as fastest as possible but it always stuck at C(70%) and D(60%).
before really simple SSL
 
However, after I add really simple SSL and moved 301 redirections into .htaccess file I had a better speed B(81%) and D(64%).
 
Actually the plugin did not directly speed up the process but it detects that I have 301 redirections enable and it recommends moving into file .htaccess When I follow the recommendation boom the speed much better and I satisfied with the result.
301 redirects
 
I don’t expect to get score A and A because of ads and many codes that I have on the website.
 
after really simple SSL

 

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