Page Speed Plugins Google and other search engines are obsessed with speed. A f aster internet means better user experience. According to several reports that are widely available on the internet, user no longer have the patience to wait f or a long time f or a page to render. Mine you that long here means “seconds”, and any site that takes more than 10 seconds (that’s a lot already) to load is nearing the borderline of loosing traf f ic. T hese plugins and some more, will help you tame that “need f or speed” issue. I highly recommend using some or a combination of them, specially if you are on a shared hosting environment. Go this way f irst bef ore going to the expensive route. T hey really help a great deal. WP Super Cache / W3Total Cache – T hese plugins are highly recommended as they reduce page speed load time by serving cached version of your f iles. Essentially, these plugins generates static html f iles f rom your dynamic WordPress blog. Af ter a html f ile is generated your webserver will serve those f ile instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. T his improves the user experience (UX) of your site by increasing server perf ormance, reducing the download times. Better UX, good f or SEO. Which one would you choose? Depends, test one or another and see f or yourself . Some plugins can be incompatible with one or the other.
jsDelivr Free Public CDN – JsDelivr (sponsored by MaxCDN), is a web service f or webmasters and developers. Almost none of the plugin developers allows direct linking to hosted versions of their plugins on their server because they cant handle such traf f ic. So the users always have to download the plugins and host them on their own servers. What jsDelivr of f ers is the possibility to the developers to of f er direct links f or the f iles of their plugins without worrying about bandwidth and high server load, and to users the ability to of f load their websites f rom the javascript/css/images that the plugins use, ef f ectively making them a lot f aster. CloudFlare / Incapsula – T hese f ree CDN services are awesome, and the plugins ensures that your WordPress website runs optimally when using either one of those services. Make use of them if you are really having problems with your page speed loading time. If you are on a shared hosting environment, I highly recommend using them. Read more about CloudFlare and Incapsula, here and here. Here are some videos to see how to install Incapsula and CloudFlare. WPSmush.it – A handy little plugin that compresses your images to make they are served f aster. Good if your site is image heavy or if you use plenty of images. Nothing to do, just install and activate. If you already have lots of images, you may want to run the “bulk compress now” f eature. It could take a long time though. Web Hosting – Yeah, makes sense, does it not? What else can I say. If your site is “not available”, what will users see? If users don’t see it, most likely, search engine bots will not either, so there you have it.
User Experience (UI, UX, Mobile) With the ever growing amount of users using their smartphones, mobile devices, etc., it is important to have now more than ever to ensure that your site is also compatible with these type of devices.