It’s no secret that your page speed load time is a critical factor in getting your site ranked properly with search engines. It’s also a huge component related to your user’s experience on the site, no one wants to wait around for long, the industry states that if you’re taking longer than 3 seconds to load you are most likely losing 40% of those potential customers. Yikes.
Website speed and performance is a large topic and encompasses many angles to consider, such as your server response time, the load order of your content, CSS and Javascript, compression, caching and the use of content delivery networks.
Today we are going to look specifically at how this site’s performance was greatly improved by using the power of caching combined with the use of a content delivery network (aka CDN) for that hosts and delivers the static content like images, CSS stylesheets, and JS script files. The process was documented in full detail and the guide is called How to create a CDN for WP Fastest Cache with AWS CloudFront.
BEFORE (Caching or CDN)
Before the adaptdesigns.net the site was using caching or a CDN it was not doing too bad, but there was definitely room for improvements. The load time was over 3 seconds and it’s in the yellow on the YSlow score.
AFTER (Caching and CDN)
After using caching and a CDN the score vastly improved in the green for both page speed and Yslow scoring and most importantly the load time is now under 2 seconds.
Summary of steps taken to add caching and CDN to this WordPress
The following steps are listed at a high level providing you the general concepts and process.
- measure your site before using a tool like GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights
- install a caching plugin to your WordPress site like WP Fastest Cache
- configure your distribution on the content delivery network like AWS Cloudfront
- wire-up your new CDN to your caching platform
- run some more tests and see the results.
Are interested in trying this out on your WordPress site? A fully detailed guide with images and animations is freely available and provided for you over here > how to setup a CDN for WP Fastest Cache using AWS CloudFront.
I hope this helps to provide you with an idea of the importance of your website’s loading speed, and how it plays into your rankings, conversions and improves the overall user experience. Making your site a better place on the web for visitors.
