March 10th 2017

Speed up your blog for geting more page views.

Caching,Cloudflare & Minification

Building a successful website in the internet is a daunting task for most people. But you can increase your chances of getting more pageviews if you speed up your blog, so that people can see the content faster.

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So these are some suggestions:

1: Use GTMetrix:

GTMetrixis the best tool to check your current page speed. After that you should try to improve the score.It lists out website’s Pagesped score & Yslow score along with the reasons why your website loads slower than others.

It clearly shows how much optimised your website is,what percent of the content is unoptimised etc.So GTMetrix is the best tool to start off with.

2: Minification:

Minify resources like HTML, Javascript & CSS to make them load faster & also helps to clean up the code. If you’re on WordPress, you can use WP Auto Minify & WP Minify Fix to minify the resources.It removes unwanted whitespaces & newlines thereby reducing the size of CSS & JS files.

3: Optimise images:

Try to reduce the size of your images so that they load faster. A page often loads slow just because of the images.Try to make the images cacheable in the visitor’s web browser.

Save all images in JPG format(except logo & favicon of your blog) & then optimise it for web content. Using WordPress, you can optimise images using WP Smush or EWWW Optimiser.

4: Enable compression:

Enabling Webpage compression using GZip or mod_deflate are the best method to ensure that webpages load faster. Since the pages are compressed, it loads faster to the user & then the browser decompresses them to serve to the viewer.

To enable GZip compression, add the following lines to the .htaccess of your website.

# BEGIN GZIP

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript

# END GZIP

or use this code:

mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*

If you use WordPress then it’s more simple. Just add plugin- GZip compression to fix this problem.A lot more simple.

Caching generates a static version of your dynamic html page(with php queries) so that the php is not executed each time when a user visits your webpage. PHP queries take some time to pull & push information from the database.

But with caching, these queries are pre-applied & saved as a static html page on your server. This eliminates the use of query strings & hence speeds up the website/blog.

Use the following code in your .htaccess to enable caching:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|HEAD) /z/([a-z]+)/(.+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css).* HTTP/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .+ /z/%2/%3.%5 [NC,L]

WordPress users can use WP Super cache & enable caching. Make sure that you enable caching in Easy Tab. Then go to Advanced & use these settings.

Enable mod_rewrite compression.

After you enable then click on update mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess to complete.

Select compress pages so that they are served quickly.

Select make known users anonymous so that they’re served Supercached static files.

Go to Preload Tab & select Preload mode & update status.

Click Preload now. Done your website is now cached.

6: Use a CDN to speed up content delivery:

CDN(Content Delivery Network) are specialised servers that save a copy of your website/blog to their fast server & hence speed up load times. Use Cloudflare to speed up your website.

Its a bit difficult & time consuming to setup Cloudflare for the first time.I had mentioned how to set up CF setup in another post.See it here.

Best settings for CloudFlare to speed up your website till the max:Read now!

Once you set it up, use these settings to get maximum speed for your webpage:

In the Speed tab-Auto Minify, tick the boxes HTML,CSS,Javascript.
In Speed tab-Rocket Loader, select Automatic. But Rocket Loader is a Beta feature, so it may interfere with Javascript (CSS is safe). If your blog has a Featured Slider or something like that, chances are that it may not work.Since TechBuzzIn has a featured slider on homepage(RocketLoader breaks the slider) I prefer to keep it disabled.If you don’t have anything like that, you can safely enable Rocket Loader & experience the speed boost.
In Caching Tab-Turn ON Always Online.
Now the most important part.
In Page Rules Tab: Create a page-rule URL: type according to this example: www.techbuzzin.com/* Replace techbuzzin.com with your blog URL. Now In Pick a Setting, select Cache Level & set value as Cache Everything.
Now Save & Deploy.
Now Go to Caching Tab & Purge Cache: Purge Everything.
Done! Now clear your Browser History & Cookies & Visit your Website after 30 seconds.

All done! Now your website has got more speed,check the scores on GTmetrix.

This post first appeared on TechBuzzIn, please read the originial post: here