We know speed is a crucial factor when it comes to blogging from both SEO and visitors standpoints. There are lots of things to make your blog load faster. All things being equal, the faster your blog, the better your chances of grabbing Google’s attention.
If your site or blog takes above 1 second to load, it’s said to be slow. Now, that shows you how much importance is given to speed. That speed literally means the amount of time the server takes to interpret and respond to any request for a web page. This has to do with processing your CSS files, Javascript, database queries, images, etc.
As a reader, it will be wrong judgement to sit before your screen and estimate the number of seconds your blog takes to load. This is because there are lots of other factors that may affect your speed mainly, your bandwidth and device speed capacity (PC, mobile, etc).
To have the actual load speed of your blog, you need to use tools. While I’ll talk about one of these tools below, I just want to mention what I did for better performance of my blog.
I fired W3 Total Cash!
W3TC is an excellent free WordPress Blog Optimization plugin with tons of options. In this post, I’m not giving you details how to configure this plugin. However, for an average user, setting up w3tc is going to be a little tough.
I ran my blog for about 12 months with this plugin. My GTmetrix optimization test results dangled between 2 and 8 seconds. Now, 8 is too slow and I know about that.
Here is screen shot of the last test I did before taking the plugin down;
Make your blog load faster with WP Rocket
Wp Rocket on the other hand is a paid cache plugin for WordPress with very interesting features. Almost every point around this plugin makes it an option to consider. Now, this table below throws more light on why you have to download your own copy of WP Rocket
WP Rocket Configuration makes the difference
I mentioned above that setting up W3TC is a bit tough especially for newbies. That’s one of the real problems I faced when I installed this plugin on my blog
WP Rocket makes things so friendly. Basically, with the default settings, most users will find their blogs optimized to a highly reasonable level.
Here is what the settings page looks like and for most of us, this is all we need to get our blogs going.
What results did I get?
Now, I have this premium plugin on my blog right this moment. After setting it up, here is what my speed test with GTmetrix looks like
Better result isn’t it? And this is worth the investment.
Both Page Speed and YSlow grades have been improved. Load time reduced. Though this may not be the best, it has taken my blog near fast. A little more optimization, doing away with some unnecessary plugins is inevitable the maximum performance.
So how much is WP Rocket?
I think this plugin is quite affordable and should be part of your investment to have a better blog. I always say free is good but paid is better. Why because you get attention from experts who make sure you get what you want.
If you want to Make your blog load faster, check out WP Rocket here
So let me hear what you think in the comment box below!
Is your blog fast enough?
What are you using as cache plugin?