(Sorry the video was more than 5 minutes ;-)What Google says is often mistaken as rumor or mistaken as a real signal. As an example, speed is often mistaken as a ranking signal when in fact it has been proven that mildly speedy sites still can outrank speedier ones.
But of course speed is still is a worthy goal because you want to make your visitors happy and more likely to stay on your site with less load time.
In this case we can bypass what Google says, and use our intuition that the faster our page loads, the happier and less frustrated our visitor. And the happier Google will be with our page based on bounce metrics.
How to speed up your website.
1.Image size is the biggest culprit. Compress your images. They are often the largest files on your page and thus take the longest to load into your visitors browser.
2.CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver pages and other Web content to a user, based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and the content delivery server.
My favorite is CloudFlare.com because the price is right (Freee!). Installation instructions are below.
Simply put, sign up for CloudFlare, point your URL to their name server they give you. And set it for speed. When you share this
3.Too Many Installed Plugins. If you have a bunch of unused plugins installed. Delete them.
Also, many plug ins do not get updated with WPs rapidly updating core install. What do you want for free? This causes conflicts that can disable your site. (I just had this very issue with a site while writing this report). And it can make your site vulnerable to a hack.
BONUS- Server Speed-A cheap server is a slow server. For a multitude of reasons. The problem with hosts are that the good ones come and go.
I have had some of the most customer friendly hosts out of any industry that I have experienced. And they eventually go away. They get sold, or find a new business model. And then I have to find a new one.
So I am not going to recommend any one host currently. I will play this one safe. Suffice it to say a fast server is better than a cheap shared server.
Resource links and CDN installation PDF download
Some cool online image crunchers are:
(I offer these without testing.)
http://optimizilla.com/
https://kraken.io/web-interface
http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/
My favorite for WordPress is WP Smush which will auto smush your image.
Speed testers. Here are speed testers which will give you ideas on how to increase your speed.
Google’s tool- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
YSlow-tool
http://yslow.org/
My favorite speed tool-
https://gtmetrix.com/
These will give you lots of geeky reasons your site is slow. That’s why I tell you the main culprits above. Some of the recommendations will give mild help at best. Test your site speed before we go further.
Remember these are tips for the non-geek, there is much more that you can do if you have the technical ability.
https://moz.com/blog/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website
Get the Report plus the CDN instalation instructions here.
