When we talk about search engine optimization we rarely talk about the speed of the blog as a fundamental part of SEO.
We know the importance of loading speed but we normally see it as part of improving the user experience without realizing that it is one of the points that our friend google looks at to position our website.
If we have our website made with WordPress we can speed up its loading considerably by activating a plugin to cache our website. einnn? what does that mean?
When a visitor enters our page, what the user sees on the screen is built dynamically, that is, WordPress processes the request to PHP, which makes a call to our Mysql database and what we see on the screen is generated. When we cache our website, what we do is prepare the screen that we are going to show the user, considerably reducing calls to the database and increasing the speed of our website.
There are two very famous plugins to activate the cache in our wordpress blog:
WP SuperCache –> Download
W3 Total Cache –> Download
Attention! Be very careful
Before talking about how to configure the cache, a very important warning, make a backup before trying them. Whenever we do something "aggressive" it is important to make a backup but in this case it is even more important.
They are very powerful plugins that can give us a headache if we play with them without taking precautions.
The two mentioned plugins are very good but W3 Total Cache is my favorite and let's configure it correctly:
We install and activate the plugin like any other plugin. If everything has gone well we will have the "Performance" section on the side of our desktop as we see on the following screen:
We click on General Settings and configure the following options:
Page Cache: We activate Enable and in the “Page cache method” option we select the “Disk: Enhanced” option as we see on the following screen:
Minify:
We activate Enable
In Minify Mode we mark auto
Minify cache method: Disk
The rest of the default options
On this screen you can see how it looks:
Database Cache: We mark Enable and as method Disk
In Object Cache: We activate Enable and as Disk method
En browser Cache we simply mark Enable:
Now we click on the option on the side «Page Cache»
In this option we mark:
Cover the front page
cache feeds
Don't cache pages for logged in users
Here is the image of what it would look like:
We go to the Minify option:
This option would look like this:
General: We mark Rewrite URL Structure
En HTML minify settings we mark:
Enable
Inline CSS minification
InlineJS minification
En JS we leave it activated by default
En CSS we just activate it:
And in the Minify section we don't touch anything else. We go to the next option, Database Cache and we will touch only the first option «Don't cache queries for logged in users»
We will leave the following option "Object Cache" and the Browser Cache option by default.
Well, now that we have our blog flying thanks to W3 Total Cache, we are going to give it a twist thanks to the free version of Cloudflare.
Cloudflare is going to speed up the blog but it is also going to add a layer of security that will protect us from attacks.
The first thing we have to do when registering is to add our domain, once done cloudflare will track our DNS and once finished it gives us some DNS that we have to put in the place of the existing ones.
We will have a screen like the following:
By clicking on next we arrive at a screen that gives us the choice between a free version or a paid version, we choose the free one since it is very complete.
Once finished, it gives us some dns that we have to add in the configuration of our domain, changing the current ones for those that Cloudflare gives us and we can only wait for the domain registrar to change it.
When Cloudflare detects that the dns are fine, it will send you an email notifying you that it is already working.
At this point we are already benefiting from the security and speed increase that it provides us. Cloudflare but we can integrate it with our "friend" W3 total cache.
To do this, we return to the W3 Total Cache plugin configuration and click on the Extensions option and activate the first extension that appears, which is the Cloudflare extension:
Once activated, we click on Settings, we click on enable and fill in the fields as you can see on the following screen:
The Api Key can be found in your Cloudflare account in Account.
So far the configuration of W3 total cache together with Cloudflare. You will notice the difference 😉