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cdn

Speeding up WordPress with the ewww.io ExactDN CDN and Image Compression Plugin

December 2, 2017 by Simon

Below is my quick blog posts on using the EWWW IO ExactDN CDN plugin in WordPress to set up an ExactDN (Global Dis.cotribution Network (CDN)) to distribute images to my site’s visitors and shrink (optimize) images in posts.

I have blogged before on speeding up WordPress that has involved moving servers away from CPanel domains to self-managed servers (e.g on Digital Ocean or Vultr), using Lazy Load image plugins like BJ Lazy Load, Optimize images automatically in WordPress with EWWW.io and scaling and moving servers closer to your customers.

For the best performing VM host (UpCloud) read my guide on the awesome UpCloud VM hosts (get $25 free credit by signing up here).

Today I am going to set up the https://www.ewww.io/resize/ ExactDN (CDN) delivery network. I am paying for this myself (and this is an unbiased review).

FYI: I use Ubuntu servers and not Windows.

Know your starting point. 

“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” – Benjamin Franklin

In my original post about Speeding up WordPress, I used the webpagetest.org site to test my sites response times, I was getting an embarrassing 21 seconds load time and 6 second first-byte time. I have worked to speed up WordPress by moving WordPress to a self-managed server (away from CPanel), used the BJ Lazy Load plugin and the awesome ewww.io image optimize plugin, now I get about 4-5 seconds.

I am hoping adding a CDN will make things faster. My blog is delivering over two-thirds images, perfect for a CDN, this is why I am trying this out.

Image type cdn

TIP: Check where your customers/readers are located, and how many are New versus Returning customers? Do you need a CDN to deliver content (Images) that are closer to your customers/readers or do you need to move your web server somewhere else?  The more you know the more you can help them. Worst case you will be supporting a positive experience (and potentially turning a one time visitor into a returning visitor).

I looked at my Google Analytics data to see where my visitors are. Whether good or bad, they are all over the world (Hello)?

World

Other data is available in Google Analytics.  I can see the last few years growth is growing and I am getting more returning visitors, now is the time to ensure my site is ready for more traffic and returning visitors.

Data

Note: The fall in traffic in the Audience overview (right-hand side of the left image) is the unfinished month (not a reader fall off).

Personally, I set a goal to have a high page bounce rate of 90% be way lower (at present I am at about 80% and falling (good) and my page read time has gone from 40 seconds to 1 minute 40.  Every bit you can do will help create a positive experience and help your visitors. I can see from the data above the content is being read, I am building returning visitors and they are geographically spread out. A CDN will be great. After you know where your visitors are it is good to know the times of day that your visitors are hitting your site. Lucky for me it is spread evenly over a 24 hour period.

Data Quantity

FYI: My servers outgoing data (last 30 days), not huge but BJ LazyLoad and image optimization may be helping.

Outbound

Traffic Forecast

Do you know the forecasted growth of your website?

Site Growth

Measure Before Optimizing

Before I started to optimize my WordPress site (hosted on a shared CPanel server) I had the following Web Page Test score. I tested from Singapore as that’s was where my server was originally (and the closest to me).

TIP: Read more about Performance, First Byte, Start Render and Complete scores at my blog post here.

Web Page Performace Test Results (Before Optimizations):

  • Load Time: 23.672s
  • First Byte: 6.743s
  • Start Render: 11.8300s
  • Speed Index: 15024
  • Requests: 132/164 (Document complete v Fully Loaded)
  • Bytes: 3,346KB/3,454KB  (Document complete v Fully Loaded)

Quick Web Page Performace Score Card (Before Optimizations):

  • First Byte: F (I should have captured the subscores)
  • Keep Alive Enabled: F (I should have captured the subscores)
  • Compress Transfer: F (I should have captured the subscores)
  • Compress Images: A (I should have captured the subscores)
  • Cache Static Content: X (I should have captured the subscores)
  • Effective use of CDN: X (I should have captured the subscores)

My initial scores were bad across the range of tests (before optimisations). On the upside, I was manually compressing images with a tool on my desktop before uploading images and this showed an “A” but this scorecard overall was really bad.

Here are the results after Quick Optimizations (EWWW.io image compress, moved the server, reorganizing the site and Lazy Load Images)

Now I get these results after speeding up my site (after using the EWWW.io image resizing, reorganizing the site, minifying, lazy load images, moving servers etc.).

Web Page Performace Test Results (After Simple Optimizations):

  • Load Time: 8.823s (down 14.849s)
  • First Byte: 3.5533s (down 3.1897s)
  • Start Render: 5,4800s (down 6.35s)
  • Speed Index: 5594 (down 9430)
  • Requests: 73/76 (Document complete v Fully Loaded) (down 59/88)
  • Bytes: 848KB/855KB  (Document complete v Fully Loaded) (down 2,498KB/2,599KB)

Quick Web Page Performace Score Card (After Simple Optimizations):

  • First Byte: F (I should have captured the subscores)
  • Keep Alive Enabled: A (I should have captured the subscores)
  • Compress Transfer: A (I should have captured the subscores)
  • Compress Images: A (I should have captured the subscores)
  • Cache Static Content: B (I should have captured the subscores)
  • Effective Use of CDN: X  (I should have captured the subscores)

Tested my pagespeed tests

Even at 4 seconds web page “First Byte“, this is considered not good. My brain says I want sub 1 second, I doubt this is achievable with WordPress over thousands of miles away with SSL (read here about scalability).

I know https and non-geographically favourable servers add half a second to data. SSL will add processing overheads and latency period. If you only want speed don’t setup SSL but if you want SEO and security then setup SSL.

locationlocationlocation

WebPageTest.org test reveals there is no effective use of Content Delivery Networks (CDN) on fearby.com (that’s why I am about to install EWWW.io ExactDN).

ExactDN (Content Delivery Network)

I did try and set up a number of caching and CDN plugins in the past (e.g Max CDN, W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache, Cache Enable, WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, etc.) but they either made results worse or were impossible to set up.

Now that EWWW.io has a CDN let’s give that a go.

What is EWWW.io’s ExactDN?

You can read more about EWWW.io’s two-pronged approach to delivering one plugin to A) “compress images” and B) “add a Content Delivery Network (CDN)” here: https://ewww.io/resize/

What is ExactDN

Ensure you read up about EWWW.io’s ExactDN here: https://ewww.io/resize/ . If you have not used EWWW.io check out my review of the EWWW.io image compression plugin here first.

Pre Signup

Purchasing and Installing ExactDN Exact DN

Login to your EWWW.io account (or signup then log in).

Signin

FYI: If you have used the Optimise images automatically in WordPress plugin from EWWW.io plugin before, then you will see past purchases here.

Signed in

Now you can go back to the EWWW.io ExactDN product page (https://ewww.io/resize/) and purchase a subscription (Make sure you are logged in with an EWWW.io account before you purchase ExactDN).

Pre purchase

I purchased an ExactDN monthly subscription for $9.00 monthly (with a $1 signup fee for the cloud compression service).

Order

Purchase confirmation screen.

Order

Post-purchase, I was advised to find my “Site Address (URL)” in WordPress and add it to EWWW.io Manage Sites screen.

Add site to the plugin

I now noticed I had a CDN for my domain ( fearby-com.exactdn.com ). Nice.

CDN Site Created

EWWW.io said to tick the CDN option in the Image Resize area of the EWWW.io plugin. But before I do that I  will update WordPress Core and WordPress Plugins before enabling the ExactDN as they are out of date.

Update

TIP: I update WordPress Core and WordPress plugins via command line (my guide here).

Backup WordPress (just in case)

It is always a good idea to backup your website, I logged into my Ubuntu server and checked the size of my site before backing it up.

du -hs ./www
513M    ./www

I copied the website folder (from “/www/” to “/www-backup”)

cp -rTv /www/ /www-backup

I confirmed the copied folder size (same, good)

du -hs ./www-backup/
513M    ./www-backup/

I dumped all databases with the MySQL dump command

mysqldump --all-databases > /my-sql-backup.sql -u root -p
> Enter password: ##############################

ls my-sql*.sql -al
-rw-r--r-- 1 removed removed 75605938 Dec  1 21:11 my-sql-backup.sql

While I was there I compress the SQL backup files (text files)

tar -czvf my-sql-backup.sql.tar.gz my-sql-backup.sql

Checking the CDN Status

I checked the DNS replication for fearby-com.exactdn.com with this DNS checker. It’s setup and ready to go across the globe 🙂

A quick CNAME check reveals its upstream provider is fearbycom-8ba8.kxcdn.com. Keycdn.com have been around since 2012. It is great that EWWW.io has paired with keycdn and included their image compression magic in a single WordPress plugin.

Configuring the EWWW.io plugin in WordPress.

Before you enable the CDN below do check the https://www.whatsmydns.net/ and see if your CDN has replicated around the world (Australia can be a bit slow at DNS replication from time to time). Do wait at least 10 minutes before proceeding.

Click the settings in your EWWW Image Optimizer Plugin.

Configure

Now click the Resize Settings tab and click Enable CDN in the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin screen.

Enable Exact DN

Don’t forget to click Save Changes

Save

Testing the CDN

https://www.webpagetest.org NOW reports that my site is using a CDN 🙂

FYI: I have always used webpage test from Singapore and I have done the same here to compare apples to apples.  Singapore is not a good test location in Australia (my server is in Australia) and it is 200ms away and the added layer of SSL adds latency to the connection (read here). This is a real-world test though (worst case).

CDN's Used:
fearby.com : 
fearby-com.exactdn.com : KeyCDN
fonts.googleapis.com : Google
fonts.gstatic.com : Google
static.addtoany.com : Cloudflare
www.googletagmanager.com : Google
pagead2.googlesyndication.com : Google
www.youtube.com : Google
adservice.google.com.sg : Google
adservice.google.com : Google
googleads.g.doubleclick.net : Google
www.google-analytics.com : Google
s.ytimg.com : Google
stats.g.doubleclick.net : Google
fearby-com.disqus.com : Fastly
ssl.google-analytics.com : Google

FYI: https://www.webpagetest.org does want other (all) static content to be on a CDN to give a higher score than 42 out 100, sorry I did not get a subscore before enabling the CDN.

I was expecting a green A here for CDN but Webpage Test has given me more items to investigate to ensure WordPress plugins are also fast (minify or move to CDN). It appears WordPress includes are my next target for optimizing.

Web Page Test indicates the following WordPress assets should also be in CDN.

FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/youtube-embed-plus/styles/ytprefs.min.css?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/simple-social-icons/svgxuse.js?ver=1.1.21
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/youtube-embed-plus/scripts/ytprefs.min.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/addtoany.min.js?ver=1.0
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/js/min/crayon.min.js?ver=_2.7.2_beta
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery-migrate.min.js?ver=1.4.1
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.12.4
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/js/scripts.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/js/menu/superfish.args.js?ver=2.5.3
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/css/min/crayon.min.css?ver=_2.7.2_beta
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/js/skip-links.js?ver=2.5.3
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/comment-reply.min.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/hoverIntent.min.js?ver=1.8.1
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/js/menu/superfish.js?ver=1.7.5
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/tabs.min.js?ver=1.11.4
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/news-pro/js/global.js?ver=3.2.2
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/news-pro/js/responsive-menus.min.js?ver=3.2.2
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/core.min.js?ver=1.11.4
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/news-pro/style.css?ver=3.2.2
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/widget.min.js?ver=1.11.4
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/news-pro/js/jquery.matchHeight.min.js?ver=3.2.2
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/css/styles.css?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/youtube-embed-plus/scripts/fitvids.min.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/bj-lazy-load/js/bj-lazy-load.min.js?ver=2
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/disqus-comment-system/media/js/count.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/wp-emoji-release.min.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-seo-html-sitemap/style.css?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/simple-social-icons/symbol-defs.svg
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/css/dashicons.min.css?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/news-pro/images/favicon.ico
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/genesis-tabs/style.css?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/simple-social-icons/css/style.css?ver=2.0.1
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/addtoany.min.css?ver=1.14

It would be a huge effort trying to read and keep static plugin and theme related files in a CDN. I’ll ask the EWWW.io developer to see if this is possible in a future version (that would be nice). The developer did promptly point me here to opt into using the CDN to deliver CSS, JS etc.

Is that it? It can’t be that simple!

I can load my site at https://fearby.com and my images load from https://fearby-com.exactdn.com 🙂 I am impressed, blog posts are now loading images from the CDN network and I did not have to edit posts. I did have to subscribe to ExactDN and tick a checkbox in WordPress though.

Here is a sample image (my largest) from this blog post.

https://fearby-com.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Infographic-So-you-have-an-idea-for-an-app-v1-3.jpg?strip=all&quality=60&ssl=1

fearby.com WebPAGE TEST Results – Singapore

Web Page Performace Test Results – Singapore (After Setting up the EWWW.io ExactDN):

  • Load Time: 4.177s (down 4.646s from previous optimizations ((My Original load times were 23.672s))
  • First Byte: 2.240s (down 1.3133s from previous optimizations (My Original First Byte: 6.743s))
  • Start Render: 2.800s (down 2.68s from previous optimizations (My Original Start Render: 11.8300s))
  • Speed Index: 3009 (down 2585 from previous optimizations (Speed Index: 15024))
  • Requests: 67/68 (Document complete v Fully Loaded) 
  • Bytes: 535KB/538KB  (Document complete v Fully Loaded)

Quick Web Page Performace Score Card – Singapore (After Setting up the EWWW.io ExactDN):

  • First Byte: F (I should have captured the subscores). 
  • Keep Alive Enabled: A (I should have captured the subscores).
  • Compress Transfer: A (I should have captured the subscores).
  • Compress Images: A (I should have captured the subscores).
  • Cache Static Content: B (I should have captured the subscores).
  • Effective Use of CDN: X (I should have captured the subscores). plugins now need to be on a CDN.

The Web Page Test site does give detailed scores and recommendations if you scroll down or click the score car (A-F). Do read the recommendations and see what you may need to do next.  I am happy that I now have a CDN via EWWW.io. Clicking the first byte and CDN buttons at Web Page Test reveal sub-scores to allow you to see if you have made improvements, regrettably, I did not know of and capture sub-scores until after installing the CDN (I suggest you do).

Full Dump.

Details
First Byte Time (back-end processing): 0/100
2240 ms First Byte Time
ms Target First Byte Time

Use persistent connections (keep alive): 100/100

Use gzip compression for transferring compressable responses: 100/100
404.6 KB total in compressible text, target size = 404.6 KB - potential savings = 0.0 KB

Compress Images: 100/100
98.7 KB total in images, target size = 98.7 KB - potential savings = 0.0 KB

Use Progressive JPEGs: 100/100
97.4 KB of a possible 97.4 KB (100%) were from progressive JPEG images

Leverage browser caching of static assets: 88/100
FAILED - (No max-age or expires) - https://fearby-com.disqus.com/count.js
FAILED - (8.2 minutes) - https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js
FAILED - (15.0 minutes) - https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-93963-1
FAILED - (60.0 minutes) - https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js
WARNING - (1.1 hours) - https://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
WARNING - (12.0 hours) - https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pub-config/r20160913/ca-pub-9241521190070921.js
WARNING - (24.0 hours) - https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Raleway%3A400%2C700&ver=3.2.2
WARNING - (2.0 days) - https://static.addtoany.com/menu/page.js
WARNING - (4.5 days) - https://s.ytimg.com/yts/jsbin/www-widgetapi-vflUJbESo/www-widgetapi.js

Use a CDN for all static assets: 46/100
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/simple-social-icons/css/style.css?ver=2.0.1
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/addtoany.min.css?ver=1.14
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/css/min/crayon.min.css?ver=_2.7.2_beta
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/news-pro/style.css?ver=3.2.2
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/css/styles.css?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-seo-html-sitemap/style.css?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/css/dashicons.min.css?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/js/scripts.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/comment-reply.min.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/crayon-syntax-highlighter/js/min/crayon.min.js?ver=_2.7.2_beta
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/hoverIntent.min.js?ver=1.8.1
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/js/menu/superfish.js?ver=1.7.5
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/js/menu/superfish.args.js?ver=2.5.3
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/genesis/lib/js/skip-links.js?ver=2.5.3
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/news-pro/js/jquery.matchHeight.min.js?ver=3.2.2
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/news-pro/js/responsive-menus.min.js?ver=3.2.2
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/tabs.min.js?ver=1.11.4
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/add-to-any/addtoany.min.js?ver=1.0
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/news-pro/js/global.js?ver=3.2.2
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/core.min.js?ver=1.11.4
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/ui/widget.min.js?ver=1.11.4
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/bj-lazy-load/js/bj-lazy-load.min.js?ver=2
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/youtube-embed-plus/scripts/fitvids.min.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/disqus-comment-system/media/js/count.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/youtube-embed-plus/styles/ytprefs.min.css?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/wp-emoji-release.min.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/simple-social-icons/symbol-defs.svg
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/genesis-tabs/style.css?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.12.4
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/themes/news-pro/images/favicon.ico
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery-migrate.min.js?ver=1.4.1
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/simple-social-icons/svgxuse.js?ver=1.1.21
FAILED - https://fearby.com/wp-content/plugins/youtube-embed-plus/scripts/ytprefs.min.js?ver=230d722825ddde2688088d563a906075

CDN's Used:
fearby.com : 
fonts.googleapis.com : Google
fonts.gstatic.com : Google
www.googletagmanager.com : Google
static.addtoany.com : Cloudflare
fearby-com.exactdn.com : KeyCDN
pagead2.googlesyndication.com : Google
www.youtube.com : Google
www.google-analytics.com : Google
adservice.google.com : Google
adservice.google.com.sg : Google
googleads.g.doubleclick.net : Google
s.ytimg.com : Google
fearby-com.disqus.com : Fastly
stats.g.doubleclick.net : Google

GT Metrix Page Speed Score

https://gtmetrix.com is giving a good score across the board (86%). It hints I should optimize Javascript files and “Remove query strings in static files” as some proxy servers do not cache URLs with “?” in them. That is (fortunately) not a problem with ExactDN, as the servers are configured to properly handle query strings.

GTMetrics

Gtmetrix.com does give some optimisation tips too (However, it does report low CDN optimizations if a single file is not delivered over a CDN).

I do like Gtmetrix.com email reports, you can see if your site performance is degrading.

GTMetrix Summary

Page Speed Insights

I am now looking at the Google PageSpeed Insights test for things to fix next. I think I can tweak my NGINX a little (adding caching). Read more about Google Page Speed Insights here.

fyi: My Google Page Speed Insights score (desktop) along with another local big corporate site I tested.

Page Insight

I am happy with 82 🙂

It appears if you want to get 100% you need to get..

  • Initial Response under 100ms
  • Animate, produce frame in under 10ms
  • Idle maximize idle time
  • Deliver all content in under 1000ms

Getting More from ExactDN by caching CSS and JS files.

I added the following to my /www/wp-config.php file as mentioned here: http://docs.ewww.io/article/47-getting-more-from-exactdn This will serve more resources from the CDN

define( 'EXACTDN_ALL_THE_THINGS', true );

I refreshed my site in a browser and now CSS, JS and fonts are loaded from the CDN too.

All

To reduce files served from my website I re-enabled the Fast Velocity Minify plugin in WordPress and pointed it at my CDN (https://fearby-com.exactdn.com/)

cdn-minify

Now I am getting a GTMatrix score of Page Speed Score = 93% (A) and YSlow Score  = 74% (C) and a 2.6-second load and a much lower 35 requests (post minification and pointing the minified files to the CDN).

WOW.

Minifiy

And WebPageTest.org is reporting Effective use of CDN 🙂 Awesome.

Effective use of CDN

I think I’m done (ExactDN CDN and the image optimiser and other tweaks have worked its magic).

How do I compare to other sites?

Given Apple, Microsoft and NBC speed scores are worse than mine I’m happy for now.  🙂

GTMetricx Graphs

GT Metrics graphs show the improvement, YSlow report does indicate I can reduce the website DOM elements to speed things up and tweak plugins but I’d rather keep my design for SEO and not play with plugins or they might break.

I could tweak the server side (NGINX/MySQL/Cache or DNS) but I don’t need too.

Conclusion

I still can’t believe setting up a CDN is a one-click solution and adding a wp-config.php lin (after you subscribe). Best of all the BJ Lazy Load plugin still works. I am very happy with the EWWW.io ExactDN. I now have a CDN and it has lowered my First Byte time, Start Render Times, Speed Index time (on more than just the front page) and all I did was subscribe and tick a checkbox.

It is nice that EWWW.io have not charged for Data delivered from the CDN network on top of a monthly subscription at this stage but they have left it open in the terms and conditions. It is important to ensure a service can sustain itself, so this is a good sign. FYI: my favorite Agile toolkit (Atlaz.io) that I reviewed here closed shop today so it is wise for aaS shops to plan ahead. I know how hard it can be to spin up servers and stuff and allocate times to keep them running. Good luck EWWW.io!

Also, I now have a clear set of steps (below) to resolve other non-optimized assets that are outside of the CDN.

Full Report

Thanks to EWWW.io and Web Page Test for helping make my site faster.

I doubt WordPress and my “down under”  server location can get me to under 1000ms but I will try.

Read on here to see how Cloudflare can increase your site’s performance.

Setting up a website to use Cloudflare on a VM hosted on Vultr and Namecheap

DNS Improved

Don’t forget your sites performance/SEO and security.

Website

Update November 2018

I have a much faster loading website after moving it to a new host, read my guide here.

GTMetrix After YSlow

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Revision History

v2.0 November 2018 Update

v1.9 added Cloudflare, SEO, Google Page Speed Insights test and future optimization, page insight speed image, added GTMetrics comments, growth image, gtmetrix.com reports (typos are free), updated change is domain to .com, added EXACTDN_ALL_THE_THINGS, 93 page speed, minify, compare, graph, fixed typos, tidied up the conclusion.

Filed Under: CDN, ExactDN Tagged With: and, cdn, compression, ewww.io, ExactDN, image, plugin, Speeding, the, up, with, wordpress

Improving the speed of WordPress

September 22, 2017 by Simon

This post shows my never-ending quest to speed up WordPress for free.

I have used to use WP Total Cache in the past but decided to check out what others recommended, I found this post 6 Best WordPress Caching Plugins Compared. Some WordPress Caching Plugins.

  • W3 Total cache
  • WP Fastest Cache
  • Cache Enable
  • WP Rocket
  • WP Super Cache
  • Etc

What plugin do I use?

Benchmark (No Caching Plugin)

I tested my site before installing a caching plugin with https://www.webpagetest.org/ and my site was loading in 21s (loading over 141 files).

My site loaded in a terrible 21.3 seconds. My blog is hosted on Jumba (Net Registry) on and Ultimate plan for $25 a month.

My site seems to deliver 70% images so I wonder if a page caching plugin can help?

I do run the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin to automatically compress images when I upload them to my site. Read my blog post on the EWWW Image Optimizer here.  I do keep images at a high quality to capture all details.

WP Fastest Cache Plugin

I have decided to try the WP Fastest Cache because it’s source was updated 4 hours ago compared to WP Super Cahches update 5 months ago. Both these plugins offer similar GT Metrix performance improvements and WP Fastest Cache has been tested on WordPress v4.8.

Installing WP Fastest Cache

I looked for the WP Fastest Cache Plugin on the WP plugin directory but it was not there.

I downloaded the latest version WP Fastest Cache from https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fastest-cache/

I upload the WP Faster Cache plugin to my site.

I Activated the plugin.

WP Fastest Cache plugin is now installed 🙂

It appears to have auto cached/indexed my site?

Now it’s time to run the same benchmark and see if the site is faster (with the same settings (Singapore chrome))?

1 of 3 test are underway.

WP Fastest Cache Results

Wow WP Fastest Cache loaded my site 2 seconds slower (Try 1 = 23 seconds, Try 2 =  21 seconds and Try 3 =  28 Seconds).

This could have been because of weekend traffic or hosting issues but this was not what I expected.

I disabled the WP Fastest Cache plugin and ran the benchmarks again and it was still 23 seconds (weekend traffic?). I re-enabled WP Fastest Cache and re-ran the test but no improvement.

My bad I think I needed to manually configure the WP Faster Cache plugin by opening the new WP Faster Cache menu on the left-hand side of the WP admin dashboard.

There I enabled caching options in the WP Faster Cache options.

I ran https://www.webpagetest.org tests again and got 16s, 18s and 16s seconds results in three tests and an A on compressed images. It appears you need to manually configure the WP Total Cache plugin after installing it (I missed this step).

I disable WP Fastest Cache and tried the WP Super Cache plugin and the test results were 29s, 24s, 24s (slower than WP Faster Cache). then tried W3 Total cache and the results were ()

I tried the W3 Total Cache plugin and the results were (30s, 16s 26s).

I Tried Autoptimize and it was tested at 45s.

It looks like WP Faster Cache is the fastest, ill turn it back on until try setup a CDN.

Fast Forward to Sept 2017

Since writing this post I have moved away from a shared C-Panel host and have moved my domain to a self-managed Vultr server closer to me, I have moved my email to Google G-Suite. I have learned how to deploy and manage WordPress by command-line tools. I have set up servers on Digital Ocean before but the servers are located in Singapore and not Sydney and latency and scalability was poor. SSL will make sites slower and servers far away will just compound the issues.

Re-enabling the WP Fastest Cache Plugin

I tried reinstalling the WP Fastest Cache plugin and for me, the plugin just slows down my site by 6 seconds.

I opened my NGINX config and got my NGINX user

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

My user is: www-data

I enabled the WP Fastest Cache plugin and ensured the WP Fastest Cache has ownership and access to the cache folder.

sudo chown www-data:www-data /www/wp-content/plugins/cache
sudo chown www-data:www-data /www//wp-content/plugins/cache/all
sudo chmod 755 /www/wp-content/plugins/cache *
sudo chmod 755 /www/wp-content/plugins/cache/all *

Below are the settings I use.

WP Fastest Cache

installing the WP-Optimize Plugin

I recommend setting up WP-Optimize plugin as it will optimize your database and keep things fast, it only saves me a second on my load times but this helps.

WP Optimize

WP-Optimize will allow for to review database optimizations

WP-Optimize database savings

Setting up Nginx GZip Compression

I set up my Nginx config to include

gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";

gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

I set the minimum size to gzip too

gzip_min_length 20;

Benchmark with G-Zip, Caching and WP Fastest Cache 

With WP Fastest Cache I now load my site in 13.9 seconds from Singapore. Time to disable WP Fastest cache plugin as it does not seem to be helping without linking to a CDN.

With Cache plugi

Setting up Browser Caching

I also setup browser caching by editing in NginX.

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Added

location ~*  \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|svg|js|css)$ {
        expires 365d;
}

Not sure if caching CSS and JS will cause problems in future?

Benchmark with G-Zip, Caching and without WP Fastest Cache (Singapore)

I re-ran the tests and got 10.9 seconds and got a B for cached content. When in Started on C-Panel I was getting near 30s

Benchmark

Benchmark with G-Zip, Caching and without WP Fastest Cache (Sydney)

I have always benchmarked from Singapore (as Sydney was not an option when I started) but now it is.  Out f curiosity is my website load time in Sydney?

8.2 seconds. Distance does affect performance.

Google Speed Insights

Google has awesome tools to help you increase your benchmark mobile and desktop website speeds and recommend focus areas to resolve problems: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Mobile Speed Score

Desktop Speed Score

Tips

I was getting SVG files failing compassion tests so I added the following under allowed mime types under “http gzip_types” in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

image/svg+xml text/html+svg

Minifying JS and CSS

This needs to be done and 50% of my site files appears to be CSS and JS related.

It looks like 30%~40 of your sites google speed index is related to minified/combined JS/CSS.

Google Speed Test

I installed the Fast Velocity Minify WordPress plugin.

I ran this to install it from the command line

cd /www/wp-content/plugins#
sudo wget https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/fast-velocity-minify.2.2.1.zip
--2017-09-23 19:51:46--  https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/fast-velocity-minify.2.2.1.zip
Resolving downloads.wordpress.org (downloads.wordpress.org)... 66.155.40.187, 66.155.40.203, 66.155.40.188, ...
Connecting to downloads.wordpress.org (downloads.wordpress.org)|66.155.40.187|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 821621 (802K) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘fast-velocity-minify.2.2.1.zip’

fast-velocity-minify.2.2.1.zip 100%[=================================================>] 802.36K   830KB/s    in 1.0s

2017-09-23 19:51:47 (830 KB/s) - ‘fast-velocity-minify.2.2.1.zip’ saved [821621/821621]

Unzip

sudo unzip merge-minify-refresh.zip

I activated the plugin and set some settings

Minify Settings

Verified minify logs

Logs

Google Page Insights can now see the minifies, css, js and html

Minified

Google Page Insights – Possible Optimizations

issues

And Google Ad Words and Google Analytics appear to be holding back Google Page Insight scores

Google adwords and Analytics

I am getting a few false positives with plugins javascript but that can be resolved another day.

Pingdom (Melbourne results)

3.2 seconds, a few false positives though.

Kingdom

I was going to test with https://www.webpagetest.org/ (from Singapore) but the service kept stalling and had too many tests before me (even from Sydney).

Wait

Address First Byte Time (todo)

If I look at the first-byte load results in the waterfall view my site is taking many seconds to deliver the first byte, this lowers the performance scores about 20%. I need to set up a CDN and or configure NGINX following this guide based on this manual configuration entry (I tried some of the Nginx settings but it appears I need to compile some performance settings into Nginx).

CDN (todo)

I am sure a Content Delivery Network (CDN) will help with the whole page deliver and first-byte times but I am trying to milk as much free as possible and limit future costs. A CDN will trigger higher monthly costs (any CDN providers want to donate a temporary pro plan for review purposes).

Misc Speed Articles

  • Yoast has a good site speed article here: https://yoast.com/site-speed-tools-suggestions/
  • Nginx has a good guide on Nginx performance here: https://www.nginx.com/blog/10-tips-for-10x-application-performance/
  • Google PageSpeed tips: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules

Configuring Ubuntu for Performance

Preventing applications swapping for disk (read more here)

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

I added this memory-related setting.

vm.swappiness = 1

This will all but prevent applications writing to disk (swap) when they are not active. I had free memory on my VM so I may as well use it.

I will monitor the free ram after reboot and play with php memory settings.

ram

Setup Lazyload for images in posts

cd /www/wp-content/plugins/
sudo wget https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/bj-lazy-load.zip
unzip bj-lazy-load.zip
# activate the plugin

Lazyload Plugin Settings

Lazyload

Placeholder Image ( Image: https://fearby.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/placeholder.jpg )

Web Performance Test from Sydney

8.4 seconds ( Score Card F A A A C, was F F F A F ).  I was getting up to 28 second load times with Net Registry C Panel servers.

Static Content is cached but Googe Ad Sence, Google Analytics, and some plugins do block the score. The front page does have some features content that has to be loaded and can’t be minified or cached much.

Sydney Results

It is obvious I need to work in the initial websitee load (DNS, CDN or SSL), there sis  3 seconds I can save here.

3 sec

Configuring PHP for Performance

todo: PHP base config.

todo: PHP caching.

Conclusion

I was expecting WP Fastest Cache to deliver faster speeds but in reality but I am getting 4 seconds faster in WordPress. I was going to configure MaxCDN but they are to expensive. Fast Velocity Minify Plugin is working a treat 🙂

I ended up ditching the shared CPanel hosted domain and setup my own server for WordPress. My site seems a lot faster now. A friend set up CloudFlare with great success, more soon. I blogged about my server setup here.

Adding browser cache and compressing and moving away from CPanel to a self-managed server helped.

The only things to try now is to use a CDN and speed up the delivery of my site and improve the First Byte Time.

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Revision History

v1.932 added lazy load information (24th Sep 2017)

v1.952 added small changes (23rd Sep 2017)

etc

Filed Under: Blog, Cache, Cloud, Domain, Software, Wordpress Tagged With: cache, cdn, plugin, speed, website, wordpress

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