PPC - Pay Per Click Management

Speed is everything for a website. The difference of just 0.3 seconds could make or break a website. There is a direct correlation between the bounce/exit rates, average time on site, engagement rate, and much more, that get worse with a slower website.

What more, Google are introducing core web vitals as a ranking factor in the next few months of 2021. With this in mind, it is a more important time than ever to make sure your website is as quick as possible, with positive core web vitals. Here is my take of how to make a WordPress achieve this in 2021…with no affiliation at all.

 

Hosting – Cloudways

It was only a year ago, believe it or not, I had one of my main websites hosted on a shared server of GoDaddy’s. I did not think it was that big a deal since it was cheap hosting until I realized just how slow the server was.

At first, I moved to WPX Hosting which was blazingly quicker and I would whole heartily endorse them. However, the issue with WPX Hosting comes with CPU usage. For websites that gain a lot of traffic or have high CPU usage, the WPX server quickly gets maxed out.

The only other hosting I found to be on par with WPX hosting was Cloudways. What’s the difference between the two? Cloduways is upscalable, making it much better for high traffic sites that are growing.

 

Caching – WP Fastest Cache

Although there are many caching plugins on WordPress, the one I found to give the best results is WP Fastest Cache. You can choose to buy the premium, although I found the free version to be plentiful by itself.

 

Optimizations – W3 Speedup

This is where the biggest gains come from. With a one of fee, W3 speedup improves your whole website’s core web vitals to green. No monthly cost and no slowing down.

Couple W3 speedup with a fast CDN, such as Cloudfare, aws Cloudfront, or Stackpath, and you are onto a winner.

What is particularly good about W3 speedup is that is not a one case fits all. The plugin is definitely incredible. But, it is the bespoke support to squeeze out every drop of performance from the team at W3 speedup which is where the value comes into play, and where you are able to truly get green core web vitals.

 

Cleaner – Advanced Database Cleaner

It is important to keep the database of your WordPress website as clean as possible. With a growing website, it is very quick and easy to clutter the database, which will ultimately slow the website down, especially the time it takes to search and find content on the database.

Advanced Database Cleaner cleans different areas of the database to make sure it is running at its fastest.