Tag: Site Speed

DIY: Optimize your browser cache

Michiel Heijmans

Browser caching is the way a browser stores files from your website on a local computer. Browser caching makes sure all files load without unnecessary server connections, which is much faster. In this article, we’ll tell you how to check if that browser cache works and how to optimize it in WordPress. We’ll tell you how we approach this in our website reviews.

What is browser cache?

Browser cache allows you to skip server connections and pull resources right from your local computer. This cache works like the temporary internet files that take up so much space on our computer. You want it there, as it helps to speed up things. But you don’t want it there forever, as things might change on a website. You can set this ‘refresh’ rate to whatever expiration time your want: the longer, the better.

List of expiration times

In most cases, you can set expiration times in seconds. Here’s a handy list of possible expiration times for your browser cache:

  • 3600 seconds (hour)
  • 86400 seconds (day)
  • 172800 seconds (two days)
  • 604800 seconds (week)
  • 2592000 seconds (month)
  • 31536000 seconds (year)

Google recommends a minimum cache time of one week and preferably up to one year for static assets or assets that change infrequently. For the majority of sites, that’s right. However, the right time of expiration largely depends on how often your content changes. If you have a news site, your homepage changes all the time. You can set the expiration time for your homepage’s content (HTML) at 3600 seconds (1 hour) without a problem. But if you load a CSS file in that homepage, that will probably only change during a redesign. The expiration time for that CSS file can easily be 31536000 seconds (a year). Please test and find what works best for your type of content.

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Testing your browser cache

In this section, we’ll show you a couple of site speed tools we use to check browser caching in our reviews. Which one you’d like to use to check browser caching for your website, depends on personal preferences as well.

YSlow

My personal favorite for checking browser caching is Yahoo’s YSlow. It’s available as a browser extension, works pretty fast and checks a lot more that just the expiration times of your browser cache. Here’s a screenshot:

Browser cache: yslow screenshot

ETags

Besides just a simple expire headers check, YSlow also allows you to check for entity tags, which are also called ‘ETags’. These ETags are used to “determine whether the component in the browser’s cache matches the one on the origin server.” This helps a browser determine if a new file is available. Note that ETags tend to slow down a website, so please dive into the subject and see if you really need these.

As you can see in that image (click to enlarge), the first file is a CSS file that has a one day expiration time. The screenshot was taken June, 20th and the file expires on the 21st of June. I don’t think that is necessary; in most cases, set expiration times for CSS files to a year.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google provides its own check for browser caching in PageSpeed Insights. If the section ‘Should Fix’ contains the recommendation ‘Leverage browser caching’, you should definitely address this.

Browser caching: pagespeed insights screenshot

As you can see in the image above, like YSlow, Google PageSpeed Insights tells you which files need a (far future) expiration date. And that these are usually CSS files,  JavaScript files or (template) images.

If these tools aren’t clear enough, there are more tools we rely on to do extra checks, like Pingdom and GT Metrix.

WordPress plugins that help browser caching

Browser caching is something you can for instance set in your .htaccess file. For most users, that’s probably not something you do every day. However, if you are using WordPress, you’re in luck. There is a number of plugins that can help you with this. We have listed two for you below.

WP Rocket

At Yoast, we’re fans of the WP Rocket plugin. It’s simplicity, combined with a lot of options, make this our to-go-to speed optimization plugin. Browser caching is enabled right after activation of the plugin. Feed cache and mobile cache can be enabled in the plugin. Find out more here.

W3 Total Cache

Because of the labyrinth of options this plugin has, we stopped recommending W3 Total Cache for the average WordPress user. However, it does have more specific browser caching options than most other plugins. In WordPress (with this plugin installed), go to Performance > Set expire headers and enable these. After that, go to the separate sections for CSS/JS and HTML and choose your section-specific expire time.

WP Rocket is really our first recommendation. But if you know your way around speed optimization, feel free to check W3 Total Cache as well.

Ask Yoast: Google PageSpeed score

Joost de Valk

In Ask Yoast we handle your SEO question! This time we received a question from Stefan Wohlert from Venlo, just around the corner here in the Netherlands. He asks:

“How important is the Google PageSpeed score for SEO?”

In this video we explain what this score means for your site’s SEO:

Focus on a fast website

Can’t watch the video? Here’s the transcript:

“The Google PageSpeed score itself is not important for SEO at all, because Google doesn’t – as far as we know – factor that score into the ranking. What they check is how fast your website loads for people across the planet. They just look how fast your website loads for users, so you don’t have to obsess over that specific score. You have to make sure your website is as fast as you can get it. So, if the difference in speed, between doing the fix to get the perfect score or not, is negligible, by all means don’t do it!

What you have to focus on is making the fastest website possible. Not only for Google, but just because every other metric on your site will do better when your site is fast as well. So don’t obsess over getting 99% or 100% in Google PageSpeed, but obsess over making your website as fast as you can. And if the changes you have to do just for the Google PageSpeed score are too hard, don’t do them, focus on something else. Good luck!”

Read more: ‘Site speed: tools and suggestions’ »

Not sure about your site's speed? Need a check on your SEO strategy? Order a website review »

Let us help you out with your SEO question! In the series Ask Yoast we take questions from YOU! So don’t hesitate and send your question to ask@yoast.com.

Managing a growing blog: technical SEO

Marieke van de Rakt

As a blog starts growing, you’ll need to do more things to keep the technical aspects of your SEO covered. The first thing you should do, whether your blog is big or small, is installing our Yoast SEO plugin. That pretty much covers everything concerning technical SEO. We made it that simple. But, as your blog or website starts growing, you should also take care of some other technical aspects: 1. security, 2. speed and 3. mobile. In this post, we’ll explain the importance of these three technical aspects for a growing blog.

Growing_blog_2_FI

The very beginning: Install Yoast SEO

WordPress actually is a really SEO-friendly platform, so most technical things are already covered in your WordPress install. For all things not covered, you install the (free) Yoast SEO plugin. Installing the plugin and using the default settings already improves your SEO quite a lot. If you make sure to run all updates of our SEO plugin, all major technical SEO things will already be covered.  

Yoast SEO premium offers some extra features and the help of our support team. If you have a hard time installing our plugin, they’ll help you out. Admittedly, the plugin has quite a lot of different settings and it can be a challenge setting up. We’re currently working on a Yoast SEO plugin training. If you want to know more about what the plugin does and what the different settings are for (and which settings you should use for your specific blog) you should definitely look into the Yoast SEO plugin training (expected spring 2016).

Not sure about your site's technical SEO? No worries! Yoast SEO will help you out »

1. Security

As your website gets bigger, you’ll become a more important target for hackers. That’s why you’ll need to make sure your website’s security is really taken care of.

Failing to take the necessary precautions for your WordPress security can lead to malware infections, branding issues, google blacklists and possibly have a huge impact on your site’s SEO . 

Read more: ‘WordPress Security’ »

2. Speed

Site speed is one of the factors that determine whether you get a good ranking in Google. Having a faster website will increase your ranking position in Google. A slow website will result in a slow crawling rate that Google uses to index your site. Making your website faster, is a relatively easy way to increase the ranking position in Google.

Moreover, a fast blog will give a much better User Experience than a slow one. That’s another very important reason to make sure your site speed is optimal.

Keep reading: ‘Site speed: tools and suggestions’ »

3. Mobile

In april 2015 Google announced a new update which included the performance of websites on mobile devices as a ranking factor. In the SEO world this update is known as ‘Mobilegeddon’. Consequences of this update are rather simple: if your website isn’t deemed mobile friendly, it won’t rank well in mobile search results. You can’t do without a mobile friendly website anymore!

Read on: ‘Mobile-friendly sites and SEO ’ »

Conclusion

Your WordPress site will be relatively SEO-friendly because you use WordPress. However, so does 25% of the web. Make sure to use Yoast SEO as well and you’ll have most technical aspects of SEO covered. And don’t forget to look into security, speed and mobile!

Sadly, you will not be done with SEO. Ever. You will have to start optimizing your content after you have handled the technical issues.

Read more: ‘10 tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly blogpost’ »

 

Improving site speed: tools and suggestions

Joost de Valk

Site speed is one of the factors which determines whether you get a good ranking in Google. Site speed is a ranking factor, and its importance keeps growing.

For starters, a fast website provides a much better user experience than a slow one. Research has shown time and again that people don’t buy as much from slower sites, and don’t read or engage as much on slower sites. That in itself should be enough reason to make sure the speed of your site is as good as can be.

Beyond just being better for users, faster websites can be easier for search engines to crawl, process and index. That means that your posts will take less time to show up in the search results, as well as performing and ranking better.

Read more: How site speed influences SEO »

The best site speed measurement tools

When analyzing the SEO of a website, you should always check the site speed. But which tools should you use, and, which metrics should you be looking at?

Speed tests may vary based on the location of the test, environmental influences (like the time of day), and other factors. This is just one reason why speed tools do not always provide the same results. Different tools may measure speed differently, and may even use completely different metrics.

That’s why we recommend using all of these tools when testing a site (and do not rely on just one):

Each of these tools has a slightly different approach when it comes to measurement, reporting, and making suggestions for improvements. To get the most out of them, you’ll need a good understanding of the different metrics they measure, and to understand how best to interpret the results. That’s why we’ve put together a guide on how to check your site speed.

The best WordPress plugins to speed up your site

Broadly speaking, there are three categories of things which WordPress plugins can do to speed up a site. They can:

  • Implement caching (server-side and/or client-side)
  • Alter the way in which your theme (and/or database) works/loads
  • Optimise the deliver of media

There are some speed optimisation plugins which are very specialised, and focus on doing a very good job on just one small part of these categories. Other plugins may tackle most, or even all of these areas, but do so more generally. It’s rare to find a single plugin which solves all of these problems.

We have some recommendations, but you should do your own research and testing, as performance may vary significantly based on your hosting setup, location, theme, and other plugins. Be sure to test thoroughly, as a purely configured performance plugin can very easily break a website.

In most cases, installing one (and only one!) of the following plugins should get you started. Most of them come with full page caching (where a static version of each page is saved and served to users, without needing to load WordPress and your whole site), and various flavours of resource optimisation (image compression, lazy loading, etc).

  • WP Rocket – very powerful, but hard to customize. Designed to be simple – very few configuration options. No free option.
  • W3 Total Cache – extremely powerful, and extremely flexible. Designed to be comprehensive. Hundreds of checkboxes and options.
  • WP Optimize – A good middle ground, with basic full page caching, and some sophisticated database + media optimization tools.
  • WP Super Cache – A basic solution which offers full page caching, but lacks other/advanced optimization techniques.
  • Autoptimize – Some really clever JavaScript/CSS/HTML optimization, though no full page caching (should work well with a dedicated full page caching solution)

Plugins not to run

It’s important not to forget that, in most cases, every plugin that you add to your site is likely to have some degree of impact on your site speed. At worse, a plugin may be poorly coded, and create bottlenecks as your pages load. At best, a plugin is streamlined and efficient, but still adds extra logic to your site, which may still require precious milliseconds to execute.

When you’re picking plugins, it’s best practice to consider the performance impact, and if possible, to measure before and after so that you can decide whether it’s worth the trade-off.

The best WordPress hosting

Having a slow hosting environment can cripple a site’s speed, even if you’re using caching and every performance optimization technique in the book. Ditching a slow host, and upgrading to a better one, can have a huge impact on how quickly your pages load.

But, like performance plugins, there’s no perfect fit for everybody when it comes to hosting. It’s important that you do your own research, and find the right balance of cost, features and performance which meets your needs.

That said, some hosting companies are much better than others; especially when it comes to expertise with WordPress and performance optimization. To help shorten your research process, we’ve compiled a list of trusted, vetted hosting companies – each of which we’ trust when it comes to WordPress and speed!

Some hosting companies go even further, and have their own performance-boosting plugins which help your site to take advantage of their specific hosting optimizations, or even add their own caching systems (e.g., Siteground Optimizer or Servebolt Optimizer).

The best WordPress CDN

A CDN (or ‘content delivery network’) is an excellent tool for improving the loading speed of your site. The CDN brings your site physically closer to your visitor, so to say. If your hosting provider has a server in California and your visitor is from Mumbai, India there might some long latency that results in poor performance. By adding a CDN, you can serve your content from a location near your visitor and, therefore, dramatically speed up its loading times.

no cdn vs cdn wikipedia
On the left: traffic to your site lands on a single server. On the right, a CDN sends visitors to the server nearest to their location. Image: Wikipedia

As we explain in our guide to CDNs, the same ‘do your own research’ principles apply here, too. You’ll need to find the best mix of performance, features, and price.

We’re huge fans of Cloudflare at Yoast (which we use to power all sorts of our own ecosystem), but it may not be the perfect fit for you.

When you’re choosing a CDN for WordPress, it’s worth making sure that they have a good plugin integration, so that page and resource caches are automatically updated or purged as you write or update your content (like the Cloudflare WordPress plugin).

Conclusion

When every millisecond can make the difference between a visitor buying or leaving, there’s always more room for performance optimization. We regularly review the setup and configuration of our hosting, CDN, plugins and theme – and so should you.

Got a great recommendation for speeding up WordPress? Let us know in the comments!

Keep reading: Mobile-friendly sites and SEO  »

The post Improving site speed: tools and suggestions appeared first on Yoast.

Weekly SEO Recap: Google & HTTPS, Bing no longer nice

Joost de Valk

Joost's weekly SEO recapAn interesting week this one, including an update that seems to have quite a bit of impact. There are also some nice new features in Google Trends, possible labels for slow loading sites and some more annoying news about Bing and keywords.

A Google update

It wasn’t Panda, it wasn’t Penguin, though both are still “to come”, but this week we had an update that gave several people in the SEO industry a shudder. Mozcast, which measures changes in the search results for a fixed set of keywords and calculates a “temperature” based on that, had one of its “warmest” days ever.

Dr Pete over at Moz wrote a post, thinking this change could be related to the HTTPS changes Google did earlier. This was quickly refuted by Googler Gary Illyes on Twitter. And of course, most SEO bloggers stopped thinking at that point and just wrote down that it wasn’t HTTPS related. I disagree with that. I think Googlers don’t necessarily always know anymore what causes something to happen.

Google’s algorithms are, in part, self-learning. They automatically determine factors that cause a site to be trusted. This week, Wikipedia started moving to HTTPS entirely. If more and more sites that Google trusts, like Wikipedia, the FBI and now also Reddit, all are on HTTPS, that factor might automatically become more important, simply because of that machine learning. So while Googlers might say they haven’t changed the algorithm, the algorithm might have changed itself. Note that Gary’s tweet said “AFAIK”. They do that more and more when talking about the algorithm. Simply because they don’t always know.

Of course, this is just a theory, and it would not explain all of the changes, but nothing ever does. My own thoughts on HTTPS haven’t changed much since January last year.

More Google news

Google did more this week. Google Trends got a nice update, including both real time data and data for YouTube. You should definitely just have a play with that for a bit. This Wired piece on it is good. Another interesting bit was that Google UK confirmed that more than half of their searches and YouTube views now happen on mobile. Have I reminded you to get your site ready for mobile enough now?

There was some fuzz the last few weeks about a Google backed company getting a penalty and then being reinstated in the search results within a week. Apparently John Mueller of Google said that everyone could get back this quickly. All you have to do is do a “fantastic job of cleaning these things up” and send in a “great” reconsideration request. I’ve spoken to a few SEO’s who do cleanups for sites that got penalized the same way this company did. No one had ever seen it happen, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

Google is once again testing a “Slow to load” label in the search results. It’s hard to reproduce tests like that, probably in part because where I spend most of my time online, at work and at home, I have either 4G Internet or a 200 mbit fiber connection. Doesn’t really make sense for Google to show that label on those connections.

Another update from Gary Illyes making me kinda scared was this one. He said this:

Please be mindful with noindex directives and remember that most search engines will honour it, even if it’s in the BODY element.

Which brings back all sorts of bad thoughts in me, wanting to leave meta robots noindex elements in comments on posts. It’s a good reminder nonetheless. Another tweet from Gary pointed to new breadcrumbs documentation, unfortunately it doesn’t answer some of the questions I had from the old documentation so I’ve send another email to Google.

Bing stops being nice

I’ve always had a soft spot for Bing, in part because they employ Duane Forrester, who is a great guy doing Webmaster outreach there. I have to admit they’ve made me lose some of those warm feelings this week when they announced they were no longer going to pass on search queries (part of them also moving to HTTPS completely). In their words:

to further protect our users’ privacy, we will not include the used query terms.

I think that’s nonsense, because just like Google, they will give them to advertisers. I wrote a scathing piece about that on SEObook when Google announced that in 2011. This is no different. Of course Bing doesn’t really send most sites that much traffic anyway, so most of you won’t (and/or shouldn’t) care.

That’s it for this week!

We still have an action on our site reviews, for a little while longer you can get $100 off. See you next week!

joost signature

This post first appeared as Weekly SEO Recap: Google & HTTPS, Bing no longer nice on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

Why I Switched to Copyblogger’s Synthesis Managed WordPress Hosting

Joost de Valk

Last thursday, I migrated Yoast.com to Synthesis, the managed WordPress hosting platform operated by Copyblogger Media.

Previously this site had been hosted on a VPS.net Cloud Server, which was rock solid as this site grew to almost a million pageviews per month. VPS.net is fast, affordable, provides good support, and I continue to recommend them.

But there are features of Synthesis that I realized I could no longer live without.

Optimized WordPress Performance

First, I don’t want to do my own Linux optimization anymore. Now I won’t have to.

The Synthesis team developed its Linux server stack specifically to handle high traffic loads on WordPress websites. They have spent the last several years tweaking and perfecting this setup to provide the outstanding performance, reliability, and security that Synthesis does today.

Simply put, the Synthesis team knows WordPress and they know server performance. I wanted to align with a team that understands WordPress performance better than I do. Now I have.

Theme Support

The second reason for the switch is that Synthesis, as part of Copyblogger, can simultaneously support my hosting and my theme.

Yoast.com runs on the Genesis Framework, developed by Copyblogger’s StudioPress design team. Yes, I could host Yoast.com anywhere and still have access to StudioPress support, but no other hosting platform is specifically tuned for Genesis. This further optimizes performance and security, and it makes updates a breeze.

Plus, the Synthesis support staff is proactive about troubleshooting and quickly fixing issues specific to Genesis. A support question that might have taken two or three tickets to answer previously now will take just one because of the Synthesis/Genesis integration.

Cutting Edge Value

Copyblogger Media hosts its own business websites on regular plans from Synthesis. Beyond performance, Synthesis was designed to support the operational needs of the site owner versus that of the hosting company, and thus provides a few features that are unique among hosting providers.

Operations

First, Synthesis provides their customers with an uptime checker called Site Sensor.

Beyond normal uptime checks, it can actually perform WordPress-specific checks which ensure RSS feeds and sitemaps are current. A website with broken SEO and content distribution mechanics might as well be down. The sitemap checker even supports the indexed sitemaps produced by our own WordPress SEO plugin, I worked with the Synthesis team to add that functionality.

Second, Synthesis has backups down to a science.

Synthesis already backs up my server on a nightly basis and ships it across the U.S. to a second data center. They also make local WordPress-specific backups that make it easy for their support staff to replace plugins, WP options settings, and more at a moment’s notice. Beyond this, they provide a database snapshot tool that I can use to back up my database before plugin and WP upgrades.

Additionally, they are soon releasing a feature called Personal Backups for S3 that will allow me to send a backup to my own S3 bucket at Amazon. Unlike normal backup plugins, this service is actually driven by robust server-side processes and is not dependent on PHP.

Site Speed

Finally, I switched to Synthesis because I trust their technical aptitude and respect their forward-thinking mindset.

For example, some of you may have heard about SPDY, Google’s initiative to speed up the web by improving HTTP and TCP. I certainly have, and it is a feature I wanted implemented on our HTTPS forums and checkout pages.

With this move to Synthesis, I’ll have it.

SPDY requires server-side and browser support. (For a list of compatible web browsers, click here.) Synthesis is one of the first WordPress-only hosts to offer SPDY compatibility for qualified sites, having already tested it on a few of their own most valuable properties.

This is just the latest example of Synthesis consistently evolving to provide more value for its customers’ hosting dollar.

A True Partner

In Synthesis, I don’t see a hosting provider. I see a hosting partner. This is what I needed as Yoast.com continues to grow and evolve.

I’ll now have more time to spend doing what I love — writing plugins, reviewing websites, even writing Genesis child themes — while the Synthesis team will make sure that the site is up and ready to take advantage of the next development in WordPress hosting.

Why I Switched to Copyblogger’s Synthesis Managed WordPress Hosting is a post by on Yoast - The Art & Science of Website Optimization. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!