Now that site speed plays such an important role in SEO, I’ve had more and more customers ask me how to speed up their site. The sad news is that there aren’t too many easy ways. Most of the things you can do take significant time to make just a tenth of a second difference in loading time, and they take a long time to implement.
However, one easy thing to do is to add a CDN. I recommend Cloudflare. I use the free version. Cloudflare not only speeds up your site, but also makes it safer by defending it from attack. Cloudflare’s WAF, DDoS protection, and SSL defend website owners and their visitors from all types of online threats.
In a previous post, I talked about one of the ways Cloudflare speeds up your site. Here I’d like to give you some before/after results for a client I just moved to Cloudflare.
You’ll notice that within minutes of adding the site to Cloudflare, the load time went from 2.52 s to 1.75s. That’s about a 30% increase in speed!
To set up Cloudflare, you’ll need a Cloudflare account, which is free, and access to your DNS, which you will need to change to Cloudflare’s servers. It only takes a few minutes to set everything up, and as you can see, the results are huge!
One thing to note is that if you have an SSL certificate, it will take a little while for Cloudflare to add you to their own SSL certificate, so if you add your site to Cloudflare and then notice the site is down, just turn Cloudflare off while they process the SSL. Check back in 24 hours and the site should be good to go. For me, It took less than an hour, so you can certainly check sooner.
Have you had success using a CDN? I’d love to hear about your experiences!
Leave a Reply