Tag: increase website loading speed

3 Must Have (Free and Premium) Content Delivery Network Providers For Bloggers
Content Delivery Network helps to boost website loading speed. If you want to rank well on search engines, getting your website speed up to par level is important. Even Google advise that sites should be loading at the speed not more than 1.4 seconds.

Brands such as CloudFlare, Incapsula and MaxCDN are no longer uncommon names when it comes to branding themselves as the best CDN providers. Before we go any deeper, let’s take a quick dive on what CDN totally means to a website.

What is a CDN and how it helps increase website loading speed?

Content Delivery Network is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. Simply by using a CDN, webmasters are able to serve static content to their readers or visitors from various data centers which are closest to the readers.

And this means that websites will load blazing fast. Yes, I mean like sonic. Okay I am just aggregating but you get the point.

Sites loading over 3 seconds should seriously consider using Content Delivery Network to ensure that they are not losing visitors. Still not convinced?

The web should be fast – Google Inc.

1% increase in revenue for every 100ms of improvement – Amazon

One of the biggest misconception done by bloggers are paid Content Delivery Networks are equivalent with the free CDN services. The truth is, they are miles apart.

The most important part to remember is that free CDN providers usually offer limited cache resources compared to premium ones. Nonetheless for those bloggers who are on tight budget, starting off with free Content Delivery Network services could be the best choice among all.

In the market right now, there are only two Content Delivery Network providers which you should really consider when it comes to caching and performance which are:
- CloudFlare
- Incapsula
Recommended read: The fastest web hosting provider – Synthesis vs WP Engine

Best CDN for Overall Performance: CloudFlare

CloudFlare is one of the most popular CDN provider for many bloggers. It has also partnered up with hundreds of hosting providers to ensure that web hosting clients are able to sign up for CloudFlare and enable it with just a few clicks of the button.

It is one of the most recommended CDN by many hosting companies as it is easy to integrate and it could easily speed up a blog within minutes. As a matter of fact, CloudFlare guarantees that they will supercharge your site in just 5 minutes.

All you need to do is to set it up (even by default is fine) and that’s it. No special settings needed … ever!

For bloggers who are looking for faster website loading speed but at the same time on tight on budget, they can easily use CloudFlare Page Rules to ensure that CloudFlare is caching more static resources on its servers. If you have no idea what it is or how it works, you can refer to this article for more information, How to setup CloudFlare Page Rules.

While CloudFlare offers unlimited free accounts for everyone, you may still opt for premium plans which starts from $20 per month. Here are the current plans CloudFlare are offering:

While CloudFlare is a great CDN choice for many bloggers, it could also be a huge problem for some as CloudFlare has the tendency to block visitors of several IP’s and country specific. Even though the odds of this to happen is relatively low, it is definitely something to consider before deciding to use CloudFlare.

Best CDN for Security Protection: Incapsula

Incapsula uses a global content delivery network to provide website security, DDoS protection, load balancing and failover services to clients. For most bloggers, Incapsula is a great alternative for CloudFlare when bloggers are trying to install CloudFlare for their sites.

So, what is Incapsula offering compared to the rest of the CDN services?

When it comes to security, Incapsula could probably be the #1 on the chart. Among all the free CDN providers available, Incapsula is one of those who offer top notch security features and lots of addon features other CDN providers might not be offering … for free.

For blogs who are always hit by spam bots, Incapsula could be a better choice for CDN service as it comes with Bots Protection feature which is said to counter attack automated spammers.

Incapsula offers both free and premium CDN services which started from $19 per month and here are the plans it is offering:

Can’t decide which free CDN provider to use? This article could help, CloudFlare vs Incapsula.

Most Popular Premium CDN for performance and price: MaxCDN

When it comes to premium Content Delivery Network at a good price, nothing beats MaxCDN. It is trusted by many top sites such as Yoast, ZippyKid, The Next Web and WPBeginner.

So, what makes MaxCDN so popular?
- Global flat rate pricing
- Free HTTP & HTTPS requests
- Instant purge
- 24/7 customer support (including live chat)
- Supercharge and make sites blazing fast
- Easy integration with W3 Total Cache and thousands of hosting environment
I use MaxCDN because I am always a speed junkie. I want my site to load extremely fast and I always aim for the 1 sec mark. Without MaxCDN, I was loading around 1.8 seconds on average and with MaxCDN, I was rocking at below 1 sec (608 ms to be exact).

This is how fast my site loads after enabling several custom settings

MaxCDN offers very competitive rate which starts at $9 per month (for 2 websites) and an allocation of 100 GB per month. I am no big fan of monthly payment and if that is the case, take up the annual plan and get 2 months free.

Not only that, use coupon code Max20 and get another 20% discount off your total bill. Now tell me, how cool is that?

Here are the plans MaxCDN is offering:

For those who are interested to make your website even faster, I would highly recommend you to use W3 Total Cache Pro + CloudFlare Page Rules + MaxCDN. Of course, this is when you are serving lots of images and JavaScripts which could affect the loading speed severely.

Give MaxCDN a 30-days trial run for free and upon sign up, get 20% off instantly with coupon code Max20. Click here!

Is your website loading over 1.5 seconds or do you want a faster website?

We all know the importance of having a fast loading website. Analytic sites such as Moz and QuickSprout has always recommend a quicker loading site if you want to rank well on search engine. If you are not using any CDN service yet, I would recommend you to grab either one of the above immediately. Not only you will have a better chance to rank well, you are going to make your visitors happy too!

Are you using any of the Content Delivery Network providers above? Tell me what you think and share your CDN experience with me using the comment form below.
February 4, 2024
Want Blazing Fast Website Speed? Hello CloudFlare Page Rules
CloudFlare is the most popular Content Delivery Network (CDN) used by thousands of bloggers. CloudFlare makes it easy for you to integrate with nearly any CMS especially with WordPress and in most hosting environment resulted from CloudFlare partner’s program.

While CloudFlare is easy to setup and could supercharge your site in less than 5 minutes (as advertised), you could produce even faster website load speed by using CloudFlare Page Rules … which I will explain in a moment time.

BONUS: Best Web Hosting for Small Business

What is Content Delivery Network or CDN?

Content Delivery Network is a service which cache most of your static contents and store them on specific servers around the world. For your visitors, they will be noticed a much faster loading speed as these static files will be served to them from the closest location and for webmasters like you, you would be able to reduce your server loads.

The CDN servers are highly optimized to provide only one purpose; which is serving your visitors with statis contents and fast … regardless which location they are from.

For those who are wondering, static files are images (.jpg, .png, .gif), stylesheets (.css), scripts (.js) and many more.

Why do you need CloudFlare page rules?

CloudFlare page rules is for those speed junkies like me who wants to get more out of the free CloudFlare service. Basically, page rules allow you to specify which files you want CloudFlare to cache it on their servers. Of course, the more files they cache, the faster your website speed is and you would be able to save more server bandwidth.

Page Rules is a powerful new set of tools that allows you to control how CloudFlare works on your site on a page-by-page basis. CloudFlare.

CloudFlare page rules is so powerful that it can:
1. Cache your whole site
2. Allows you to setup different cache levels for specific pages
3. Setup custom cache expiration
While CloudFlare page rules can be godly, it can easily (literally) destroy your site with tons of 404 errors and slow updates. This wouldn’t really happen in this tutorial unless you are really pushing your luck.

Most of us are using CloudFlare free account and you are entitle for 3 page rules plans free of charge. Anything more and you would need to sign up for CloudFlare pro or business plans.

>> Not using CloudFlare yet? Sign up for a free account here! <<

How to setup CloudFlare Page Rules?

What do you know about CloudFlare page rules?

Configuring CloudFlare Page Rules is easy as long as you know which URL pattern to use. This means that very specific page rules settings are applied only to that specific URL’s only.

So, what happens if you want to set a custom patterns for several strings of URL without using up all your page rule allotments?

1. Understanding CloudFlare pattern matching URLs

This is where Pattern Matching comes into play. It is a feature that allows you to create powerful dynamic custom patterns that can match a series of URLs instead of just one. The symbol used is the asterisk (*) character.
example.com/* matches:
- example.com/blog
- example.com/directory
But does not match:
- blog.example.com
*.example.com matches:
- blog.example.com
- www.example.com
But does not match:
- example.com
2. Setting up CloudFlare Page Rules

The first part is adding the relevant URL pattern which you can use from the chart above. Personally, I would advise setting up two specific URL patterns which are:
- *example.com/*
- *example.com/wp-admin/*
In the first string of URL, this is where all the extreme caching takes place. The below are the settings for this specific page rule:
- Custom caching – Cache everything
- Edge cache expire TTL – Respect all existing headers
- Browser cache expire TTL – 4 hours
- Always online – Default
- Apps – Optional
- Smart errors – On
- Performance – On
- Rocket Loader – Default
- Security – On
Now, for the second string of URL, you would need to make a cache exception for your back-end (wp-admin area). Just follow the settings below:
- Custom caching – Bypass cache
- Browser cache expire TTL – 4 hours
- Always online – Default
- Apps – Optional
- Smart errors – On
- Performance – Off
- Security – On
These are some of the very basic and safe page rule settings that will speed up your blog loading speed and ensuring that you wouldn’t face any issue on your admin area. You may change any of these settings to fit your liking or requirements.

Note:
- Adjusting the duration of Edge cache expire TTL and Browser cache expire TTL are risky as you may face issues logging in or your visitors will not be able to see the latest post even though it is published
Additional information:

Edge cache expire TTL

Sometimes cache headers are set on the server-side or by a CMS solution like WordPress. If you choose to Cache Everything, CloudFlare will respect these headers unless you choose to overwrite them. By overwriting the headers, CloudFlare will cache more content at the CloudFlare edge network, meaning a decrease in load to your server. To overwrite any default headers, choose a time from the drop-down menu. This is the refetch time for when CloudFlare checks the origin server for a new resource. Common situations where you may choose to overwrite any existing headers:
- You are experiencing large surge in traffic
- You are under DDOS attack
- You are not sure what the headers on WordPress or your server are set to
- You are using WordPress and want to easily overwrite the default settings
Browser cache expire TTL

This setting is how CloudFlare communicates with the visitor’s browser. CloudFlare will respect the headers that you give us from your web server, and then we will communicate with the browser based on the time selected in this drop down menu. For example, your origin server headers may be set to cache for 1 year. You could configure CloudFlare to respect those headers (this is done by default, unless specifically changed), and then choose a different time limit here like 24 hours. What this means is that if you ever had to change the resource over the course of the year, you could know with full confidence that all your visitors would have the new asset within 24 hours, without any additional load to your origin server.

3. Clearing old caches on CloudFlare and WordPress

By now, you should have two page rules setup for your blog. The last part would always be clearing your cache on both CloudFlare and on your blog. This is to ensure that the site is running on the latest cache version and updates.

Once this is done, allow CloudFlare and your WordPress blog to build cache over time. If you are using W3 Total Cache, it could takes up to 48 hours while Super Cache could take around 6 hours or less.

Help! CloudFlare Page Rules are not working!

Here are two of the most common symptoms that the page rules are not working properly:
- Unable to login to wp-admin
- Newly published post is not visible even after clearing cache
Through my experience, the biggest culprit for this could be the Edge cache expire settings. If you have set a very strict and long duration such as 24 hours, this means that CloudFlare will only check for new contents once every 24 hours. CloudFlare recommends a duration of 4 hours as the duration is more than enough for a normal (and average) blog site.

At the same time, it is not recommended to have a shorter duration than what recommended as it could create a lot of resources strain on the hosting servers.

Help! I am not seeing much improvement after enabling CloudFlare page rules

This is extremely common if you have a lot of JavaScript and CSS files on your site. Another option is to use CloudFlare railgun which would cost you around $200 per month aka CloudFlare Business plan. If you are running a high traffic website, I would highly recommend this as railgun technology will make your website blazing fast.

The cheaper and more affordable alternative is using MaxCDN and it only cost you $67.50 per year (with MaxCDN coupon checkout25). For your information, you can integrate MaxCDN with CloudFlare to boost your website speed. MaxCDN is a great tool for bloggers when it comes to serving static contents while CloudFlare ensures that your site is packed with bulletproof security.

>> Try MaxCDN today and get 25% discount off your total bill! <<

Does your website takes more than 2 seconds to load?

If the answer is yes, you certainly got to try the free CDN solution which is CloudFlare. If you are having around 1,000 traffic and below, CloudFlare would be more than sufficient when it comes to make your website blazing fast. With so many hosting companies already partnering up with it, I see absolutely no reasons why you shouldn’t!

Tell me what you think using the comment form below and if you like the article, I would appreciate a social share!
February 4, 2024