- So Nealey I have this new exciting blog Alex Eats,
but it takes forever for everything to load, to pull up
how do I fix that?
- That is such a common problem,
but luckily that's what we're gonna cover here
on The Journey stay tuned.
All right, so slow websites are just an epidemic online.
The slower website is, the quicker visitors
are to just bounce and never come back again.
So it's such a great topic that we're covering today
of how to optimize your site speed.
Now really to start off is figuring out what type of hosting
do you have.
So Alex, what type of hosting do you have?
- I use just basic shared hosting.
- Okay that's super common.
It's a pretty inexpensive option
for most small businesses.
But with shared hosting means you share their resources
with everybody on that server.
So less resources for you means less resources
for your website.
So we covered a video on the different types of hosting
you can check out right there.
All right, so next I really need to understand
why your site's running so slow
with a little site speed test.
And really figure out what's going on under the hood.
- Yeah, let's go diagnose that food coma.
- Let's go check it out.
All right Alex.
So I have your website up here.
Let's go ahead and do one of my favorite tests
using gtmetrix.com
What you do is you just copy the URL right here,
open up a new tab and go to gtmetrix.com pretty simple.
And then go ahead and add the URL in
and choose test your site.
This will take maybe a moment or two depending
on their queue and then how slow your website is.
And then it's gonna give you a test result
basically of all the things that are good and bad
with your site and in regards to speed.
One second you said it was slow, come on.
- [Alex] You only have people's attention for so long.
- All right so, if you're trying to get this even faster
or if your site isn't one second fast, Alex,
there are lots of things on this page that can help you out
in determining what might be an issue.
So if you see here, you have served skilled images,
leverage browser caching
and all these different things on here.
Now this may not mean a whole lot to you right now,
but if you expand it, you can go, what's this mean?
And it'll kinda give you a little bite sized summary
of what it is and then an option to read more.
There's lots of cool tabs on here as well.
So "why slow" it has more content, more suggestions for you
so you can figure out what you may want to update
or adjust in your site.
I really like looking at the waterfall tests
and this basically shows a waterfall of all the assets
loading on your site.
- [Alex] So what does that mean?
- [Nealey] So you don't have a lot of stuff going on.
So with, especially with WordPress and speeding it up,
there are literally hundreds of files being called
to basically prepare your site up for a visitor.
It's like making a burger.
It's not just one thing.
I get the bun and the mayo, the meat everything else
and serve it up.
Same thing with your site.
So every single basically script has to load
and it's showing you how long that script is taking to load.
So if you see one that's taking just way too long
and you know that cool, that that's an issue.
Deciphering this though, it can be an absolute pain.
Like I've been doing this for a while,
I don't even like doing this part of it.
So we're gonna go through some plugins and stuff
to help you out, but there's timings on this tab
and you can even see a video if you sign up
and create an account, it's free to use.
And then history.
So if you can kinda keep track of how long,
maybe day one and maybe like you have one second,
but you start adding all your plugins and content.
Maybe now it's like 17 seconds then
you actually have an issue not now with one second.
- [Alex] So you can see when things started going downhill.
- [Nealey] Right like what did I do?
So now when building your website,
the one of the first things you do,
like we talked about in one of our other videos
is you go to and choose a theme first,
Not all themes are created equal.
There are free themes, there are premium themes.
What you really want to do is try to find a theme
that's super lightweight, which means it doesn't have a lot
of the add-ons and flare
that some of the cool premium themes have
but you wanna make sure that they load fast.
Because at the end of the day, all that flare may be for nothing
if someone's not actually going to visit your site.
- So the less add-ons the quicker the loading time.
- Absolutely.
- Got it.
- Like you have the theme Hestia.
Hestia is pretty solid, super lightweight,
not a lot of add-ons to it.
So it makes it fast.
That one second load time like you had.
There's Astra, there's Genesis, there's all sorts
of like themes and frameworks that you can use.
But those are some of the ones that we just had here.
- So you mentioned before plugins they can solve
all my problems.
- Yes and no.
Too many plugins can be an issue.
So if you have like say 50 plugins,
which I've seen on some sites, that might be a problem.
So the very first one that I'm going to recommend for you
is a plugin called WP Smush
and it's gonna do exactly that.
It's going to smush all your images on your site
so they're not as big.
So to download it, you go to plugins and add new,
then type in WP Smush
you're gonna get some other results here
that'll kind of go by keywords.
But here is the Smush Image Compression and Optimization.
Go ahead and install now.
And then click activate.
And then it's there.
So let me take you through some of the settings
since you do have to activate some of them.
So click on Smush directly.
It's gonna go ahead and say, "Hey Alex, nice work
"installing Smush, hurray." - [Alex] Thank you
- [Nealey] Go ahead and begin set up.
I want it to automatically optimize new uploads.
I want a strip image data.
I wannna enable lazy loading.
A lazy loading is a cool new feature WP Smush added.
Essentially what that does is - you blog a lot
so you have a ton of posts.
So instead of loading all the images at once on your posts,
it'll only load the ones the visitor actually sees
all that really matters.
So that way when the rest are called or scroll to
then they'll load and then it has less load
on the actual server makes your site running super fast.
- [Alex] Got it.
- [Nealey] So next again and then finish setup wizard
and it's gonna go through basically checking your images
to see what else needs compressing.
And then it goes, cool Alex, you have four attachments
that needs smushing.
Let's smush.
- [Alex] Let's smush.
- [Nealey] Smush it up.
And then it'll just take a few seconds.
We only have four images, so it's not gonna take that long.
If you have a ton of images, you've been doing this a while,
it'll probably take a while.
The free version of WP Smush will do 50 at a time.
So you'd basically do your first 50.
Let that go, then smush again, then smush again.
And then we're done.
And then saved us 95.7 kilobytes.
That might not seem like a lot, but it does in the long run.
All right, so more plugins.
You said plugins fix all your problems?
- [Alex] Right.
- [Nealey] These ones are gonna hopefully fix your problems.
The next one's called Autoptimize.
It's like auto optimize smushed.
So just type it Autoptimize enter.
I didn't spell that right. - [Alex] Close enough
- [Nealey] Take two Nealey.
All right, then it's gonna pop up here.
Same principle, install now, might take a moment
and then you click activate.
Cool, almost always it's gonna take you back
to the plugin screen.
This one makes it easy.
You can just click settings right here to go to it.
Then it's gonna give you a lot of information,
so it's gonna not show you all the advanced settings,
which is fine.
It's gonna keep it nice and basic for you.
If you are a little bit more experienced,
you wanna check those out.
This little button at the top will do that for you.
But I just wanna optimize JavaScript code,
optimize CSS, optimize HTML.
And then save changes empty cache.
Now once this happens, basically all of these scripts
are gonna get smushed.
So there's not that extra space on there.
Making them less file size
makes them load a little bit quicker.
- [Alex] Okay
- [Nealey] Onto more plugins.
Let's go ahead and plugin, add new.
- [Alex] All the plugins.
- So have you ever heard of clearing your cache?
- Yes.
- Cool, so the same thing goes with your website.
Browsers, cache data, but so can a website
so you can set up a caching plugin on your site.
So instead of all those scripts being called at once
it'll condense it and basically give you a copy of your site
super quick to your visitors.
There are lots of caching plugins
and everyone has their preferred.
I'm just gonna kind of choose one here,
but let's go with, W3 Total Cache.
Why not?
It was second in line.
So again, as always, install now
and then activate when it wants to install
and then you click activate.
Cool, and then it's right here on the left hand side.
We've got performance.
Go ahead and just click that.
Now this shows a ton of options to go through.
We don't have the time today to go through all of those.
You can kinda check them out.
Every plugin, it usually has some type of documentation
or a website to go and learn more.
So you don't have to be super overwhelmed,
but I wanna set up page cache
and it looks like it's already done for me.
- [Alex] Perfect.
- [Nealey] Perfect so now when visitors come to your site,
it's not gonna take as long to load.
You already had a one second load time so you're fine,
but if your site's loading a little bit slow,
this definitely helps.
- Well, thanks for all the helpful information.
Hopefully my website is super fast now.
- I guarantee it is.
(laughs)
- Absolutely, well, let us know in the comments below.
How fast was your website when you did that speed test?
- Yeah and this is a great foundation for getting your site
a little bit faster.
There's always so much you can do,
and we'll probably cover it in later videos,
but if you got some value out of this video,
make sure you smash that like button.
Let us know.
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This is The Journey we'll see you next time.