Creating and optimizing a website is hard work, which requires years
of programing, experience and in-depth technical knowledge.
Except it's not.
Optimizing websites is easy if you know the right way to do it.
So what exactly is the right way?
Well, if you're a SiteGround user, you have access to a tool
called SG Optimizer.
This is a brilliant WordPress plugin developed by SiteGround
that will automate a lot of optimizations.
And it's completely free. Even though it now works with any web hosting
provider, due to different technical configurations and server settings
I would only recommend using it with SiteGround. As for other hosts.
Generally, there are better options available
But if you are a SiteGround customer, let's get started.
Log into your dashboard.
And next to your website name, click on site tools,
navigate to speed
caching, and then just activate the memcached option.
Trust me. This will come in handy later.
Moving on.
Navigate back to your WordPress admin panel
and the SG Optimizer plugin should already be there at the bottom
If it's not, you'll need to get it by going to plugins and selecting add new
just type in SG or SiteGround optimizer and hit search.
Now all you need to do is press install
and as the installation finishes simply activate it.
Okay so SiteGround has made it really easy and non-technical
to make your website faster by implementing all of the best practices.
Let's start by activating dynamic caching,
file base caching and memecached
as well as automatic purge. To continue your optimizations.
Scroll down the page to your SG optimizer and select environment.
The important ones here are the HTTPS enforce option
and the fix insecure content toggle.
Okay. Now this next part is a little bit tricky.
What we're going to be doing is minimizing and optimizing
the code that makes up your site automatically.
There are a lot of instances
where you have three lines of code that's basically do the same thing.
If it's smooshed into one line of code, your website
has less things to load, so it works faster.
This is great in theory, but pretty dangerous in practice
because sometimes things actually need three separate lines to work correctly,
and if they get smushed into one well stuff kind of breaks.
So here's how to do it safely.
Activate one setting.
Go back to your website. Press Control Shift and R to reload it with the cache
cleared and just browse around to see if the fonts are the same,
are the elements moving correctly.
And if so, great, you can leave the option activated and move to the next one.
However, if something breaks, just deactivate
that option, leave it deactivated and move down the list.
Okay, to finish our toggle switching marathon.
Head to the SG optimizer's media tab.
Here you'll find it two more features, image compression
and WEBP images by selecting edit on image compression.
You'll be able to choose the decompression level.
I recommend ticking the second box as well as this
will compress all of the existing images on your website.
And it will only take a few moments.
Most people use PNG or JPEG
format images when uploading them to their website.
However, these take up a lot of space.
Newer formats like WEBP
can automatically cut your image sizes by more than half.
Essentially saving you a lot of space and precious loading seconds.
Finally, let's go ahead and turn on lazy load media.
This will make so
that images are only loaded when the person scrolls to that segment.
Of your website.
No point in loading something people can't see, right?
The big question now is how much does all of this actually do for the speed of our site?
For that we'll head over to the good old GT Metrix.
The first test is the same site before we put the SG Optimizer plugin to work.
It ain't bad but of course it can be much better.
This is what we get with all of the available optimizations in Action.
Gotta say - pretty big difference. Actually, all of the loading times are cut almost in half,
and the tools literally just took a couple of minutes to put it all in place.
While it is possible to achieve similar results using other tools
and other providers,
it's generally a lot more time consuming and a tad bit more difficult.
That's why I like SiteGround and I recommend them to first time
website owners, they automate a lot of these good practices and allow
you to have a more professional website without having to hire anyone to help.
And you know what's better than having a super fast website?
Having two lightning fast sites on a single hosting plan.
That's right. Learn to get the most out of your plan by hosting several websites
on a single server.
You can follow my tutorial for that right here.
But for now, my name Jeff, and I'll see you in the next video.
Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, My name is Jeff.