hey everyone Tyler Horvath here and in this video I'm gonna show you exactly
how to increase your WordPress website speed with a content delivery network
and caching so what exactly is a content delivery network a content delivery
network or CDN is a system of distributed servers that deliver pages
and other web content to a user based on the geographical location of the user
the origin of the web page and the content delivery server in other words
other servers are hosting your media like images JavaScript and CSS to
decrease the load on your own server increasing your website speed I know it
sounds a little complicated but it's super simple to setup so let's get
started so the first thing that we're going to do is sign up to stack path so
stack path is a content delivery network that will host your files and allow you
to set up a CDN really easy on your WordPress website so the first thing to
do is sign up for stack path I'll put a link below that so you can easily get to
it and you're going to create an account now to use the CDN it is about ten
dollars a month so it's pretty affordable and you'll see some really
great speeds with it so let's sign up to stack path now we already have an
account so I'm just gonna log in here and here is our stack path account now
the first thing that you're gonna do when you create an account is you're
going to be directed to create a site so the site is basically your website so
that it knows how to create the domains to host on your site so the first thing
that we're gonna do is click create a site and we are going to be doing this
for our WordPress SEO net site so you're gonna type in your URL exactly just the
domain name and then you're going to choose CDN because we want to add the
CDN now I wouldn't worry about any of these upgrades this is gonna provide you
a pretty good increase in speed so for now just click CDN and then click next
and it's going to make you confirm the hostname or IP address you shouldn't
need to change anything here it should automatically pull that for you so just
click continue again okay and now it has been successfully created and you should
see your Edge address so your edge address is basically your new domain
all of your files are gonna be hosted so you know you will see this in your
site's code once we set it up on our site and it will pull all of those files
from your site to this URL and host them on this URL so we shouldn't need to copy
this or anything so let's just click continue
and now what we're going to need to do is we're gonna create some API
credentials so that we can integrate stack path into a wordpress site so it
automatically sets up all the CDN for us and we basically don't have to do
anything except add the API codes so you're gonna click the top right corner
here and you're gonna go to API management and this is where you can
generate your API credentials so click generate credentials and then you're
gonna add a name so let's just call this WordPress SEO site and then click Save
and now it's gonna spit out a client ID and an API client secret now I blur
these out so that for obvious reasons so that you know people don't use my API
code but you're gonna basically copy these codes and now we're going to go
into WordPress and set things up in there and then enter in these details so
go to your WordPress back-end and you're gonna go to the plug-in area and we're
going to add a new plug-in called w3 total cache now this plug-in is a really
great speed plug-in that will allow you to really increase the speed of your
site so find w3 total cache by Fredrik towns and then click install now and
then before we activate it we want to first get a baseline test of our site
speed so there's plenty of tools that you can use to check your site speed
I'll add a few down below that so that you can easily get to them but I always
just use Pingdom tools it's pretty simple test and it can give you you know
a decent readout of what your site speed is so the first thing we're going to do
is go to tools Kingdom com add in our URL and then you want to test from a
location that's closest to you so let's say Washington DC and then click start
test now this will run a few tests on your site and check the speed it will
pull all the resources and see how long that takes to load so this will give us
a base of a starting point to know where our site
started as far as site speed so then we can do this same test at the end and
hopefully it will be faster than it was on this first test so let's let this run
and see what we get okay so it's done and it took about three point two seven
seconds to load the home page at WordPress SEO net so you know that's
pretty good already but as you can see below there's a number of improvements
that we can make and the w3 total cache plug-in will help a lot of these so
let's go back to our site and let's click activate and now by default this
will install some caching so what caching is is it's basically generating
a really simple HTML version of each page when someone visits that page now
when someone else visit that page instead of pulling from the database
again and pulling all those resources again it's just gonna show that simple
HTML page that was cached before so this really decreases the load on your server
and on your pages and loading and will really increase your speed so now that
you have w3 total cache installed you should see this performance tab here on
the left so let's go that go here and go to general settings so you can see here
that page cache is already turned on we are also already have minified turned on
so you'll want to check your site after you do this because sometimes depending
on your server it can mess up your CSS because it's basically crunching it all
down into one file and making it really small and you know really fast so it's
possible that it can mess some things up so make sure you click Save all when you
do when you enable minify and then go to your site and check and make sure that
everything looks right and you know everything's still on the right place
etc so you can see here there's some issues here with this so it's reloaded a
few times and see if that fixes it it's also possible that your CDN is still
grabbing all of those files and you know it takes a while to pull in all those
files so let's go here and set up our CDN so let's scroll all the way down
here to CDN and we're going to choose stack path as you can see it's already
chosen in here and then click enable and then you're gonna click Save Settings so
now there's one more thing that we need to do and that is add our API
credentials that we created before so click on CDN on the left part here
and go to more of the detailed page and then we're going to add in our
authorization to stack path so what you're gonna do is you're gonna click
authorize or reauthorize if you've already created it and then you're gonna
add in those API credentials that we pulled back here in our stack path
account so simply copy those here and then click Next and then you're going to
choose your site to use that we've already created in stag path and they're
going to click apply and that's it so now's the CDN is all set up and we can
test to make sure it works in a few different ways the first way is simply
by clicking this test deck path button and it says test path so it should be
good but make sure you click Save all settings and purge cache and then we're
going to go check the site and make sure that all of our images are there and
everything looks right and it's working ok so let's go back to our site here and
click control f5 to clear any caches that are in the browser ok and now we
can see our site is looking good looks normal like it is and then if you want
to check again just to make sure that your CDN is
working you can either do f12 in chrome to see the source or you can click right
click and view page source but we're going to look at an image here and make
sure that it is and yep so it is pointing to our new stack path cbn.com
you can see that right here in the image instead of WordPress SEO net it's our
new address so the CDN is on and working and we are all good there and then we
have the caching installed as well so just to go over that again we have our
page cache enabled now this page cache method you don't need to worry too much
about that disk enhance is good enough if your
server uses opcode or anything like that you can definitely choose those for more
speed and then the opcode cache if you have that it will are already you know
be set I wouldn't use database cache or object caching unless you have a really
large site and then you have your browser cache you know those are the
only caches that you need to install and set up on your site and that should
give you enough speed to get a really fast website so let's now go back to our
speed test and let's make another test here and then click start test and let's
see what difference we get then we got before so before we got about 3.2
seconds low time and now we have caching installed we have a CDN installed so
let's see how fast our website is now okay so it ran and you can see here that
we got a load time of 1.5 2 seconds so it is 50% faster than it was before with
just a few check boxes and $10 extra a month let's stack that so I hope this
video helped you increase the speed of your WordPress website if you have any
questions please comment below also be sure to follow my channel and click
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business online so thanks and I'll see you next time