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Improving Your Site’s Speed & Reliability

How Do I Speed Up WordPress?

How Do I Speed Up WooCommerce?

There are a number of ways to speed up your WooCommerce store. Some easier ones include:

  • WordPress Caching. The quickest and easiest method to speed up your site is to enable caching where possible. This will essentially save a static copy of your WordPress pages, reducing the amount of load on your server.
  • Get Better Hosting. Often the cheapest and most effective way to speed up your WordPress site is to simply get better hosting. If your hosting is insufficient, no amount of improvements are going to fix your site. This will likely be the fastest way to speed up your site and the cheapest in the long run.
  • Reduce Unneeded Plugins. A lot of sites will have unneeded plugins that just slow the site down. Page builders are the worst offenders here. By reducing down your plugin bloat, you’ll site should run faster generally too, not just with WooCommerce.

Important Performance Metrics

Time To First Byte (TTFB)

Time to First Byte (TTFB) measures the time taken for a user’s browser to receive the first byte of data from a web server when requesting a web page. It is an important indicator of a website’s responsiveness and overall user experience.

TTFB encompasses the time it takes for a server to process the request, generate the response, and transmit the first byte of data to the user’s browser.

First Contentful Paint (FCP)

First Contentful Paint (FCP) measures the time it takes for the first piece of content, such as text or an image, to appear on the screen after a user navigates to a webpage. Optimizing resources, avoiding blocking rendering, and using better hosting techniques to improve performance can greatly speed up your FCP.

How Can I Improve My Site Speed on Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is often very limiting. You’re restricted on server resources and often you’re stuck with extra restrictions placed on you by the hosting provider.

In order to improve your website’s speed on shared hosting, you’ll want to work on what you can control. These include:

  • Minimizing your HTML, Javascript, CSS, and other files. This will help by reducing the amount of data each visitor has to download, speeding up your site.
  • Compressing Images. This will help similarly to minification by reducing the amount that has to be downloaded.
  • Using a CDN. Using a content distribution network can help reduce the amount of data that has to be provided by your server, as well as speeding up the delivery of your content by using servers closer to your visitors.
  • Using Caching. Caching is one of the biggest ways to improve the speed of your webpages. By saving a static version of your site, you can greatly speed up your site.
  • Optimizing Your Database. This is a bit more technical, but you can optimize your database to speed up your site by adding indexes where needed and by improving your database server’s settings.

Advanced Site Speed Improvement

All About High Availability Clusters

High availability clusters are designed to provide redundancy and failover capabilities, ensuring that your website stays online and accessible to users if one of your servers goes down. HA clusters use load balancing to distribute incoming requests evenly across all servers in the cluster and failover techniques to switch over to a secondary server in case of a failure of the primary server.

Hardware requirements for a HA cluster include multiple servers with similar specifications and redundant power and network connections.

Software requirements include an operating system, clustering software, and a load balancer.

Overall, high availability clusters are an effective solution for ensuring website uptime and accessibility, but their set-up and maintenance require careful planning and attention to detail to ensure they work effectively.

Finding hosting that offers high-availability clustering can greatly improve your website’s performance and reliability.

Load Balancing for Speed & Reliability

If you have a larger site, load balancing is one of the best ways to optimize the performance of your site cost-effectively. You can separate your traffic across multiple servers, reducing the load on any one individual server and often improving the speed of your website.

There are 3 main methods of load balancing: DNS load balancing, Hardware load balancing, and Software load balancing.

  • DNS is the easiest; you just add multiple A records. It’s not very efficient though.
  • Hardware is the most efficient, but it’s also the hardest to set up and the most expensive.
  • Software is the most flexible, but it requires more work than DNS load balancing and usually isn’t as efficient as hardware load balancing.

Optimizing Your MySQL Database

This is a bit more of an advanced technique, but you can often greatly improve your website’s speed by optimizing your MySQL database. There are a number of things you can do:

  • Optimize Your Configuration Files. There are a number of configurations that will allow you to specify the amount of memory you use, optimize the CPU availability, and many other settings. These can greatly improve your server without major upgrades.
  • Use Indexes. Wherever possible, use indexes to speed up your database queries. Also, if you have a lot of queries that use multiple columns in searches, use multi-column indexes. This is arguably the biggest improvement you can make. It requires some extra disk space, but the speed improvements can be massive.
  • Normalize Your Database. You can normalize your database and avoid data duplication wherever possible. This happens more in the design phase, but can be very helpful with speed and disk space improvements.
  • Use Partitions. Partitions break apart your tables into multiple sections to make searching a lot faster. This is a more advanced technique, but you can sometimes see a big improvement on some types of databases.
  • Optimizing Your Queries. This can take a lot of work, but you can see massive improvements when you optimize your queries. This will generally happen more in the design and coding phases, but it’s definitely worth the extra work in the long term. This is especially true for larger datasets.

For more MySQL database optimizations, please see this article.



If you're wondering why your site works great when you design it, but it times out when you run traffic, this is why.

Wondering why your WooCommerce site is loading so slowly? We go over some of the reasons why and some ways to speed up your store.

TLDR Caching plugins store frequently accessed data in a temporary storage area to reduce load time, optimization plugins reduce the • Read More »

The TL-DR Shared hosting can very be limiting. You can improve your site’s performance though by optimizing your site’s code, • Read More »

The TL-DR This article provides an overview of best practices for optimizing MySQL databases for high-performance hosting, including optimizing configuration • Read More »

Are you tired of slow loading times and poor performance on your WordPress website? Look no further! Our expert guide provides a step-by-step approach to unlocking the full potential of your website through optimizing images, caching, reducing HTTP requests, and optimizing databases. Say goodbye to frustrating wait times and hello to lightning fast loading times and an unparalleled user experience.

Learn how to keep your website online and accessible with our guide to high availability clusters. Discover the different types, set-up process, real-world examples and benefits/limitations.

Ensure your website can handle high traffic levels with ease by implementing website load balancing. Our comprehensive guide covers the benefits, methods and steps for a successful implementation. Say goodbye to downtime and slow performance and hello to a smooth user experience for all your website visitors.

Boost your website's performance and speed with our comprehensive guide on website caching. Learn about browser, server, and CDN caching, and how to implement them for optimal results.

Is your website slow to load? Learn how to improve your TTFB (Time To First Byte) and boost page speed, user experience, and SEO rankings.

Boost your website's performance & user experience! Discover proven techniques to optimize First Contentful Paint (FCP) and leave users impressed.

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