Initial Performance Test
In order to measure the speed of the website, I used Pingdom Tools. Here are the performance results of the website before any optimization was done:
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Using WordPress with MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache
I created a “MaxCDN Pull Zone” in order to distribute small files (Javascript, CSS documents, images, etc.) through their Content Delivery Network. In order to modify all the source links automatically, I used the W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress.
At this point, I enabled the CDN option of the W3 Total Cache plugin only and configured it to work with MaxCDN. All other caching features have been disabled.
Here are the performance results:
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Load time have gone from 9.7 to 4.7 seconds. A tremendous speed increase of 52%!
Enabling Caching Features
Next I activated the following caching features of W3 Total Cache:
Browser Caching;
Page Cache – Disk;
Database Cache – Disk;
Object Cache – Disk;
One downside of enabling the Page Cache feature is that it requires the permalink structure to use an ending slash. Changing your permalink structure can have negative impacts on your website. Evaluate this option carefully before doing anything that could mess up all your internal and external site links.
Here are the performance results after enabling caching features:
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By activating caching features, we gained 0.8 seconds. Not bad at all!
Enabling CloudFlare
The last step is to enable Cloudflare to distribute content. Basically, the way Cloudflare works is by hosting copies of your website data (web pages in this case) on multiple web servers located around the world.
In order to send visitors to the nearest web server, Cloudflare must handle nameserver duties for you domain name. By using different DNS entries depending on where the visitor is physically located, they are able to provide a different IP address for your website. This way, visitors are not accessing your web server: they are accessing a copy of your data located on the nearest Cloudflare server.
Here are the performance results after enabling Cloudflare:
![]()
By enabling Cloudflare, we gained an additional 2.3 seconds in speed. Overall, we increase the website’s speed by 73.1% which is very good.
This article first appeared on thewebhostinghero.com.
In order to measure the speed of the website, I used Pingdom Tools. Here are the performance results of the website before any optimization was done:
Using WordPress with MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache
I created a “MaxCDN Pull Zone” in order to distribute small files (Javascript, CSS documents, images, etc.) through their Content Delivery Network. In order to modify all the source links automatically, I used the W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress.
At this point, I enabled the CDN option of the W3 Total Cache plugin only and configured it to work with MaxCDN. All other caching features have been disabled.
Here are the performance results:
Load time have gone from 9.7 to 4.7 seconds. A tremendous speed increase of 52%!
Enabling Caching Features
Next I activated the following caching features of W3 Total Cache:
Browser Caching;
Page Cache – Disk;
Database Cache – Disk;
Object Cache – Disk;
One downside of enabling the Page Cache feature is that it requires the permalink structure to use an ending slash. Changing your permalink structure can have negative impacts on your website. Evaluate this option carefully before doing anything that could mess up all your internal and external site links.
Here are the performance results after enabling caching features:
By activating caching features, we gained 0.8 seconds. Not bad at all!
Enabling CloudFlare
The last step is to enable Cloudflare to distribute content. Basically, the way Cloudflare works is by hosting copies of your website data (web pages in this case) on multiple web servers located around the world.
In order to send visitors to the nearest web server, Cloudflare must handle nameserver duties for you domain name. By using different DNS entries depending on where the visitor is physically located, they are able to provide a different IP address for your website. This way, visitors are not accessing your web server: they are accessing a copy of your data located on the nearest Cloudflare server.
Here are the performance results after enabling Cloudflare:
By enabling Cloudflare, we gained an additional 2.3 seconds in speed. Overall, we increase the website’s speed by 73.1% which is very good.
This article first appeared on thewebhostinghero.com.