Chances are, your website is actually costing you money because it’s loading too slow. And in this video I’ll show you how important a fast website is, and how to fix it. How to get your website up to speed and make it as fast as it needs to be. Today I want to show you what a “normal” website building speed is, what Google thinks is a speed that your site should achieve, and then what a fast loading website looks like. And we’ll also talk about numbers. What is the impact on your conversion rate? What is the impact on the revenue that you make from your website? All of this in this video, so stay tuned. Hi, I am Jan Koch. I run the Uncommon Solopreneur Newsletter, and I am a proud Cloudways Maverick. Let’s have a look at some statistics from Google right now, because I want to show 2. Google Statistics Analysis you what Google thinks should be a good loading website speed, and then obviously, what Google thinks is based on the behavior that Google tracks from analytics and search console and all their tools. And if we cannot meet their expectations, chances are you are leaving money on the table because you are not pleasing your visitors. So let’s help over onto the screen right now. So these are statistics from 2017, and you can expect that visitors demand way faster loading times now, but those are the most recent statistics from Google I found. And I wanted to show you the statistics from Google rather than from some third party data aggregator. If your loading time increases from one second to three seconds, chances are that 30% of your visitors will bounce. Or that the bounce rate increases by 32%. So the number of bounces you already have, which are people who leave the website within the first 10 seconds, they don’t do anything, that’s called bounce rate. And chances are, if your loading speed goes from one second to three seconds. That number increases by 32%. So that’s obviously a big impact because that is 32% fewer people who would buy from you, or who would even sign up for your newsletter, read your content, click on your phone number, whatever call to action you have on that page. It’s 32% fewer people who consider taking that call to action. Now you can read those for yourself, you probably already have, but one thing that I wanted to show you when we go down here are the best practices. The average speed, how quickly the mobile page displays content to your users should be below three seconds. So even on mobile devices, your website should show something and be interactive within three seconds. The time to first byte. This is the time where your web host starts sending the website data to the visitor, should be below 1.3 seconds. You should have, on average, fewer than 50 requests for an entire mobile page, which is pretty hard to get. The website size should be less than 500 kilobytes, which is also pretty hard to get, and I don’t think it’s as relevant anymore because we have Lazy Loading. And that’s about it. 3. Website Analysis That’s the main statistics I want to show you. Now I’ll put the link to this page in the video show notes. So let’s have a look at one of the websites I run that is not loading speed optimized. This is LearnVSM.com. It’s one of the communities I run, and this is just for community. This is no marketing, I’m not generating leads. People are already in the funnel and they are already customers if they see this website. So the largest contentful paint is 1.2 seconds, which is still in accord with what Google would say. It takes less than three seconds for the website to show something. Now, this is, mind you, a test simulating a desktop device, not a mobile device. The time to first byte is 91 milliseconds. This is hosted on Cloudways, by the way. It’s not fully loading speed optimized, but it benefits from the Cloudways architecture already. So the time to first bite is 91 milliseconds, which is super fast. And within 1.1 seconds website visitors can interact with this website. So this is for customers, 1.3 second fully loaded time, I think is okay. It’s not amazing, but it is okay. Now, for my marketing based website, this would not work at all. This is way too slow. For the marketing website, you can see this is JanKoch.co, my main website where I generate leads. The Largest Contentful Paint is a third of the time of the community based website. There is no blocking time, the layout shift is okay. It’s not amazing, but that is because this contact form that you’re seeing is loaded via JavaScript from Convert Kit, and therefore it is creating a bit of a layout shift. But this page only takes 325 milliseconds to interactive. So within the third of a second, people can use the website. The fully loaded time is way longer, it’s 3.1 seconds, but I don’t care about the fully loaded time because there’s simply more stuff going on on the website, we have cookie scripts that we don’t need on the other page, and the on load time is roughly twice as fast. So this is on average, I would say from the visitor’s experience, this is double the loading speed of my community based website. And in this video I’ll show you what I’ve done to create this experience. 4. What I’ve done to double the loading speed So we’ll hop into the Cloudways platform right now, I’ll show you the exact server settings that I use, and we’ll hop into the WordPress backend. I’ll show you the plugins that I use and how I configure the Breeze set up for the caching plugin as well. Okay, so this is the Cloudways Control Panel. I have two servers with Cloudways right now. Two 2GB servers both located in Frankfurt. The live server, which we are looking at is a Vultr High Frequency located in Frankfurt, 18 applications on there right now. 18 websites on the server, and five websites on the development server. Now, let’s go through these settings really quick, because I just want to show you a few settings here that are important that I’ve tweaked a little bit from Cloudways to make this website run as fast as it does. So these are the basic settings. I’ll just keep the screen up here for a second so that you could test them for yourself. I’ll do the same with the Advanced tab. I didn’t tweak anything here. So all the variable settings are the default settings from Cloudways, but I’ll still go through this so that you can copy this for yourself if you wanted to. And for the packages, you want to make sure that you are always using the most up to date PHP version. For WordPress, I like to use the MariaDB platform. Redis is installed, which is in server site cash. That’s super important. And on the optimization settings, this is something I really enjoy by Cloudways. They make it super easy to maintain your server, to keep it clean from temporary files and logfiles and things like that. So I have this automatic disc cleanup enabled, that runs with those settings right here, where we clean up the temporary files folder, we remove archived logfiles, and we just save some space on the disc for the server. Now, if I were to come into problems that the site can’t handle the traffic anymore, I could just vertically scale the server from 2GB to 4GB. That would increase the cost from $26 a month to $50, so it’s still super reasonable for the amount of service and power that I’m getting. But as of right now, when I go to the monitoring tab, I don’t need it because the CPU usage is 70% or 77%. It is a lot, but it’s not like redlining the server at all. And I can break down what applications take up most of the CPU usage, and it’s actually one of my Summit websites. It’s not even my main marketing site that we had a look at right now. So that’s the server settings. I won’t dive deeper into this. Leave a comment below this video if you want to have a full breakdown of the server settings I use in the day to day business, let me know below the video. More than happy to dive into this. Well, let’s have a look at the main website. Let’s have a look at the application settings. So we go into the application right now. And here you can see that there is a staging site enabled. I just wanted to show that because staging is very important for me. The site I use actually needs staging because one of the privacy plugins conflict with each other, so I’m always working on staging and then move staging to the live website. But that’s on the plugins, that’s not on Cloudways. Now, one thing I wanted to show you is that I do not have CloudFlare Enterprise set up yet. I could set this up, and we’ll test this in a separate video, but for now I don’t need this and I still get those fast loading speeds. Cloudways and CloudFlare teamed up to give CloudFlare Enterprise to the Cloudways customers at a super affordable price. I think it’s like $5 per domain if you have less than five domains, and then if you go over five domains, the price gets even cheaper. I highly, highly recommend this, but I’m not using it myself right now. Now we can look at the application settings if you want to. We have no WebP redirection. That would probably make the site even faster. The PHP FPM settings are default, I didn’t update anything here, it’s all commented out, and then for the Varnish settings I don’t have any exclusions right now. But that’s essentially just a sign how easy it is to set up a fast website on Cloudways. And now let’s have a look at the WordPress backend so you can see what plugins I’m using, what theme I’m using, and how I’ve configured the Breeze caching plugin that comes with Cloudways to get this fast loading speed. This is JanKoch.co in the backend. So let’s first have a look at the plugins and the theme. The theme is actually not relevant on this page, because I’m using the Oxygen page builder. I’ve picked this particularly because Oxygen focuses on speed. It’s not the best page builder I’ve ever used, it’s not the most pleasant page builder to use, but as you can see, it loads super fast and in the end it’s worth the trade off on my end. In my perspective, it’s a solid page builder. You can think about the team, what you want, but they provide a great page builder with Oxygen. Now for the plugins, I have 18 active plugins installed, and here you can see all of them. I’m not going into details about each of those plugins. Again, this is not a video to explain why this plugin over the other plugin, or why specifically I’m using these, but it is just to show you the entire background. And then when we go into the Breeze settings. This is something, please take these settings with a grain of salt. Everybody has their own philosophy when it comes to website caching. Some people love Breeze, some people hate Breeze. I’m in the camp of, focus on what works, and keep things efficient and lean. So I don’t need a third party plugin when I have a Breeze cache that integrates with the Cloudways server architecture. I just use this. So the basic options, everything’s enabled except for native browser Lazy Load. I don’t have the Cross-origin Safe Links enabled, and I’m caching for the admin because I want to see the cached version of the website when I try it. This will again, break the page builder in some cases. That’s why I’m using the staging version. In terms of the file optimization, I Minify HTML, I Minify CSS, I include and combine CSS. I don’t need exclusions right here. Everything’s working as expected, as it should. I Minify the JavaScript files too. I have found problems combining JavaScript files and including Inline JavaScript files, mostly because of the privacy plugin I use, iubenda, which doesn’t really like combining JavaScript files, so there’s no further configuration for the JavaScript. In terms of the preload, I have nothing enabled right here. For the advanced option, I don’t need anything. Everything’s working smoothly out of the box. I don’t need to exclude cache URLs for shopping carts, for example. I don’t need to cache specific Query Strings, it’s just a super straightforward website. I am controlling Heartbeat, which is a feature I appreciate from the Breeze plugin, which means that I limit the amount of server resources this website needs. So I’ve limited the frontend Heartbeat to every two minutes. In the post editor, I’m keeping it on default, and in the backend, I’ve limited Heartbeat to every two minutes as well. I regularly clean the database options, most importantly, for the post revisions and for the drafts, because I want to make sure that the database is as lean as possible. I don’t have a content delivery network set up. As I said, there’s no CloudFlare Enterprise or other CDN, but I do have the Varnish cache integrated. Of course, it just makes sense on Cloudways particularly. And here on Breeze you can import and export settings if you wanted to. Now, one other thing that comes with Cloudways that helps speed up the website is the Redis object cache. So let’s have a look at this plugin too. It’s not really anything that you need to configure here. You just need to make sure that the plugin says “connected.” I am not a Redis expert, I’ll be totally honest, but so far I’ve had no problems whatsoever. I could update to the latest version. And there are some scans that I could do, but I’ve never really used those. I just keep the Object Cache Pro as it works. I appreciate that Cloudways is giving that to their users for free. And you can see that it handles quite a lot. So here’s the median hit rate on this one is 99%. So that from all the website visitors that load resources from my website, from the server, 99% have been served through the cache. That’s obviously what makes this website load so fast. 5. Summary Yeah. This is it. It’s not magic, it’s not rocket science, but you’ve seen now what it takes to run a fast WordPress website on Cloudways, and if you want to get the most bang for your buck, if you want to make the most results with the traffic you already have, working on your loading speed is one of the best ways to get more results. Leave a like, leave a comment and if you have questions about loading speed specifically, maybe some certain plugins that you’re using or you’re not sure if your website has the best configuration, leave them below because I would love to know and I would love to help you out with this, and we are always looking for feedback. If you want your websites to load as quickly, get your free trial for Cloudways using the link below this video. You don’t need a credit card to sign up. Simply set up your server, move a website over using the Cloudways Migrator plugin, and you’ll see how much faster that website loads out of the box.