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February 5, 2015 by Editor

Speeding up Custom Hosted WordPress Websites

WordPress_Speed
How Well Does your Website Stack Up?

If you are facing problem of slow loading WordPress website, or simply want to improve your users experience by minimizing loading times here are a few great suggestions courtesy of HostPapa.ca.

The first question we need to ask ourselves in coming up with solutions to any problem is what is the root of our issue. There are two amazing websites that will assess every aspect of your website from GZIP compression and image size to where we place our JavaScript (js) code. Both websites listed below provide free reports and grading on how well your website is preforming and provide actionable information on how to improve your site speed.

  • http://gtmetrix.com/
  • http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Additionally, there are numerous factors involved in determining why your website loads so slow and it is difficult to track the exact reasons contributing to the load. However, here is a list of things you need to do:

  1. Optimize the databases and enable Gzip compression.
  2. Plugin related issues:
    Plugins can have a huge impact on your site speed. Deactivating all plugins (yes, all) to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s). Remove any inactive or active plugins that you don’t need.
  3. Theme related issues:
    Switching to the Twenty Eleven theme or default theme to rule out any theme-specific problems is always recommended. This way you can identify if the problem is related to theme.
  4. Optimizing Images
    The culprit for a large site is often large images. The quick way is to use the Pingdom site speed test tool to find if you have images that need to be optimized. Enter your website at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ and run the test. After the test is run, click the drop down and choose ‘Sort by file size’.

Shared Hosting Environments

In a shared hosting environment there are a large number of factors that can affect your site’s performance. Below, I have listed two common reasons.

1. Occasionally when another user hogs all the available memory, cgi processes, or some other limited server resource you may face loading issues with your website. This is short lived and in many cases the simplest thing to do is be patient and wait for ten minutes then try again.

2. Your website, theme, and plugins require PHP memory in order to run properly. If your combined resources are consuming too much memory, this eventually will affect the website load time. In this case you need to work upon your website to reduce the resource consumption.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Lastly, sometimes latency alone will add to load time. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) such as CloudFlare can assist in improving the  latency or how quickly your web browser can connect to the website and view the page by acting as a proxy between your visitors and your webshosting servers. CDN’s like CloudFlare can also protect your website against malicious visitors, save bandwidth and reduce average page load times.

How Does a CDN Work?

Once a CDN such as CloudFlare is enabled for your website, it is designated as your authoritative name servers; this allows CloudFlare to clean and accelerate your traffic as all requests to your website are now routed through CloudFlare. With network routing technology and 23 data centers around the world, CloudFlare is able to:

  • Bring visitors the fastest connection possible – CloudFlare’s global Anycast network routes customers to the closest datacenter, resulting in your website loading twice as fast for your visitors no matter where they are located.
  • Screen your website’s traffic for malicious visitors – CloudFlare receives requests for your website and analyzes them to determine if a visitor is a threat based on the visitor’s IP, the resource being requested, the payload being posted and how frequently requests are being made among other things. Threats are blocked and good visitors are able to quickly access the pages they request.
  • Cache static content on your site – CloudFlare caches static content on your website like images, JavaScript and CSS, but not HTML. Cached content is refreshed frequently and delivered directly to visitors from a local CloudFlare data center at an extremely fast speed. Even when data is not cache-able, CloudFlare is able to respond to requests just as fast by using premium routes.
  • Optimize your web content – Rocket Loader technology is included in all CloudFlare plans (even the free one) and helps your website to more efficiently process requests for third party scripts like apps, widgets and tags. Rocket Loader ensures that no script blocks your page content from loading by bundling all script requests into a single request and loading them one at a time.

Optimize WordPress

GTmetrix is a great resource for evaluating the speed of our sites.  With many website running content management and blogging systems such are amazing platforms to develop out content, offering thousands of great plugins to create a full-featured website with a lot of neat functionality. These plugins however, can insert additional CSS and JavaScript files into your header which can hurt your site’s performance (and Page Speed and YSlow scores).

The professionals at GTmetrix have written some recommendations for WordPress users seeking optimization help.  Take a quick look at their website for detailed information, however in summary the following Pluggins will improve your website in a few clicks:

W3 Total Cache

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

This plugin adds page caching onto our WordPress install which helps us with Page Speed’s Leverage Browser Caching rule. It also has features to help with other recommendations, including enabling gzip compression, setting ETags, and even CDN settings (if you have one), to further tweak your performance.

WP Smush.it

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/

This plugin runs every image you upload through Yahoo’s Smush.it application. This will losslessly optimize every image and helps us with Page Speed’s Optimize images recommendation.

How well did my sites improve?

I admit, I have not enabled W3 Total Cache thus far on my site, however, with a few tweaks by enabling GZIP and updating my .htaccess with Future Expires Headers significant improvements in response times to my sites were observed.

See for yourself….

ithink_speed

Filed Under: Tutorials Tagged With: How-To, maintenance, WordPress

February 2, 2015 by Editor

JohnZada.Com | Writer, Photographer and Journalist

John Zada is independent writer, photographer and journalist based in Toronto, Canada with stories crossing travel, culture, and remote locales. We have assisted John in the development of three portfolio WordPress sites through our WordPress Installation Services and technical support.  John’s Sites can be found at:

  • JohnZada.com – Reconfiguration of Windows (IIS) html website with the installation and configuration of WordPress engine and template. (20 12)
  • theplanisphere.com – An online publication dealing with the subject of exploration – in both the literal and figurative sense.  WordPress installation on existing Apache Server. (2014)
  • JohnZada.com/blog – To enable a second template on the primary host, a second WordPress installation was choses over Multi-site configuration.  Included custom coding of Web.config file.  (2015)

Congratulations to John on the development of three amazing sites.

JZ_1JZ_2

Filed Under: News and Events, Our Clients Tagged With: maintenance, WordPress, WordPress Installation

January 1, 2015 by Editor

Halls and Hawk Lakes Release new Website

Congratulations to the Halls and Hawk Lakes Property Owners Association (www.hallshawklakes.ca) on their new WordPress based website. iThink! has been working with the cottagers association to migrate their existing HTML based website to a WordPress Content Management System (CMS) to simplify their updates and posting of new web content.  The project consisted of a redesign of their current website, and population of the CMS.  Some of the unique characteristics of the new website include:

  • Email updates to subscribed users
  • Rotating content blocks for banner advertisements and FAQ
  • Customized Polls module
  • Static and catagory / article content
  • Daily weather
  • Photo Gallery
  • Google Analytics for visitor tracking

Since 2006, iThink has provide technical support and assistance to the Cottager’s association to maintain and enhance their HTML, WordPress and StudioPress Websites.  Congratulations to HHLPOA on their continued success on providing on the most advanced and informative association web sites in Cottage Country.

Filed Under: News and Events, Our Clients, Portfolio Tagged With: design, maintenance, WordPress Installation

June 10, 2014 by Editor

Whispering Pines Bed and Breakfast

Whispering Inn Bed and Breakfast (Website Maintenance)
Whispering Inn Bed and Breakfast (Website Maintenance)

Congratulations to the Whispering Pines Bed and Breakfast (www.whisperinginn.com) on their new WordPress based website. iThink! has been working with the Whispering Inn’s graphic artist to migrate their existing HTML based website (which we have maintained since 2008 to a WordPress Content Management System (CMS) to simplify their updates and posting of new web content.  The project consisted of a redesign of their current website, and population of the CMS.  Some of the unique characteristics of the new website include:

  • Migration of static HTML content to WordPress
  • Finalize design flaws and conversion of broken links
  • Integration with Google Maps and FaceBook
  • A fresh look and feel
  • Photo Gallery
  • Google Analytics for visitor tracking

Filed Under: News and Events, Our Clients, Portfolio Tagged With: design, maintenance, WordPress Installation

September 28, 2013 by Editor

What to do When Your Computer Gets a Computer Virus

First of all, go get a drink of water and calm down. If you’re too excited you won’t know what to do when your computer gets a computer virus. Or if you’d rather go get yourself some chocolate do that. I know that always calms me down.

Steps to take if your computer has a virus

Then if you’re connected to a wireless router, disconnect your computer. This will keep your other computers from getting infected. This is like when one of your children gets sick and you confine them to their room.

Back-up your data. This is important enough to say it again. Back up your data. Maybe I should tell you again. Back up your data!

You will have to connect again; however, the best way to do that is to use a wired connection. There are many free virus scans online; you could download one if you need to. (Of course, being the responsible computer owner you are, you’ve not let your computer virus software go out of date, did you? No. I thought not.)

Next, run your virus scan! If you’ve kept your software updated (and you did, right?) then your virus scan should be able to pick it up. If you’ve not kept it up to date, then try to download a more current version of your anti-virus software. You may have to wait a bit for it to finish, but if you catch it early that will be all the better. Delete those bad boys! Get them off of there!

The next thing to do is to check your files. Some may not be able to be recovered. So make sure your computer is running the way it should. It can be difficult to know whether or not your computer has a virus, much less if you’ve gotten rid of the virus. My OCD brain makes me do a second scan. If you need to too, that’s okay.

Then, if there is still a problem, you may need to contact technical support. Most computer companies offer support of some sort when you buy your computer. It will become ineffective after a certain amount of time; however use it if you can. Another option is just to take it in and pay to have someone look at it.

Preventative care

Now if you’ve been through the whole virus thing you know it’s important to keep on top of things. There is a reason for the adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Keep your virus software updated! Run scans often, at least weekly. Don’t download things you don’t recognize. Don’t open emails from those you don’t know. Be careful when you are online so that you don’t have this problem again. Computer viruses can be a headache. They’re not always preventable, but you can try your best not to let them happen to you! Make sure you get a computer from Dell because they have great technical support in case you do get a virus.

Filed Under: News and Events, Reviews Tagged With: How-To, maintenance, virus

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News and Events

  • Speeding up Custom Hosted WordPress Websites
  • JohnZada.Com | Writer, Photographer and Journalist
  • Halls and Hawk Lakes Release new Website
  • SportLaw.ca | Custom WordPress Coding
  • The Not-So-Secret Art of Creating a Secure Password You Can Remember

Websites to Visit

  • 3d Game Man
  • Making You Think
  • PaperStore,net
  • Website Hosting For Canadians
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