According to Wikipedia…

“Cloudflare, Inc. is an American web infrastructure and website security company that provides content delivery network services, DDoS mitigation, Internet security, and distributed domain name server services.[2] Cloudflare’s services sit between a website’s visitor and the Cloudflare user’s hosting provider, acting as a reverse proxy for websites.[3][4] Cloudflare’s headquarters are in San Francisco.”

For those who aren’t giant nerds like we are, Cloudflare is an easy-to-set-up tool that turbocharges your website, protects it from the bad guys, and tells you where your audience is coming from. So, let’s talk about what all this really means.

Speed

Faster DNS

Everyone likes a fast website, right? But did you know that there is a lot more to loading times than just a fast web host?

One common issue that causes sites to load slowly is having poor DNS lookup times. Cloudflare helps trim this time down by stepping in as your DNS manager. If you are migrating from a poor DNS manager, you could see your site load speeds reduced by as much as 2,000 milliseconds! For more information see Cloudflare DNS.

Distributed CDN

Ever heard of cache? A cache isn’t money misspelled, but when it’s properly configured, it can make you some.

I’ve covered caching in greater detail in Diagnosing a Slow WordPress Site, but the short answer is it helps your website load faster for all your users. A major factor of website load speeds is distance. In other words, how far away is your server from your audience?

The farther the user is from your host server, the longer it takes for your site to load for your users. Unlike caching solutions that are hosted on just your host server, Cloudflare provides you multiple cache servers distributed across the globe free!* In practice, if you have a global audience, they are served a copy of your website from a server that is closer to them. That means faster load times.

Bonus fact: Since Cloudflare can save a cached copy of your website, in the event your web server goes down, Cloudflare is able to continue to serve your users from its saved copy until your web services are restored. For more information see Cloudflare CDN.

Analytics

Another major benefit that Cloudflare provides is in-depth analytics of all your site’s traffic out of the box. Knowing where your audience is coming from is helpful for your marketing strategy. Perhaps you didn’t know you were popular in Germany. These types of insights aid you in making more informed business decisions, such as opening up a version of your site in German or load balancing your website to be closer to your real customers.

If you are a fan of Google Analytics, you can still use it in conjunction with Cloudflare. For more information see Cloudflare Analytics.

Security

While speed and analytics certainly are important, as a backend engineer, the biggest reason I love Cloudflare is for the security resources it provides. Better than a mall cop, Cloudflare provides free denial-of-service (DDOS) protection to all of its users.

A DDOS attack is when a bad actor wishes to make a website (or any network resource) unavailable to other users. One way this can be accomplished is when a pool of thousands of infected computers are instructed to load a particular website in the hopes of overwhelming that server’s capacity, and thus bring down the website.

The reasons why someone nefarious would do this are plenty; sufficed to say, it’s not a good thing to happen when your its next target. Being a leading provider of DDOS protection Cloudflare has a database of most bad actors and can block their requests from ever reaching your website, thus keeping it online. For more information see Cloudflare DDOS.

Conclusion

If you like your website to go faster, become more secure, and ultimately know where your customers are coming from I hope you give Cloudflare a consideration.

To address the asterisk after free earlier, all the services I mentioned in this article are provided free for all the sites you own and should be all smallest to mid-sized websites should need. Who doesn’t like free stuff? If, however, you are a larger enterprise client, Cloudflare provides an extended range of paid services to help you even more.

So, whether you’re leveling up your current website or launching a new web project, consider my advice. If you’re seeking a team of pros to help you with that, contact us!

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Pro tip: we recommend using a managed WordPress hosting company like WP Engine.

Less is more

There are many things you can do in order to speed up your mobile WordPress website. Other than making your images smaller and easier to load, we want to stick with the concept of loading less is more. That means you want to load the bare minimum of items in order to properly share your content on a mobile device. In WordPress, we have many tools that can help offset the number of resources loaded on a page: enqueue_script and enqueue_style are two functions inside of WordPress to help you load a file/asset conditionally. Plugins like Gravity Forms utilize these functions in many interesting ways.

In the Gravity Forms plugin, a user places a shortcode inside of a page or post to display a contact form. The plugin developers are loading resources inside of the shortcode to ensure the resources are only loading on the specific page or post where the shortcode is present. This method will help speed up any page not using a contact form.

Not all code is written equally. Some plugins/themes have assets loading on every page. You can use a plugin like WP Asset CleanUp to combat loading unwanted files. WP Asset CleanUp scans your page and detects all the assets that are loaded. All you have to do when editing a page or a blog post is just select the ones you DO NOT wish to load.

WordPress is mobile

Like enqueue_script and enqueue_style, wp_is_mobile is a conditional tag to check if the user is visiting a WordPress website using a mobile device. You can use this inside of your theme/plugin to conditinaolly load elements on your site. A good starter plugin is called WordPress Mobile only & Desktop Only Content. The plugin provides shortcodes called Mobile and Desktop only. Using these shortcodes on a page or post can maximize the user experience, as well as increase the page performance. Of course, there’s always the issue of turning off a needed resource.

Pro tip: Make sure you test all of your changes on a staging site first.

If your theme uses a framework such as Twitter Bootstrap, you can leverage the built-in responsive utility classes. These classes are simple to use and can be used inside of the WordPress editor, too. Usually, it is because the bootstrap theme loads the asset controlling the responsive utility classes globally. It’s a handy thing to remember when trying to fix your WordPress Website.

Accelerated Mobile Pages

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a concept where you focus on the important content of a page. It’s a great and convenient way to make your website load fast on mobile.

The idea is to remove all non-content related media altogether and provide the information. More along the lines of less-is-more strategy, only text content will be shown, while removing the header, footer, and sidebar. AMP is like reading in distraction-free mode. If you want to find out if a page is set up for using AMP, just add /amp/ to the end of a blog post or page URL. Try it now using this article.

Test before you buy

If you have access to a mobile device, you can usually test a product before you buy it. WordPress themes and plugins are no different. Before you select a theme for your WordPress website, view the theme demonstration. View it on your phone. Does it load fast? If it does, then you know it’s possible for you to replicate the performance on your hosting provider. If the demo takes longer than you would expect your own website to load, move on. You’ll save yourself time and money in the long run.

Take advantage of the available resources, like BuiltWith, to see what other WordPress websites are using to make their sites load fast. Advanced developers can view the page source to see the list of assets loaded on the page. I’ve used it a time or two when trying to figure out if my website can do the same thing a competitor is doing. I’ll view the page source and search for wp-content/plugins. I’ll see all the assets being loaded from the site and what plugin/theme is in use.

If you find that your website does not load fast on mobile, don’t hesitate to contact us for an audit and recommendations. We would love to help you find the right solution. Let’s get you up to speed, pronto!

The post How to Make Your Website Load Fast on Mobile appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Did you know that you, too, can join in this effort? If you’re a website owner, whether you have a modest blog or a robust media publishing website, here are some ways that you can help to improve not only your own site, but the internet overall. We even include some suggested reading—articles from our blog—to aid in your journey.

Set up HTTPS

While the whole point of HTTPS is to, of course, add a layer of security to the HTTP protocol of your website, beginning this month (July 2018), Google is now demanding it. Maintaining a secure website means you care about your website visitors. If you still haven’t set up your secure sockets layer (aka SSL), read “How to Set Up HTTPS on WordPress Multisite Without Headaches.”

Think Accessibility

Are you trying to exclude certain readers and/or internet users from accessing your website? If the answer is no, then you had better ensure that your website is accessible by all! First, read the article “How Thinking About Accessibility Can Lead to Success.” And, if you’re a developer who is interested in learning more about building accessible websites, we highly recommend these two pieces here: “Accessibility of Semantics: How Writing Semantic HTML Can Help Accessibility,” and “Accessibility in Chrome DevTools.”

Design Easy-to-Use Web Forms

Not only should the forms (be it a contact form or request for more information) on your website be easy to use, they should also be simple to understand and complete. A long, drawn out form can have a negative impact on the accessibility of your website, too. (See previous recommendation.) Use these “3 Tips for Proper Web Form Design” to help you create forms that your visitors will be happy to fill out.

Speed Up Your Website

Web users hate slow websites! As a matter of fact, so does Google. Do something good for your site, your visitors, and the internet overall: improve the speed of your website today. Read “Ways to Speed Up Your Website” to get started.

Give Back

If you want a safer neighborhood, you should volunteer for your local crime watch committee. If you want to improve your child’s school, join the PTA. It’s the same with the web. Give back.

WDS actively gives back to open-source development and the WordPress community through our Five for the Future contributions. You can give back, too. Read “Five Ways to Contribute to Five for the Future” for ideas on how to donate your time and talents.

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