It was love at first site (no, that’s not a typo!). You checked out WordPress and saw how easy it would be to use this amazing CMS solution to create your website. It’s simple. It’s powerful. It’s so popular that it’s used to run over 60 million websites worldwide.
The beauty of WordPress is that you don’t really have to know all that much about creating websites to get some pretty amazing results. The WordPress plugin architecture allows you to extend its abilities far beyond most templates – and with over 26,000 plugins from which to choose, you can pretty much find one to help your WordPress powered site do just about anything. Including making it run faster.
MaxCDN Plugin for Max Performance
Some of the biggest and most popular websites in existence today are running on WordPress. These sites are so big that unless they were optimized and benefiting from the services of a content delivery network (CDN), they’d be slow as turtles and frustrating to use.
Who uses WordPress? You might be surprised. Here’s an easy way to tell if a website is running on WordPress: Use your browser’s “View Source” option to look at the site’s code, and then search the HTML for a “wp-content” folder. WordPress stores all of its files in the wp-content directory.
If taking your WordPress powered website to the next level of performance for a growing audience is on your list of things to do, make it an easy five-minute project using MaxCDN.
This content delivery network is making a name for itself by offering a pleasing combination of highly affordable pricing plans and do-it-yourself implementation.
Mouse-Click Simplicity
Because you’re already used to the ease and simplicity of WordPress plugins, you’re going to appreciate how stress-free it really is for a successful installation. Want a walk-through first? There’s a video of the plugin installation process here.
Basically, if you can download a plugin and activate it in your WordPress dashboard, you can install and power up the MaxCDN plugin – and you can do that in about five minutes. (Full disclosure: you will need to have a MaxCDN account set up and have created a Pull Zone.)
Success!
There are a few simple settings you’ll apply to the plugin, which the tutorial will walk you through. After that, you’ll be using the MaxCDN network to speed up the delivery of your website. MaxCDN will be offloading your website’s images, CSS and JavaScript to data centers around the world. So the big files come from a server that’s closest to each of your customers.
Why is that important?
The slowest thing a website can do is make the requests for files from servers across the Internet. By cutting down those requests, you remove the reasons your website could be frustrating customers with slow loads.
How can you be sure the WordPress CDN plugin is working?
Your URLs should be rewritten by the MaxCDN URLs – and you can confirm that this process is successfully occurring by viewing the source code of your website in your browser.
And, speaking of your browser, that’s what you use for your WordPress powered website, right? You’ll be right at home with MaxCDN because pretty much everything happens in a browser window, as well. You can monitor performance and make changes on the fly – without the need to install yet another software program on your computer.
Before You Supercharge
Give yourself a benchmark prior to implementing the services of MaxCDN so you can measure your net gain. If you don’t have actual stats on the loading time of your website’s pages – and would like to find out – head over to Webpagetest and enter your URL.
What’s slowing it down? There are three main things – and you can envision them as the “heavy parts” of your website.
- Images
- CSS
- JavaScript
Each of these three elements can easily get out of control if you don’t have a high degree of knowledge and comfort with website optimization. If that’s not something in your area of expertise, this trio can drastically increase the amount of time it takes the pages of your website to load. You may not even be doing complicated things with your site, such as e-commerce or video – it’s just the nature of how easy it has become to create rich and sophisticated web environments for viewers using WordPress.
In fact, today’s websites push out pages that are nearly twice as large in file size as they were just two years ago, according to Web Performance Today.
MaxCDN has a global distribution, with 500 peering partners that give you direct reach into over 90 countries. So if you’re a MaxCDN customer, your website is reaching viewers with just a single network hop. In some cases that means a page load time could decrease from hundreds of milliseconds to only tens.
A Few More Essential WordPress Solutions
After you’ve got the MaxCDN plugin up and running – and supercharging your website – you might want to consider these helpful WordPress solutions, as well:
- Because WordPress is based on PHP and MySQL, backups of your sites’ databases are crucial. BackUpWordPress is a free plugin that can be loaded in seconds – and configured in just a few more – to perform backups of your entire site.
- Need version control? BU Versions turns that into a snap. Written by Boston University, this plugin allows multiple people to work behind the scenes of your WordPress websites to create, edit and publish content that can all be reviewed and approved before going live.
- You’ll appreciate this plugin the next time you get a message that one of the many WordPress plugins you use on your multiple WordPress sites has been updated. No need to hit each one individually if you’ve got WP Remote.
- Stay ahead of malware with the Sucuri Security SiteCheck Malware Scanner plugin, which allows you to scan your WordPress site directly from the dashboard.
- Do you manage multiple WordPress blogs? You want ManageWP Worker making it easier for you. This plugin lets you access and facilitate multiple WordPress blogs from just a single dashboard.
Supercharge Your WordPress Site Today!
A website’s speed and performance is essential in creating the best experience for your visitors. If you value your visitors, you should provide them with a smooth, fast and optimal browsing experience. Go on and give MaxCDN a try and accelerate your site. If you have any queries, feel free to ask their around-the-clock friendly support team, whether via email, ticket or call.
