Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.
I was working on my Website the other day because I wanted to get a better Google page speed score, and one of my biggest problems was that Google told me to reduce my initial server response time.
This can be caused by many things, your DNS response time plugins you have installed, if you’re using any CMS system like WordPress. It can be your theme. It can be many things.
The issue for me was definitely my DNS, I was using Namecheap and Namecheaps DNS is not the fastest compared to what I did, but I will get back to that later. So what I did was that I changed to Cloudflare, many of you have probably heard about Cloudflare in many occasions. They are a big company that offers a lot of stuff for free, completely free, and they offer a lot of features for you. And I will dig a little into those features.
So what I did was I signed up for Cloudflare and Cloudflare has this amazing feature where you can basically import your whole DNS setup with one click, I had to manually add two or three records it couldn’t import. Otherwise it had imported everything perfectly and it was awesome. It was super easy to sign up and again, completely free. So basically what I did was I went from a DNS lookup time, load time, you can say from Namecheap, which is 34.44 milliseconds, all the way down to 12.89 milliseconds.
Cloudflare is definitely the fastest DNS out there on the market. WordPress.com is the closest one to they load at 15.31 milliseconds. Even Amazon, you should think Amazon was a fast loading DNS. They take 30.57 milliseconds to load. So after this change, Google didn’t request me to reduce my initial server response time anymore because it was already lowered so much. And I had looked through my plugins and basically the DNS was my issue.
I’m using WP Rocket as my cache plugin and if you are doing that so you can easily integrate with Cloudflare. Cloudflare is giving you a free CDN and WP Rocket will also take care of this. If you go to WP Rocket under addons there is a whole Cloudflare point where you basically need to fill out some information and then WP Rocket takes care of the rest. It’s super easy. So to get back to some of the features that Cloudflare gives you, they give you a ton of features and I’ll not mention all of them, but I’ll mention the most important ones.
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One of my favorite, except for the speed, of course, is that they keep your website live all the time. Let’s say that your server is crashed down. Cloudflare has a cached version of your website that they will be able to show. So basically, you will never, ever have any downtime on your website. It’s amazing. Furthermore, they give you a lot of different features you can work with in Analytics. You can see everything from where your visitors come from. Do you have anyone trying to hack your website that Cloudflare with their firewall have stopped? Do you have crawlers? What crawlers are entering your website? Is it Google? Is it Bing is it Yahoo? And how many times do they enter your website? So basically, Analytics is just to tell you what’s going on with the visitors on your website, then they have another one, which is my favorite called, speed. We all love speed. We want our website to be as fast as possible.
In speed you can get browser insights. Does your visitors experience any issues? Are there any URLS they are trying to access that does not exist? Then you need to get it fixed of course. I recently removed a language from my website and I forgot to add some redirects. So basically by using Cloudflare, I figured that out and I got some redirects set up immediately. Furthermore, you get a free CDN, as mentioned before, completely free and its the fastest CDN on the market, you get free SSL, you get free SSL everywhere on every host now, but you also get it on Cloudflare. Furthermore, you get caching, as I mentioned earlier, if your website go down, then Cloudflare has a caching of your website, they will be able to show that if your server cannot deliver the website and the last thing they have is security, they have a whole firewall system, but they also have security set up around your website to avoid hackers from wherever they are in the world to try to hack your website.
So I have now gone around some of the most important features, if you ask me, and I hope it’s been helpful for you, I would love for you to leave a review wherever you are listening to this podcast. And remember, consistency is key to success. Thank you for listening. And let’s catch up on the next one.
