Maybe you’ve heard about this service called Cloudflare and wondered what the heck it is. Or maybe you started to read about Cloudflare and thought, “this doesn’t sound like something my little website needs”. I am here to tell you that no matter how small your website is, it can greatly benefit from Cloudflare’s services. And best of all, Cloudflare is free!

Here is how CloudFlare describes itself on its website:

Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet. Our Anycast technology enables our benefits to scale with every server we add to our growing footprint of data centers.

What does all this mean? Let me translate for you. When you connect with Cloudflare, it speeds up your website by routing your traffic through its global network and delivering your web pages and content as fast as possible. It also stands in front of your site like a shield to protect it from malicious activity.

Free SSL (https) is another benefit that comes with Cloudflare. As long as your host supports self-signed SSL certificates, you can use Cloudflare to encrypt the traffic between your website and your visitors. This means not having to worry about renewing your SSL certificate every year or two. With Cloudflare, your SSL remains active indefinitely.

Configuring Cloudflare is not difficult – it just requires rerouting your website through their service by changing your nameservers. In the past few months, I have helped a number of clients switch over and they all have been very pleased with the results.

If you would like to switch over to Cloudflare and need assistance, please contact me here.

The post Why I use Cloudflare and you should too appeared first on Website Issues, WordPress errors, Maneo Web.

I was testing a website tonight, trying to figure out why it was loading so slowly even after we had optimized it for speed by using a cache, css/js optimization, and image compression. We were testing at more than three seconds when I was convinced that it should be loading at a second or less. This difference in seconds may not seem like much to you but remember that Google takes speed into account when ranking websites. Optimizing website speed is an absolute must when you are conducting SEO for your site.

After playing around with a few settings and looking at the actual files that were being loaded, I finally discovered the problem. A certain social sharing plugin which shall remain nameless (there are many of them in the WordPress plugin repository) was the culprit. The scripts that were being loaded with this plugin were significantly large. When I disabled the plugin, my site speed went from 3.40 seconds down to 880 ms! That is a significant increase in speed by any standard.

So what should you do if you find yourself using a social sharing plugin that is increasing page load times? Here are a couple of suggestions:

1. Disable the plugin – I’m not convinced that you actually need a social sharing plugin these days. I think that most people can figure out how to share a page without your help.
2. Create your own links – This may be a little too complicated for some, but you can create your own links. Check out a site like this one, to learn how!
3. Find a lightweight plugin – If you must use a plugin, do some testing with different ones first. Find one that doesn’t significantly impact your site load speed.

In case you are wondering what I use to test load times, here they are:

• Google PageSpeed
• Pingdom

Good luck! If you need help with improving your page speeds, feel free to contact me by clicking here.

The post Why You Might Want to Turn Social Sharing Plugins Off appeared first on Website Issues, WordPress errors, Maneo Web.