I’ve picked up six popular free online tools to check website speed and tested my website hosted on A2Hosting (the cheapest Lite plan). And I’ve made 600 tests to find out the most reliable (i.e. the best) tool. And after analyzing the test data I make recommendations on using the particular free online tools which will help you make more precise measurements of your website speed. By … [Read more...]
Cheaper And More Expensive Hosts Compared From All Over The World. HawkHost vs A2Hosting
March 26, 2018 By
Evaluating hosting speed is not a trivial task. And as you probably know, to answer the question "what it is to be fast for a hosting" I monitor 15 US-based hosts from US West and East Coast and publish monthly reports. It’s truly a great source of the objective information on hosting performance. However, in some cases these reports may be considered as limited because there are only two … [Read more...]
Performance issues on your website: CPU, RAM, IO limits explained for non-technicals
February 19, 2018 By
Sometimes your website on shared hosting may become very slow during seconds or pair of minutes. Or your visitors see errors when they visit your website. And you may not even notice that there's something wrong, because after a short time your website is fine again. Such website instability can affect your business quite a bit. So, I've written this article to help you find out what may be wrong … [Read more...]
Is Avada theme fast on A2Hosting? 8352 tests done to answer that.
November 16, 2017 By
On what shared hosting does Avada theme work well? Is Avada fast on A2Hosting? These are the questions that I have been asked multiple times. Until I tested it and monitored it myself during a quite lengthy period of time, I could just say that most shared hosts are not suitable for a heavy WordPress theme like Avada. And I could just say that a managed or self-managed VPS or more expensive WP … [Read more...]
The Best WordPress Caching Plugins Speed Test: W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache vs Sucuri Firewall (Cloud WAF)
October 18, 2017 By
I've run 32,224 tests during one month to find out which caching plugin makes your website faster. I tested W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache plugins. They are the two best well-known free caching plugins that WordPress users highly recommend using to make your website faster. And also I compared them to the caching solution that I currently use – Sucuri Cloud WAF (website application … [Read more...]
How to Configure W3 Total Cache. Easier Than You Think. Settings Explained
July 17, 2017 By
Intro Many users think that configuring W3 Total Cache plugin is hard because there are a lot of settings that they do not understand. In this tutorial I want to explain the settings and show you how to configure this plugin easily. W3 Total Cache is a powerful, flexible and free caching plugin for WordPress. But it allows not only optimizing your website caching, but also … [Read more...]
How To Optimize Images: The Strategy To Make Your Site Faster For Free (52 Tests)
May 18, 2017 By
Image optimization is one of the simplest and efficient things you can do to make your website faster. And I want to show how you can optimize images. And I'll demonstrate how useful image optimization is in numbers. Also, I'll share with you several practical and very useful tips how you can optimize your new and existing images for free. This is easy and cool :) Intro and … [Read more...]
Display Images Only When You Need Them (Faster Site With Lazy Load. 50 Tests)
April 17, 2017 By
I've written this article to show you a practical effectiveness of lazy load optimization using a free WordPress plugin. It allows to significantly cut the page loading time (make your website faster). I've run 50 manual tests to get reliable test data. I also focused on Render Start time and Visual Complete time in my research. These are important metrics for a neat user experience that you'll … [Read more...]
Can You Use Time To First Byte (TTFB) To Judge Hosting Speed (after 11.7 mln tests)?
January 16, 2017 By
I've seen many hosting reviews in which Time To First Byte (TTFB) or Server Response Time is directly associated with hosting speed. Sort of, the smaller Time To First Byte, the faster web hosting. This research is based on 125 hosting-months of continuous testing and monitoring the performance of different hosts. I will show you how really much TTFB has to do with hosting speed. There were 11 … [Read more...]
Slow Redirect Plugin Or How To Make Affiliate Links Faster (Tutorial)
November 21, 2016 By
In this tutorial I'll show you how to make your affiliate links work much faster. It's extremely useful if you use a redirect plugin or an affiliate link management plugin which started to work very slowly for you (this was exactly my case). Intro One day I found out that my affiliate links started working very slowly. Visitors clicked my affiliate links, and it took tens of … [Read more...]