Speed Optimization Archives

How to Speed Up Your WPML Website 2022

WPML currently has over one million active users, including us at Templ. According to WPML themselves, the key to their success has been offering a user-friendly tool, which does not require any coding skills. Other popular features of WPML are as follows:

The possibility to translate every part of your website
Compatibility with popular themes, plugins, and page builders
Rigorous security and release of new updates of its plugin in a continuous manner
Beneficial your multilingual SEO
Fully integrated with WooCommerce and popular WooCommerce plugins
Possibility to choose if you want to translate the website on your own, automatically (and review before publication), or send the content to a translator
Global support six days a week

How to optimize your WPML page

WPML has four general tips on how to speed up your website with their plugin installed:

Keep WordPress and your plugins up to date – Using old versions of plugins usually cause problems, and WPML is no exception. WPML’s plugin has become significantly faster since version 4.2.8, and you can see up to 60% shorter loading time when updating to a new version.
Use a fast host – Using a web host that focuses on page speed is an effective way to increase the speed of your website. Ask your new host for a free test to ensure that the website is faster before moving away from your current provider permanently.
Use cache – By caching your website, the server avoids generating the same content over and over again. There are several popular cache plugins such as WP Rocket and WP Fastest Cache. At Templ, we offer the possibility of activating cache at server level, which is faster and uses fewer resources than a plugin.
Use PHP 7.0 or above – PHP 7 is more than twice as fast as PHP 5. At Templ we always offer the latest version of PHP. If you want to upgrade, please contact us.

WPML offers a 12-months performance guarantee

These four tips and the guarantee will go a long way, but I recommend you follow these extra recommendations to make your website as fast as possible:

Choose a light theme

A light theme means that it has well-written code without mambo jumbo, which the server can quickly process and is fast for visitors’ browsers to load. Changing the theme can be time-consuming, but I recommend you consider it if you suspect that your theme is making your website slow.

Some themes load slower than others because of a lot of unnecessary functionality, which you do not use. If you want to evaluate how your theme is performing, we recommend you measure the number of requests your website’s pages have, and how big they are, and compare these on a copy of your website, where another theme is installed.

Three light and popular themes are Storefront, Astra, and GeneratePress.

Minify and combine CSS and Javascript files

Minifying code, combining files, and changing the order in which files are loaded, are all effective ways to optimize your website. If you have a cache plugin, such as WP Rocket, you can let it do this optimization for you. The Autoptimize plugin is another popular option with more than 3 million active installations.

At Templ, we offer the option to use Google’s PageSpeed Module, which optimizes your website at server level.

Avoid external resources as much as possible

Your website’s resources are mostly retrieved from the server where the website is hosted – these are called internal resources. It can also retrieve resources elsewhere and is then called external resources.

Social Media like Facebook and Instagram
Google Fonts
Tracking via Google Analytics and other marketing tools

Why do external resources slow down your website?

With a so-called DNS lookup, your website needs to check every domain it gets resources from. The more domains your website needs to retrieve resources from, the more time-consuming it will be.
External resources can sometimes be render-blocking, which means they prevent the remaining content on the page from being rendered until the external resource has been downloaded in its entirety. If the external resource is early in the order, it can mean that it takes an annoyingly long time before the visitor sees any content.
If you want to see what external resources your website loads, you can find them here:

Go to your website
Open the dev tools in your browser
Go to Network -> JS, and you will find your external resources under “Name” or “Domain” depending on which browser you are using.

Preload cache

WPML recommends using cache, and it is a must if you want to make your website fast. If you are serious about your website, you should optimize the website’s cache so that as many visitors as possible will have your pages served from cache.

Preloading cache on pages you expect visitors to improve the loading time where it is most needed in a smooth and time-efficient way.

Cache can be preloaded with the WP Rocket plugin, which offers the best flexibility and superior user-friendliness.

Clean your database

Your website’s database may, in time, become full of unnecessary data. By cleaning it, you make your website lighter and faster. To clean your database, you can use our free plugin Templ Optimizer.

Templ and WMPL

Templ is fully compatible with WPML, and you are more than welcome to contact us with questions about the plugin or if you want our help in speeding up your website. Good luck! 🚀

Why websites load faster at Templ

It does not have to be difficult or time-consuming to speed up a website. In this blog post, I will explain the importance of web hosting for your website’s page speed, as well as what we at Templ have done to increase the speed of our customers’ websites by an average of more than 200%.

How important is the page speed?

It is not only the conversion rate that increases with reduced loading time, but also other behaviors are affected, such as how long the visitor stays on the website, and how many return to it. In the end, it is the brand that is harmed if the website is slow.

Several large companies have analyzed the impact of speed:

For Amazon, a tenth of a second of extra loading time resulted in a reduction in sales of 1%. (Gigaspaces.com)
Pinterest conducted a study in 2015, which showed that the conversion on their mobile website increased by 40% as loading time decreased by 60%. (Pinterest Engineering)
Google determined that half a second of extra loading time resulted in 20% less traffic. (Gigaspaces.com)

Several comprehensive studies, which include a large volume of websites, demonstrate the importance of speed:

47% of all visitors expect the website to load in two seconds or less. (Neilpatel.com)
46% of all visitors do not return to websites that load slowly. (Exai.com)
70% of all consumers state that loading time affect their willingness to shop from an online store. (Searchenginejournal.com)
88% of all internet users choose webshops that are high-performing and fast. (Sweor.com)

At Templ, we have discovered that almost all websites have unattainable potential when it comes to speed, and often it is the web hosting that is the reason why it is slow.

Why are web hosts slow?

The most common reason that websites load more slowly before moving to Templ, is that the former web hosting service offers so-called “Shared Hosting”. This means that the website is placed on a physical server with resources shared by many websites. In addition to risking the website’s security and uptime, it also has a negative effect on page speed. Such a web host is also rarely optimized for WordPress, and cannot usually offer the features required for a really fast website.

Templ offers so-called Managed WordPress Hosting, which in many ways differs from traditional Shared hosting.

How Managed WordPress Hosting affects your page speed

The concept of Managed WordPress Hosting has, unfortunately, become a bit watered down in recent times. Today, many web hosts boast that they specialize in WordPress, while offering hosting for other platforms as well. Managed WordPress Hosting requires a focus on only WordPress, and that the web host is built and has adapted its service completely for the platform.

Factors that enable faster websites on web hosts that offer Managed WordPress Hosting are:

The latest technology – – Does the web host use Nginx/Litespeed, MariaDB, server-based cache, CDN, HTTP3/Quic, latest version of PHP?

Dedicated resources – With dedicated resources the website does not risk loading slowly due to congestion of other websites on the same web host. If the resources are exceeded, they will usually be temporarily scaled up and you will be notified with a recommendation to upgrade your plan so that your load time is not negatively affected.

High-performance cloud servers – Instead of the website being placed on a physical server in a dusty basement, modern web hosts often use cloud servers from e.g. Google and Amazon. When websites are placed on the Google Cloud Platform, they enjoy the same technology that Google itself uses for services such as Gmail and Google search.

Is Templ faster than other web hosts that offer Managed WordPress hosting?

What mainly differentiates Templ from other web hosts, in addition to the previously mentioned factors, is speed optimization – which is adapted to the website and is performed by hand. This means that Templ can speed up websites additionally after migrating them from previous web hosts.

Here are examples of actions Templ is taking to speed up customers’ websites:

WordPress Configuration – Optimal configuration of WordPress
Review of plugins – Identifiy and replace black listed plugins
Database Optimization – Replace olde database format with newer ones
Troubleshooting – Scan site for serious errors
Server Log – Scan the server logs for issues
Image Optimization – Reduce the file size of images
Activate and optimize cache – Check cache and optimize for website

Thanks to the optimization service, we’re proud to say that all websites that have moved to Templ have reduced their loading times. Here are some examples.

Sixtydays.com

The Scandinavian fashion brand Sixtydays, which previously used shared hosting, reduced its loading time from 5.9 seconds to 1.6 seconds, by moving its website to Templ.

When examining the speed of a website, people often talk about TTFB. This means “Time to first byte” and measures as the name suggests the time it takes for the first bytes on the website to reach the visitor’s browser. TTFB is thus a measure of the web server’s responsiveness, which is of course clearly affected by the web host. Sixtyday’s TTFB went from 3.4 to 0.6 seconds after migrating to Templ.

Lotusproshop.se

Lotusproshop sells beauty products and improved their page speed by 211% – from 5.6 seconds to 1.8 seconds – after moving to Templ

Bjork-magnusson.se

The loading time on the traditional food wholesaler Björk-Magnusson’s website went from 18 seconds (!) to just over 1 second after migrating to Templ.

Theupskillcompany.se

The Upskill Company is an innovative company in competence supply. The company’s website was already loading relatively fast at its previous web host, but after moving to Templ, the loading time was cut in half.

TTFB was decreased from 1 second to a remarkable 0.06 seconds.

Flowersforfriday.se

Just as the name implies, Flowers for Friday delivers flowers every Friday, to those who want to spruce up the home for the weekend. The webshop is an important part of the business and after moving to Templ, the loading time was reduced to 0.7 seconds from the previous 3.08 seconds.

Average improvement

Using speed optimization, Templ has accelerated customers’ websites by an average of 202%. The average loading time before migration was 3.1 seconds, and has been reduced to 1 second on average.

The TTFB has improved by an average of 351% – from 1.9 seconds to 0.4 seconds.

The ratings on Google’s tools PageSpeed Insights have also improved, and the average rating on desktops has increased by 27% – from 61 to 77.6. On mobile, the same increase is 36% – from 29.8 to 40.7.

How fast can your website become?

Want to know more about the potential of your website, and how fast it can be? Contact us in the chat or register an account at https://templ.io/register/ – we will help you get started, and optimize your website free of charge.

* Templ has tested the home pages of the websites with the tool tools.pingdom.com. At this publication, 2021-01-13, the statistics have been based on 51 tests. The websites that have been tested and moved to Templ have previously used the services Cloudways, Siteground, A2 Hosting, Miss Hosting, and Linode, among others.

The ultimate guide to WebP images in WordPress

These days, when load times and web core vitals are more important than ever, serving images in WebP format seems like a no-brainer.

Making images smaller in size, speeds up your website and saves on bandwidth.

WebP files are typically up to 25-35% smaller than JPG and PNG, without losing in image quality.

But how does one get started? We’ll explain all about it in this blog post!

Table of content:

1. What is WebP and why use it?
2. WebP vs JPG: a quick and simple comparison
3. About WordPress native WebP support
4. Serving WebP with fallback
5. Converting images to WebP using a plugin
6. Converting images to WebP without a plugin
7. Summary

1. What is WebP and why use it?

WebP was developed by Google in an effort to make the web faster. It’s meant to be used as a replacement for JPG, PNG.

The total file size of the average websites consists of about 50% images, so reducing file size of your images can have a big impact on the overall load time as well as scores such as web core vitals.

Google thinks that the benefit of using WebP is so significant that they even suggest using WebP when testing one’s website using their PageSpeed Insights tool.

Google PageSpeed Insights recommends WebP — Google suggests using WebP in their PageSpeed Insights tool.

WebP allows for both lossless and “lossy” compression of images.

Lossless conversion of course means that there will be no loss of image quality whatsoever. However, even the lossy compression using WebP offers virtually no visual difference in terms of image quality, as can be seen in this sample gallery provided by Google.

2. WebP vs JPG: a quick and simple comparison

We also did a simple test ourselves and uploaded 10 different images to a demo page.

The combined size of all images uploaded in JPG format was 4.0MB, as seen below:

Example without WebP — Combined size of images prior to WebP conversion: 4.0MB

After converting all images to WebP using a lossy conversion, the combined size of all images was a mere 2.0MB.

Example with WebP — Combined size of images after converting to WebP: 2.0MB

That’s a 50% reduction in size, and we could see no difference in image quality whatsoever!

3. About WordPress native WebP support

Since WordPress 5.8, there is native support for WebP built-in to WordPress itself.

To use it, one can simply upload images in WebP format to the media library, just like with the more traditional image formats.

Native WebP support in WordPress — Since WordPress 5.8, it’s possible to upload .webp files directly in WP Admin

This approach requires you to convert your images to WebP prior to uploading them to WP. To do that, there are several handy conversion tools available online.

It’s that simple to use WordPress built-in support and start uploading WebP to your site.

One should note however that browser support for WebP is still not 100%, so as of today we would recommend to make sure you have a fallback in place.

4. Serving WebP with fallback

WebP is a rather new file format and although it’s today supported by all major browsers, visitors using older browser versions won’t be able to see WebP images, unless we use a fallback. For an up-to-date overlook at the browser support for WebP, please take a look at caniuse.com.

For better backwards compatibility and to be able to support visitors using older browsers, we would recommend uploading your images to WordPress in JPG and PNG format, like you normally would, and later convert them to WebP after uploading.

Even though WebP is now natively supported by WordPress, browser support is still at ~95%. For now we would still recommend the conversion approach since it allows for a fallback for visitors with older browsers.

By doing this, your site can serve images “dynamically” and only serve WebP images to visitors who support it, and fall back to the original PNG/JPG version for visitors with older browsers.

All the popular WebP plugins (including the ones listed below) has this fallback feature built-in, and is easy to configure.

5. Serving WebP in WordPress using a plugin

For most WordPress site owners, the easiest way to convert all images to WebP and start serving them to your visitors, will be to use one of many of the available plugins for this.

There are several plugins available for WordPress that let you convert all your JPG and PNG to WebP, some are free and some paid options exists as well.

Some of the most popular options are:

WebP Express (Free and unlimited)
Imagify (Freemium model, 20MB of images can be converted for free every month)
ShortPixel (Freemium model, 100 images per month can be converted for free)
Smush (WebP conversion only available in the paid “Pro” version)

WebP conversion using WebP Express — Converting images to WebP Express, or other plugins, is easy and straight forward.

Please note that besides converting your images to the WebP file format, you will also have to configure your web server in order to serve them to your visitors.

For Apache environments, your .htaccess file should be updated automatically and it should work out-of-the-box. For nginx hosting environments, manual configuration is needed, so you may have to ask your host to help out. Here on Templ, this service is of course included for free as a part of our managed hosting.

Using a plugin is for the most part easy and straightforward, but using a plugin has its drawbacks since installing additional plugins on your site means that more code needs to be run on each page load, which slows down the site, and conversion to WebP through PHP is not exactly ideal.

6. Serving images in WordPress WITHOUT plugin

Ideally then, we would want to serve images in WebP format without relying on a plugin for WordPress to make it happen.

This would give us the best of both world; we would be able to serve WebP and speed up our website, and wouldn’t have to add more code to our website and thus slowing down the backend.

If you are hosting your website on a VPS or have other non-managed hosting for yours site however, this is rather technical to do and you would likely have to do it all by yourself. A good starting point in those cases would be the official documentation on how to convert images on different operating system.

If you are using a managed hosting provider on the other hand, your host just might be able to help you out and setup this for you.

Here on Templ for example, we offer conversion of images to WebP, including all the necessary server configuration, all included for free with all our plans.

7. Summary

All in all, it’s clear to say that the benefit of using WebP on your site can be significant and when using fallbacks we don’t see any drawbacks either.

There is a good reason Google’s PageSpeed Insights recommends you to “serve images in next-gen formats”.

We would recommend anyone to start looking into WebP conversion and start using it on your website as soon as possible.

If you have any questions about WordPress and WebP images then you are welcome to ask us in the chat here on this page or to post in the comment box below.

Good luck! 🙂

Google Cloud CDN for WordPress: Features and how to set it up at Templ

Google Cloud CDN is one of the fastest CDNs in the world. It is the same CDN powering YouTube, Gmail, Google search, and other products from Google.

Using Google Cloud CDN for your WordPress site will speed up your site and make it easily accessible to your customers and readers around the world.

The benefit of a fast website is overwhelming. According to Google, speed is a ranking factor. That means if you have a slow website, your site will perform badly in Google’s search result.

Do you know that a slow website can impact your sales? A slow website will affect how much money you make negatively. According to a research by Skilled, page load time directly affects conversion rates. The research finds that 79% of customers who are dissatisfied with a website performance are less likely to buy. Every 1-second delay means a 7% reduction in conversion.

If your website is slow, then your business is at risk. It should be a priority to fix it. A fast website will increase conversion rate and improve your SEO.

A good web hosting can boost your speed. But sometimes, it is not enough. Especially if you have readers or customers around the World.

That is where a Content Delivery Network (CDN) comes in. A CDN creates many copies of your site (or parts thereof) and stores them in different locations around the world. Then serve them to your users when they try to visit your site from the closest location.

Table of content:

Features and advantages of Google Cloud CDN
1 – Over 130 locations
2 – Speed
3 – HTTP/2 and QUIC
4 – Anycast
5 – HTTPS
6 – Integrated with Google Cloud
7 – In Good company
How to set up Google Cloud CDN at Templ
Conclusion

Features and advantages of Google Cloud CDN

Google Cloud CDN is at the very top of the best CDNs for WordPress. Here are some features and advantages that make Google Cloud CDN the best choice.

1. Over 130 locations

With over 130 locations, Google Cloud CDN has one of the best networks to speed up content delivery.

This will benefit you specifically if you have customers or readers around the world.

When you set up your website at your web host you sometimes have the opportunity to choose where your server should be located. When your visitors visit your website, the website loads from that location. If your data center is in Detroit and your visitor is from Britain, your website still needs to load from Detroit.

This can slow down your page load time. And based on the research we have seen above, you could potentially lose customers.

But when you use Google Cloud CDN, your site will be made available from over 130 locations worldwide. So if your site is hosted in Detroit and a user visits from Britain, your site will load from Britain to the user. This reduces the time it takes to fetch the site from Detroit. Making your site fast no matter the location of your customers or readers.

2. Speed

Google Cloud CDN is known for its speed. To see how fast Google Cloud CDN is, I will use CDNperf. CDNperf is a platform that collects real-world data on the performance of CDNs.

It is very easy to use. If you go to CDNPerf, you will immediately see the performance of all major CDNs for the past 30 days. You can check performance worldwide or by continents.

From the above result, Google Cloud CDN comes up with the best among the big names.
Google Cloud CDN averaged a query speed of 66.40ms. That is more than Microsoft Azure CDN whose average is 71.00ms, Amazon’s AWS CloudFront CDN at 71.80ms, and Cloudflare CDN at 77.17ms.

If you check by continents, you will notice Google Cloud CDN is consistently at the top.

3. HTTP/2 and QUIC

Google Cloud CDN supports the latest technologies. HTTP/2 and QUIC are supported. These are the new generation technologies powering the web. QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connection) makes HTTP traffic fast and secure.

But it goes beyond just supporting these technologies. They were actually developed at Google! The advantage is that they can speed up websites. Most especially for mobile visitors.

4. Anycast

As the leader in technology, Anycast is one of the numerous features of Google Cloud CDN. This is at the core of its content delivery.

5. HTTPS

HTTPS is packaged with Google Cloud CDN for free. SSL is very important for businesses. It is standard.
Users are free to bring in their own SSL.

6. Integrated with Google Cloud

Google Cloud CDN is integrated with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which is known for its low latency. Meaning it can process a high volume of data with very minimal delay. That means your site will not go offline just because of a very big spike in traffic.

As a result of the integration, the CDN benefits from Cloud Monitoring and logging.

7. In Good company

Using Google Cloud CDN and GCP means you are in good company. The Google Cloud network is used by top brands, including:

YouTube
Gmail
Google Search
Twitter
Snapchat
PayPal
Spotify
New York Times
HSBC
Target
Bloomberg
Sky
Home Depot
And more

How to set up Google Cloud CDN at Templ

There is no skill required to integrate Google Cloud CDN with WordPress at Templ because Templ has already built a solid platform that integrates Google Cloud CDN with every site hosted. All you have to do to activate Google Cloud CDN at Templ is to contact our support and we will do it for you.

Conclusion

You should be using a CDN to make your site load faster for your users around the world. This will lead to better user experience, reduced bounce rate, improved SEO, and better conversion rate.

A CDN will also reduce the load on your origin server. As a result, your site can handle more visitors. This means that if you suddenly have a spike in traffic, the CDN will reduce the possibility of your site crashing.

Why Templ.io Supports QUIC & Why Your Web Host Should Too

First we had HTTP.

Then HTTP/2 came along and brought new features and speed improvements to the world wide web.

Now, there’s QUIC which is yet another major leap in performance as well as security, and it’s a candidate to replace HTTP/2 and become HTTP/3.

QUIC is a next generation internet protocol that is encrypted-by-default and can decrease website load times considerably, especially for mobile devices and for low bandwidth connections.

Templ.io has enabled QUIC for all our customers

At Templ.io we have already enabled QUIC for all our customer using our free of charge Google Cloud based CDN and we’re already seeing improvements on our customers’ website load times.

QUIC is an initiative by Google (as HTTP/2 was as well) and brings several major improvements:

Dramatically reduced connection-establishment time
Multiplexing without head-of-line blocking
Improved congestion control
Connection migration

Dramatically reduced connection-establishment time

HTTP/2 typically requires 2-3 roundtrip of handshakes between web browser and server for every visit before a secure connection has been established.

With QUIC on the other hand, a server can send data to a web browser without the need of a single roundtrip if they have communicated before, which can dramatically reduce the “time to first byte” or TTFB which is often measured by tools like Pingdom or Webpagetest.org.

Non-blocking loss of single packets (a.k.a “Multiplexing without head-of-line blocking”)

HTTP/2 enabled multiple streams of data in one connection, but all of its streams of data can be blocked when a single TCP packet is lost—a problem called head-of-line blocking.

QUIC, just like HTTP/2, allows for multiple streams of data in one connection but uses a more redundant way to transfer data using UDP instead of TCP. With QUIC, a loss of a single data packet won’t slow down other requests than those contained within that packet.

Improved congestion control

Congestion control is a very complex subject and I won’t dig deeper into that in this blog post. Here is a very brief summary of QUIC’s congestion control ambition from Wikipedia:

QUIC’s secondary goals include reduced connection and transport latency, and bandwidth estimation in each direction to avoid congestion.

Connection migration, from WiFi to cellular and back

QUIC was very much created with a mobile-first way of thinking and supports migration of connections from WiFi to Cellular and back.

Never again will your website stop loading completely just because your phone lost its WiFi connection for a moment.

How Much Faster?

On a well-optimized site like Google Search, connections are often pre-established, so QUIC’s faster connections can only speed up some requests—but QUIC still improves mean page load time by 8% globally, and up to 13% in regions where latency is higher.

Source: Google

Google Cloud CDN throughput after enabling QUIC. Source: Google

How To Check If Your Website Is Currently Using QUIC?

To check if your current website is being served using QUIC or not you can open up the Developer Tools panel in your web browser and go to the Network tab and look for QUIC in the Protocol column.

Check if your site is utilizing QUIC or not

If you see several rows mentioning QUIC then voilà, you’re already using QUIC and are ready to blaze pass your competition! ?

Are you already using QUIC today or are you looking to start using it?

Let us know in the comments below!

Sources:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-quic-support-https-load-balancing
https://www.litespeedtech.com/products/litespeed-web-server/features/quic-support/why-use-quic
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-road-to-quic/

7 Reasons Why Cloud Hosting is The Future (And Why You Should Switch Today)

We have all heard that having a fast loading website is important – especially as a ecommerce store owner.

But do you know just how important it is?

One second longer load times would cost Amazon $1.6 billion a year (yes, $1.6 billion!), according to Fast Company.

The big guys like Amazon, Walmart and Apple, to name a few, they all know this – and they all spend millions of dollars on state-of-the-art infrastructure to make sure that their websites always load blazingly fast.

But what about you and me?

Most of us don’t have that kind of money laying around just waiting to be spent, let alone on servers!

Instead, most people are still using old-fashioned “shared hosting”, where huge numbers of websites are squeezed onto one and the same server. Something that is often both slow and insecure.

So, what can we do to increase the performance of our websites without having to spend a fortune and set up our own server?

Enter cloud hosting!

Cloud hosting lets smaller players like you and me use the same kind of computing power as the big guys – without spending millions of dollars.

The internet mega giants that is Amazon and Google now both offer their clouds to the public, letting anyone tap into their huge amount of server resources.

Cloud hosting – the future of web hosting?

Cloud hosting is pretty much a dream come true as it is highly affordable, remarkably stable and super easy to scale to almost infinite levels.

It is the best way to get maximum hosting performance for your money.

But speed is just one of many advantages of cloud hosting.

Below I will list the top 7 reasons why cloud hosting is the future – and why you should make the switch today.

If you haven’t already…

1. Easy to scale (and scales really, really big)

One of the top benefits of cloud hosting is scalability.

The sheer size and power of the big clouds are almost unimaginable.

Sure, the day might never come when you would need even a fraction of the raw power that’s available to you, but it sure is good knowing that it’s there, and that lack of hosting power won’t be holding you back as your business grows.

Cloud hosting makes scalability very easy, and you can also scale really big. With traditional shared hosting on the other hand, your choice is limited to the preconfigured physical servers that the host have decided to offer.

Flexible scalability is incredibly important to ecommerce websites to be able to handle the enormous traffic spikes during special shopping holidays such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or if ones website would be mentioned by some big influencer.

With modern cloud hosting, a server can easily be reconfigured with just the click of a button. Just a way smarter solution!

2. Only pay for what you actually use

Another huge upside of cloud hosting is more flexible pricing.

In fact, cloud hosting lets you save money as you only pay for what you actually use.

Rather than paying up front for a fixed amount of resources that you may not end up using, like you do with traditional hosting, many cloud hosting providers offer their service as pay-as-you-go basis.

This means that you can tailor a server for your needs, decide how much CPU and RAM that you need, and pay for just that and nothing more.

This smarter payment method means less wasted resources, and more money saved for the customers.

cloud hosting for better security — Cloud hosting means better security

3. Isolation from others

Wouldn’t it suck if your site got slower when another site on the same host has a lot of traffic?

With traditional shared hosting – this is the reality.

In a shared hosting environment, you are sharing server and bandwidth with other users and your site’s performance are heavily affected by other sites usage. Something that are completely out of your control.

This problem is now solved!

With cloud hosting, there is much better isolation and your site has assigned dedicated resources and guaranteed performance. Unaffected by the use of others.

Increased isolation is not only good for performance but also for security reasons;

With increased isolation, your site is also better protected against viruses and malware as other sites on the same host won’t be able to infect yours.

4. Superior up time

Having a really high up time is a fundamental factor for your website’s SEO, and also for your customer satisfaction.

Google favors websites that are steadily available when deciding which sites to place among the top search results, and punishes websites that are unreliable and have poor uptime.

With cloud hosting you will typically get higher uptime as cloud hosting is a system of interconnected servers and has no single point of failure.

If one of the servers in a cloud host network goes down then another one will simply take over the workload of the failed server and the requested site will still be able to be served.

5. Environmentally friendly

While the environment might not be the first thing you consider when choosing a web host, cloud hosting is nonetheless a more environmentally friendly option.

Servers in a cloud is used up to 4x more efficiently compared to servers in a traditional data center.

The utilization rate is higher and servers are also powered down when usage is low, thus reducing electricity use and carbon emission.

Who would have thought that switching to better web hosting could be such a selfless act of goodwill? ?

6. Not tied to one physical location

Another reason why cloud hosting is so great is because the big clouds (Amazon and Google, that is) have multiple data centers spread out around the globe and that you can choose where you want to host your website.

No longer are you tied to one physical location that is where your host happened to be located.

Placing your website near your target audience is key to make sure that your website will load fast for your visitors.

With cloud hosting you have much more flexibility in this regard.

… And in today’s globalized world that additional flexibility could prove hugely valuable.

Rank up in Google — Cloud hosting is easy to scale big

7. Unrivaled performance

Last – but certainly not least – is performance.

The raw power of cloud hosting just can’t be beat!

With cloud hosting, the highest level of performance is guaranteed by the vast number of interconnected servers, which results in unbeatable performance and stability.

In the last few years, more and more internet companies are moving away from the headache that is managing its own servers and hardware, and instead choose to rely on cloud hosting provided by companies like Amazon and Google.

Netflix, for example, are hosted on the Amazon cloud (known as Amazon AWS).

And the Swedish music streaming giant Spotify rely on the Google Cloud platform to serve its 100+ million users with the music that they love.

That kind of hosting power is now available for everyone, even for smaller website owners.

Cloud hosting definitely is the future – and that future is here today!

If you found this article insightful, please help us out and share it with your friends. Please also leave a comment below and tell us what web hosting you are using today.

6 Quick Tips on How To Speed up WooCommerce

WooCommerce isn’t a slow platform, not at all actually. But you do need to make sure that your website doesn’t end up being way too slow for your audience. Things like a lack of optimization, too many products added to the site and so on can end up leading to various types of issues. Most of the time, it all comes down to doing some quick adjustments and tools to get the job done very fast.

When you host your website on templ.io, we have already done many optimizations for WordPress and WooCommerce, but there are still a few that you might want to do on your own.

1.Optimize images

Make sure that all the images are optimized for the web. PNG files are offering a great quality, but they slow down your site. Using a good image optimizer plugin will be able to help you with this. The idea is to approach it with the utmost attention to detail, and once you do that, results will shine quite a lot for sure. Image optimization is especially important if you have a WooCommerce store with a lot of product pictures, you want them to load fast!

Smush is a popular image optimization tool that helps you resize, optimize and compress all of your images.

Link: Download Smush

Bonus: If your site is hosted on Templ.io, then we can help you optimize all your images in /wp-content/uploads/ on server level with the lossless optimization tool jpegoptim.

2. Consider adding LazyLoad

Lazy Load displays images and/or iframes on a page only when they are visible to the user. This reduces the number of HTTP requests mechanism and improves the loading time. Major websites such as Facebook, Youtube & Yahoo use this technique.

WP Rocket offers this in their cache plugin, which we will mention below.

3. Cache plugins

If you use a cache plugin, the website info will be stored on your customer’s computer the first time he uses it. As a result, each time the customer comes back, the site will be loading faster and faster all the time. There are many cache plugins available for WordPress, most of them have a have a free version and a paid version.

These are the most popular cache plugins for WordPress & WooCommerce:

WP Fastest Cache – Free & Premium version available
W3 Total Cache – Free & Premium version available
WP Super Cache – Free & Premium version available
WP Rocket – Paid (Offers lazyload).

Also check out Autoptimize which can be used as a supplement for your cache plugin. Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default and can move and defer scripts to the footer.

4. Optimize your homepage to load quickly

Your homepage is your most important page, it’s the page most of your visitors will go to the first, so you want to make sure that your homepage loads with blazing speed.

5. Here are some tips for your homepage:

Widgets are cool, right? But you don’t want a million widgets on your homepage, consider removing everything that isn’t crucial for your homepage.
If you have a blog with posts on the homepage, limit the number of posts (10 or lower are recommended).
Optimize your images!

6. Host your website in the right location

With templ.io’s Google Cloud Platform hosting, you can choose where you want to host your website, this is a very important, choose the data center that is closest to your target audience. Choose between United States, Europe & Asia.

If you have done all these steps, congratulations! Now you can focus on the important, selling! A faster website will keep your visitors happy, and they are more likely to purchase from your store.