Two Steps to the Top 10% Fastest Sites

I’ve been doing a lot of back-end blog updates recently, and had great success with two of them especially. These two steps put my site into the top 10% fastest sites.

I’m no site speed expert. Also, from my experience, the speed of your site can not only change with different factors and conditions. It can also change day to day and even test to test. Not to mention there are many tools out there to calculate your site speed and their results will likely vary, as well. While following my exact steps won’t guarantee the same results, I thought it would be helpful to share my experience because the results were so great.

I’d been looking into moving to premium hosting for a couple years now but hadn’t pulled the trigger yet. I’ll save my migration reasons for another post (or multiple posts), but the main reason I wanted to move was due to site speed. While speed was far from my mind as a newer blogger, I’ve now been blogging over 10 years. I was probably due an upgrade a long time ago, but…better late than never?

Starting Point: 76% Slowest Group

Despite this site being tiny, the template being simple, and the fluff of sidebars and footers being almost nonexistent, my site was slow. Slower than 76% of tested sites according to Pingdom (results were run the day before my migration).

Middle Point: 50% Fastest Group

Change: moved to premium WordPress hosting

After migrating this site from BlueHost to SiteGround (more on that another time), I re-ran the test. I saw an improvement by 26%! My site was now faster than 50% of tested sites.

Current Point: 92% Fastest Group

Change: Remove 3rd party analytics in Shareaholic

When I checked the details on my Pingdom test above, I was surprised to see a 0 value for one of the Performance Grade tab rows: Minimize redirects. I checked the list and didn’t recognize most of the URLs listed. A quick Google search brought me to this WordPress support thread that suggested turning off 3rd party analytics in Shareaholic. So, I did. You can read about how by clicking here.

I was happily surprised by the results. I’m not sure if this new number represents a combination of the new premium hosting with SiteGround in addition to the updates I made to my Shareaholic settings. But, either way I’m thrilled. According to Pingdom, dianastarts.com is now faster than 92% of tested sites!