WordPress Speed Test With LiteSpeed Cache & Cloudflare Railgun

There is nothing worse than a slow loading website.

It effects your Google rankings and your customer experience.

But how do you speed your website up if you use WordPress?

Use Proper Server Configuration

For starters, we’ve equipped all our servers to use LiteSpeed web server (which is up to 9 times faster than Apache) and Solid State Drives (SSD) protected by Raid 1 (which is much faster than traditional SATA hard drives).

This gives us a “huge” advantage over the “other hosts” as most use traditional Apache servers with SATA hard drives (much cheaper).

Use Quality Themes & Limit Plugins

Next, it’s important to use a quality theme and limit the number of plugins you install.

Just because a WordPress theme is free or looks nice doesn’t mean it’s been professionally coded with the best practices.  Unfortunately a lot of developers are just looking to make money with their themes and haven’t actually tested them on live websites.

When selecting a theme for your WordPress website make sure to do your research on the developer to ensure they actively update it and also address support issues.

There is also a WordPress plugin for almost anything you can think of.  That doesn’t mean you have to install them though!

Only install plugins that are “must have.”  The more plugins you add to your website, the more database calls you’re making and like themes, if they haven’t been professionally coded they could be using unnecessary server resources costing you crucial page load time.

LiteSpeed Cache Plugin

Caching your website is important as it prevents the website from having to constantly load resource-heavy elements such as css, javascript, etc.

There are many different caching plugins available for WordPress, but recently, LiteSpeed developed their own caching plugin that works in conjunction with their web server:

If hosted at NameHero, you can submit a support ticket and we can enable it for you, or you can install it just like any other plugin.

It will then automatically begin working with the web server software to optimize your WordPress website’s speed.

You’ll notice there are plenty of options you can tweak to make it a perfect fit for your website:

For the most part though, it should work pretty standard out of the box (see results below).

Cloudflare With Railgun

We’ve touted our direct integration with Cloudflare’s DNS inside of cPanel for several years now.

When this is combined with their Railgun technology, we see a pretty nice jump in page load:

Cloudflare also acts as reverse DNS proxy protecting you from some nasty DDOS attacks.  With our free and automatic SSL certificates, there isn’t a need for their paid plan!

WordPress Speed Benchmarks

To give you an idea of how your WordPress website should be loading on NameHero, I’ve done some speed benchmarks using GTMetrix.

Disclaimer: Speed test websites such as gtmetrix.com are good “free” tools to help you optimize elements on your website.  They should not however be your end-all be-all when coming to monitoring and measure speed benchmarks. 

Standard WordPress Install On NameHero

LiteSpeed Caching Plugin Using NameHero

LiteSpeed Caching Plugin + Cloudflare Railgun Using NameHero

How To Speed Up WordPress [Video Tutorial]

Now, as I stated, these speed tests aren’t the end-all, be-all.  They help give you an idea about your page load time, but certainly aren’t the holy grail.

They do however show the impact these simple [and free] integrations can help you achieve to set you apart from your competitors.

Both LiteSpeed cache and Cloudflare Railgun is immediately available on ALL NameHero web hosting packages including Resellers free of charge.  If you’d like us to enable these on your website, reach out via Live Chat, Telephone, or our Ticket Center!

Let met know if you have any questions!

Ryan Gray

Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.