There are various platforms to start a blog. Blogger, Tumblr, Ghost, etc., are some of the commonly known platforms. Another popular blogging platform quite famous on the internet is WordPress. When it comes to having fun or hosting a personal journal, blogger, tumbler, WordPress are some of the most preferred platforms since they are easy to manage and have free access.
However, when you want to turn blogging into a business, make money or use the platform to promote your business, these free versions aren’t much helpful. It is better to opt for a self-hosted version of WordPress. Let us first understand what the WordPress platform is?
What is WordPress
WordPress was launched as a blogging tool which later on turned to a complete Content Management System (CMS). Released in 2003, the platform has merited enormous fame and repute in the past 14 years.
There are various wondrous services offered by WordPress such as Gravatar, Jetpack, Videopress, Vaultpress, etc. However, two significant features of WordPress make the platform outstanding in the market. These are:
• WordPress themes
The platform has a big community of designers who create and offer free as well as premium WordPress themes. Thus, any day you can change the theme of your site and raise it to a master level. All it requires are a few clicks that can turn your website’s appearance to an excellent site. The themes do not demand any coding knowledge to make this platform attractive.
• WordPress plugins
Plugins are the features that you can add to your WordPress based website. All you require is to install the plugin to your website and customise them as per your requirements. Accessing the plugins is easy. You can go through each one’s directory understanding how to operate it. The platform has a big community of designers who create and offer free as well as premium WordPress themes. Thus, any day you can change the theme of your site and raise it to a master level. All it requires are a few clicks that can turn your website’s appearance to an excellent site. The themes do not demand any coding knowledge to make this platform attractive.
WordPress plugins
Plugins are the features that you can add to your WordPress based website. All you require is to install the plugin to your website and customise them as per your requirements. Accessing the plugins is easy. You can go through each one’s directory understanding how to operate it. WordPress has two different variations in its software, that is, WordPress.com and WordPress.org. The WordPress.org is a self-hosted WordPress site. Let us understand the difference between the two.
WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
WordPress.com is a free platform to start blogging. Anyone can create a blog within 2 minutes and start blogging. It is a paid platform if you decide to own your own domain.
On WordPress.com, one needs to install WordPress on their hosting server. Some hosting servers may ask some coding, but some apparently have a one-click install available.
One creating a blog, you will have a web address like name- www.wholesalecommunity.com. Thus, the blog is hosted on the WordPress server. You can create a custom domain name like name.com. =It is a perfect platform for anyone who wants to record their personal writings or merely want to blog just for the sake of writing.
=It is a perfect platform for anyone who wants to blog with the aim of making money, business promotions or creation of an e-commerce website. =The blog as paid add-ons available. You can also buy a custom domain name, themes, etc. Unlimited ad-ons are available to create an appealing and an attractive website.
Setting up using resources from WordPress.Org (A community for wordpress developers)
As there are various limitations on managing the website like the third party plugins that might really help you add an amazing feature is not possible and the access to limited choices. However, it is a perfect choice to make from the perspective of a personal blog. It removes all the limitations present in WordPress.com version and is completely controlled by the owner of the blog. You can install third party plugins. The website can be monetised any way you choose like AdSense, affiliate marketing, etc.
Choose your platform Now that you are aware of the pros and cons of each of the platforms, it is easier to decide which one can fulfil your requirement. Thus, if it is all about personal blogging and no aim to make money, it is always suggested to opt for a WordPress.com platform. It can later be converted to WordPress.org platform if you intend to make money.
However, if you want a custom domain name, want to use the blog for monetary and marketing purposes, then WordPress.org is an ideal solution. It is easier to get the complicated tasks done by third parties such as WordPress website design on Fiverr.
You can the complete ownership of the platform. Though this platform is very demanding, it also gives you an opportunity to make up the returns. However, the case is not the same as the former version. It is a free platform and has a limited scope of getting returns.
Both Squarespace and WordPress are the ultimate platform for creating the fully functional website. But both of them have some advantages and disadvantages in term of interface and performance. If you are a website developer, then it is very important for you to choose the platform wisely and also it is very important to know what you get from the platform.
So in this article, we provide you with enough information so that you can easily distinguish the platform according to your choice and the platform which gives you the desired results.
Is it really a compromise?
Whenever you want to try Squarespace or WordPress, your choice must be clear about the things like what the specific platform will be provided to you. Firstly, you decide whether you want to create a website in a simple way or you want some flexibility to add exact styling and features in your website according to your need. These two aspects help you to choose the best platform between Squarespace and WordPress for your website designing.
Talking about the Squarespace, this platform is very easy to use and provide you with the simplest method to create a website but in order to this, it offers you a closed environment and due to which you cannot work according to your need.
On the other hand, WordPress is complicated for the beginners, but it provides you with an open environment to work and there is no boundary at all for the developer just like in case of Squarespace. WordPress offers you the thousands of theme and plugins so as to customize the site according to your need.
There are some other aspects which a customer can consider like:
Price of the platform, maintenance and security gave by the platform’s owner, how good a content has been provided etc. But in general, the separation of the platform is based on the ease of use and flexibility given and these two aspects are enough to shape the decision of the individual. Now let’s talk about how these differences will actually cost you when you are going to build a website.
How a customer Build a Website using these 2 Platforms? In terms of how easy one can build the platform, the Squarespace is slighter better than WordPress. But WordPress is still easy for most of the beginners, the setup process is more involved because in WordPress, you’re responsible for the certain technical detailing like hosting and purchasing a domain name for your website.
Squarespace
Whenever you build a website with the help of Squarespace, you don’t need to worry about the technical details at all. Once you signing up for the Squarespace account, then immediately Squarespace will offer you the vast variety of templates to use on your website. You can also customize your desired templates pages by just clicking and typing on it. If you want to create your own layouts, then also you can do it by using the drag and drop editor.
Now Let’s talk about the 2nd platform:
WordPress: Working with WordPress is not easy but quite interesting because you’ll need to complete some technical details before you work on your website.
These technical details are: Choosing and signing up for your web hosting, purchasing a domain name for your website & installing the actual software for WordPress.
How to add functionality to the Website with Each Platform? While Squarespace has the slighter edge over the WordPress term of simplicity and how easy to use it, but WordPress dominates in term of extending your website with the use of new functionalities.
Squarespace Since Squarespace is a closed environment, you are unable to install and implement your own functionality in it. It provides you with an option to add your own client-side code. But Squarespace at least provides you with some inbuilt functions to extend your site. Squarespace is also useful to set up an e-commerce store where you can start selling your items through your own website. Some additional pre-built modules for basic functionality are also provided like:
Contact forms Social share buttons Newsletter subscribe forms
Irrespective of the above points, Squarespace is way behind than WordPress in terms of potential functionality.
WordPress will provide you with the full access to the massive plugin of its environment. One of the biggest advantages of WordPress is that whether you know the code or not these plugins add all the functionality of your website and offers you a fully fleshed new website.
At recent times, there are 52,000 plugins with thousands more premium plugins. Due to these plugins, people find the WordPress as a better platform in term of functionality because you can add these functionalities to your website and make the interface beautiful and eye-catchy.
How these platforms Handle Data Ownership Whenever you have to choose one of the platforms between Squarespace and WordPress then you have some concern regarding the data ownership and privacy of the platform. Talking about the WordPress, it provides all the access to you regarding your data. In this platform, you can do whatever you want and you can easily manipulate it according to your requirement.
Squarespace Now let’s talking about the time when you want to move away from the Squarespace platform to some other platform then what happens to your existing content? Now you can export your content as an XML file as this authority is given by the Squarespace to their clients. Currently, you can transfer the following items:
Gallery pages Comments Text and Images blocks One blog pages and all its posts
But there are some contents you cannot export like: Products pages Index pages Event pages and folders Album pages and cover pages present. Drafts Custom CSS Audio and Video Blocks
This limitation suggests that you can never make the backup of your entire website. And due to this reason, Squarespace is not good and not reliable in term of handling the Client’s data.
WordPress In WordPress, you can easily get the backup of your data and you have 100% ownership. In this, you can easily access your data and export every single bit of your data present on your website. These features make it more reliable as compared to Squarespace.
How much you have to pay for Each Platform
Since both the platforms are very good in their fields so there is no clear answer regarding which platform is cheaper. Price will change according to your need, a basic WordPress site would be cheaper but you buy premium hosting and themes then WordPress could cost you more as compared to Squaresp
The internet is solely rooted in the notion that content is king. This is largely due to the fact that everything we see on the internet is made in such a way so that it should attract us to have more immersion. This is why websites use content that’s catchy and in-trend. Others make sure it is a lead generation magnet.
When building a website or publishing your own works on the web, many tools help you in doing so. Let it be blogs or other informative web pages, and you can avail the services of such tools to see your ideas come to fruition. This is why anyone who is in the process of starting their own website or blog would never go by without hearing the word “WordPress” even once.
WordPress had its set of competition over the years, many have not reached the position that WordPress has among the users, and hence they have all withered at some point of time. But, some contenders are doing a great job at what they do, and they have put some serious competition towards WordPress. One such service provider is Wix.
Wix is regarded as one of the best website builders available on the market. This is due to the advances they have brought into the game. Wix is made around the notion that not everyone knows coding this has helped them to create Wix as a tool for creating beautiful websites for those who do not know how to code. For users who are inexperienced in coding, which is many, this is something of a dream come true. Now you don’t have to go to the intricacies of website building to get your website up and running!
But both WordPress and Wix have their share of pros and cons. This is why we are going to put them against each other see how to fare in a head to head comparison.
Wix vs WordPress Pricing
WordPress:WordPress serves as an open source website builder. Hence you don’t have to pay for WordPress itself. But if you want to host your website, then you will have to buy a hosting plan. With the hosting plan, you will get your own domain and hosting services.
Wix: You can create a free account at Wix and start publishing your work without hassles. The only drawback to a free account is that Wix will host their in-house advertising on your web page. If you choose to go for a paid account, you can use your own domain, and the Wix ads will be removed from your web page.
Ease of use:
WordPress: If you know a bit of coding, WordPress provides the most flexible developer environment you can also use plugins to make yours much more attractive. Then again for a beginner, the aesthetics of the website depends on the template he/she has chosen. In editing the web page, you can’t just drag and drop stuff in WordPress; it takes a bit of a learning curve. If you know coding, then WordPress gives you full freedom over their tools.
Wix: Wix is built from the foundation to help those who aren’t well acquainted with coding. With Wix, you can create your website with no knowledge of coding as the tools helps you to drag and drop the required styles and effects.
User support:
WordPress: With WordPress, help comes in the form of WordPress veterans. WordPress has got itself a large community that helps in solving and help out with queries. The forums and related topics hosted on WordPress are enough to help you out with any issues you face.
Wix: Wix has a dedicated customer care support facility. This helps you to get in contact with them very easily. Also, there is a training program called WixEd that will help you get the grasp of Wix in no time at all. The guide’s posted at Wix covers almost all the confusing bits of creating a website.
Flexibility:
WordPress: if you know your hand at coding, then WordPress becomes the increasingly attractive option as there are a ton of customizable themes and templates for you to modify and edit. Another key characteristic of WordPress is that it provides thousands of free plug-ins for you to add to your website.
Wix: Wix does not entertain open source plug-ins to be used on the website. All the plug-ins are monitored closely, and you can’t modify the available tools as only developers have access towards modifying them. This also implies that if you ever face an issue with plugins or tools, the dedicated customer care is there to iron out the discrepancies as they come.
Which one should you choose?
WordPress and Wix, both have their ups and downs. But if you are not versed in coding and need a carefree approach to website building with 24/7 customer support, then Wix is the one that’s best for you. Hence if you are a beginner, Wix is the best place to start hands down.
When you need a need a website where you can add a lot of features and technicalities, WordPress is up to the job provided you know how to code those features into the system. Enjoy the t
Siteground have undergone a whole lot of changes over the last year so I decided to write a completely unbiased Siteground hosting review based on my experience as a hosting client over a number of years.
Is Siteground A Good Web Host?
Sure it is – as far as hosting goes.
Review Signal, who round up regular conversations on Twitter and turn them into hosting reviews, reckon that users place them in second spot in the shared hosting category.
If you want to read about server technology and speed, it’s available on the Siteground Website.
But I didn’t write this Siteground hosting review to regurgitate what’s already been documented.
I wrote it to help you understand exactly what you get from Siteground and why I switched to Cloudways. I’ve never looked back!
Here are my ratings.
Metric
Author Rating
Reason
Uptime
5/5
99.9% uptime GUARANTEE with compensensation
Backups
4.5/5
Daily automated + on-demand (except on StartUp)
Support
3.5/5
Knowledge (98%); response time (97%-99%)
Speed
3.5/5
Excellent + QUIC technology for slow connections
Security
5/5
Account isolation + brute force protection
Resources
4/5
Servers well monitored for maximum speed
Load Impact
4/5
Performs well (within traffic / resource limits)
Pricing
2.5/5
High end plan renewals can be steep
Locations
2.5/5
6 Data centers
Why Does WordPress.ORG Recommended Siteground?
The only reason these hosting providers appear here is because they pay for it.
WordPress.org is a self hosted platform. The software is open source so it’s not funded by licence fees.
All three of the above hosts donate a portion of their fees when referred via the WordPress website
Research What You Read On The Internet
In the same way that it’s easy to misconstrue the merit of the WordPress recommendations above, so too is it easy to misconstrue the plethora of apparently benign information out there on the internet.
I’m here to bring you a fair and factual Siteground review that will help you to make a decision based on the right information, not one you’ve made through sales talk.
From my own experience, I found that after hosting with Siteground for many years and eventually becoming disillusioned on a number of levels, I switched to Cloudways because I get far better value in every respect, but more about this further on.
Here are some interesting Siteground reviews that support the poll shown above.
“Rip Off”
“Billing Problems”
“Poor Security”
“Billing Bullies!”
“Malware Scanner Takes Site Down Multiple Times”
What About Value For Money
I never gave a second thought to signing up for a GoGeek hosting plan.
Make no mistake, it’s a good hosting plan. It used to be marketed by both Siteground and affiliates as a semi-dedicated hosting plan, which was the furthest thing from the truth and something that annoyed me because of it was a misleading and deceptive marketing tactic designed to get signups in a clandestine way.
There is no such thing as semi-dedicated hosting. Hosting is either shared or dedicated. There’s no overlap.
If you’re a beginner looking to start a WordPress blog, I’d actually suggest you look at Bluehost which is not only cheaper, it’s also simpler and easier to get yourself up and running within a few minutes. Siteground is just too complex for beginners.
Here’s what happened with me.
Some years ago I signed up for a GoGeek plan at $11.95 per month. But this is a discounted first year payment. The price goes up to $34.95 from year 2.
I was happy to accept that, in the full knowledge that the renewal price would escalate in year 2.
So 10 months down the line I got a message in my user area advising me of services that are about to expire.
My traffic had increased substantially and I was ready for cloud hosting which offers dedicated resources.
But like I said at the beginning of this post, Siteground’s cloud hosting is too expensive.
And the prospect of forking out $960 was just crazy!
I migrated to Cloudways, the reason being that I get fully dedicated resources on a Pay As You Go basis – no contracts and you pay only for the resources you use.
Siteground’s cloud hosting plan at $80 per month provides 40GB of storage space whereas Cloudways provides 80GB of storage for $50 per month.
New Server Locations Added And Some Removed
Siteground have recently added new data centers (for new signups) bringing the total number of data centers to 6, viz. Iowa, London, Eemshaven (Netherlands), Frankfurt, Singapore and Sydney. This enables webmasters to select a location closest to the target audience. Multiple locations also provide for greater global orientation.
The shorter the user’s distance to the server, the faster the site will load because the reduced latency improves time to first byte (TTFB), otherwise known as server response and concomitantly improves contentful paint times, i.e. the perceived speed of the site and hence improves user experience.
Additionally, Google upranks sites with fast TTFB times making server location even more critical from an SEO perspective.
By comparison, Cloudways has 25+ server locations . . .
. . . In these cities.
Clearly, there are options that you need to weigh up.
Choosing a web host is all about achieving the best value for money based on YOUR individual needs, at any given point in time.
Siteground’s Hosting Plans – Pricing At A Glance
Plan
Type
Year 1
Year 2+
StartUp (1 site)
Shared
$6.99pm
$19.99pm
GrowBig (Unlimited sites)
Shared
$9.99pm
$29.99pm
GoGeek (Unlimited sites)
Shared
$14.99pm
$49.99pm
Entry
Cloud
$80pm
N/A
Business
Cloud
$120pm
N/A
Business Plus
Cloud
$160pm
N/A
Super Power
Cloud
$240pm
N/A
Enterprise
Bespoke
–
–
See full list of Siteground’s shared hosting features here, a full list of cloud hosting features here.
Excellent Uptime Comes With Guarantees
Probably the most important consideration when choosing a web host is server uptime.
Uptime is adversely affected by periodic server maintenance required mainly due to security vulnerabilities.
Siteground have gone to great lengths to minimize bot based brute force attacks and they also employ account isolation strategies to minimize risk and maintain the integrity of servers (especially shared servers) should a particular site come under attack.
My uptime on a site that I shut down recently was never below 100%.
Knowing that their security is impermeable, Siteground guarantee their uptime to be no less than 99.9%.
Should they not be able to deliver on their promise, Siteground will reimburse you as follows:
99.9% – 99.00% uptime: 1 month free hosting.
For every 1% of uptime lost below 99.00%, an additional free month of hosting.
Support
From personal experience, I’d say that 95% of the support I’ve had from Siteground has been excellent.
With the exception of a small percentage of incidents, live chat has generally been answered within a minute.
The live chat team are very proficient with onboarding, migration, WordPress and related issues such as working with the .htaccess and wp-config.php files.
More technical issues may require escalation to level 1 through to level 3 technical support which is dealt with by ticketing. If a live chat technician is unable to resolve a problem they will happily escalate such issues directly to advanced technical help.
Siteground’s commitment to a first reply within 10 to 15 minutes has always been met. However, beyond the first reply, expect to wait a short while!
With the odd glitch here and there, Siteground support is better than any other that I’ve come across.
I have a small site hosted with A2 Hosting and I’ve never had a live chat call answered in under 20 minutes. Most times I’ve had to wait for about 45 minutes.
Just be mindful that Siteground’s support guys are techies. They’re not SEO experts. It’s your responsibility to look after the greater good of your own site. This goes for all web hosts, not just Siteground.
Scalability (Cloud Hosting)
Siteground’s Cloud hosting offers easy optional scalability. This means you can add CPU or RAM with a single click.
Another really positive feature of Siteground’s cloud hosting is the ability to auto-scale based on unexpected traffic spikes.
On the flipside, however, is the cost factor.
Auto-scalability certainly contributes to the overall cost of the package so you need to carefully consider whether you need that functionality.
Comparing apples with apples, Siteground’s $80 per month plan can equally as well be achieved with a $42 per month Cloudways plan.
But it’s not just the pricing of the Siteground hosting plans that’s important. It’s about what functionality you can get elsewhere and the comparative cost.
CPU Overuse – Your Site May Go Down
In order to maintain the integrity of their servers for ALL users, Siteground provides rough guidelines as to the maximum allocation of resources for your chosen plan.
Let’s be fair here.
Once a site starts reaching the upper end of resource allocation, it’s time for an upgrade. Overusing resources affects everyone else on the shared server and Siteground may close your site down.
Please understand, Siteground does not impose limitations. The provide guidelines.
They’re not overly concerned about a once off spike here and there. At worst you get a friendly notification. They’re more concerned about regular overuse.
The number of visits to your site is not the most important factor. What really counts is CPU seconds usage.
It may happen that you exceed the hourly CPU seconds allocation. That’s not so serious as long as you’re within the daily allocation, it will be seen as a once off spike.
At the end of the day, it’s important to understand why these quotas exist. That said, Siteground’s resource allocation is generous. Personally, I don’t like shared resources. That’s one of the reasons why I switched to Cloudways.
SuperCacher Isn’t Nearly As Good As Page Caching
SuperCacher is Siteground’s own server side caching mechanism.
It differs from site caching in that the cache / store saves information in the server’s RAM after the page is loaded by a browser for the first time. Thereafter, the page is served from RAM which is faster than retrieving it from the server.
An added advantage for the website owner is that serving pages from RAM can save server resources due to less “hits” being made on the server.
Sitegound invested a great deal of time, effort and money into the development of this plugin and it comes to you absolutely free of charge.
Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that it wasn’t built to be a page cache and therefore, it has it’s limitations.
For page caching, I recommend WP Rocket. It’s what I use on all my sites and together with other speed optimizations, it makes a considerable difference to user experience. Furthermore, it helps to reduce bandwidth and save server resource usage.
85% of the time, I had acceptable speed from Siteground’s shared hosting.
I guess that’s why resource allocation is important.
Speed on a shared server is relative to the number of visitors on the entire server at any given time.
The greater the traffic, the greater the demand on CPU and memory of the overall server.
The best way to judge a server’s performance is to see how it handles traffic.
I used a tool called Load Impact to judge what happens with Siteground’s GoGeek server under load.
The tool sends virtual users to your site while running the test. At the same time, it makes numerous requests from the server.
The green line represents the number of virtual users. The purple line represents the number of requests and the blue line shows the server response time.
As you can see, apart from 2 minor spikes, the server response time remained absolutely constant at an average time of 93ms and number of requests was 110,260.
Enough said.
QUIC Enhances Speed On Slow Connections
Siteground have taken their speed technology a step further by enhancing their shared and cloud hosting with QUIC technology which speeds up loading times on slow internet connections.
Quic applies to all plans on the above mentioned servers
The top 10 countries that will benefit most from this technology are:
Yemen
East Timor
Syria
Guinea
Turkmenistan
Niger
Republic of Congo
Somalia
Burkina Faso
Mauritania
But that’s not all. According to ceoworld.biz, the USA ranks 20th in the list of countries having the fastest internet connectivity. So the benefit of QUIC technology may be further reaching than you think.
QUIC is the precursor to the next generation HTTP/3 protocol and in order to reap its benefits, websites must be deployed on the HTTPS protocol and users must be browsing with either Chrome or Opera browsers.
Those using less innovative browsers will fall back to HTTP/2 while insecure sites cannot offer any of these speed benefits to their users.
So how does QUIC work?
When pages load over the HTTP protocol, all requests needed to display the page are queued in line and loaded one after the other. A delay anywhere in the queue therefore slows down all requests thereafter, making pages slow to render.
HTTP/2 significantly improves speed by allowing for multiplexing of requests over the same TCP connection. The only drawback is that the HTTP/2 protocol doesn’t cater for slow connections in that all requests are still sent and received over the same connection.
QUIC alleviates this because it’s built on the UDP protocol which handles multiple connections at the same time, something that TCP is unable to achieve. It effectively reduces the number of handshakes required (which is already increased over the HTTPS protocol) to download resources, making it very effective over congested networks.
Even if one request fails in its entirety, all other requests can still be loaded.
Daily Automated Backups Are A Life Saver
If you need to restore your site from one of Siteground’s automated daily backups or one of your own on demand backups (not available on StartUp plan), no problem.
Strangely enough, I never thought backups were such an important feature until the day I needed to restore my site to a previous state.
The only feature that I feel Siteground (and all hosts I’m aware of excepting Cloudways) lacks is the ability to revert a restore.
That said, it’s easy enough to adopt a work around.
Simply make an on-demand backup before performing a restore.
Critical Enhancements With Siteground’s New Interface
Siteground have recently scrapped their cPanel interface in favor of a refreshing new interface similar to what cloud hosting providers design for their platforms.
All of the same functionality is available, and more. And as per Siteground, its’ not just the “skin” that’s changing. Siteground expect to see a performance boost. But don’t take that for granted.
All new signups will be using the new interface while existing clients will be transitioned slowly.
The new interface is not available for cloud and dedicated hosting. Nor is it available for Italian and Spanish speaking clients.
Siteground believe that the new interface will achieve some very important objectives.
Enhanced user experience.
Mobile friendly so the interface can be accessed using any device.
Separation of site tools for each website under the same account. Each site will have it’s own set of tools.
Fast site creation plus enhanced onboarding process thereby enhancing the ease of joining Siteground.
Enhanced agency and developer orientation. While a significant portion of Siteground’s clients are single site users, I am sure that this move is designed to attract a greater degree of agency business.
Agencies can now start a client’s site on their own account and then ship it to them with a single click and transfer ownership with ease. This is a huge advancement.
Ability for clients to add developers as collaborators on the site who can then handle support issues on the client’s behalf. (GrowBig plan and higher).
Provide clients with white-label access to site tools.
Access all client sites with a single login under your account.
There’s no such thing as the “best” hosting provider. I say this because:
The level of support offered by Siteground makes it an ideal choice for beginners.
Uptime is brilliant.
Being managed, things happen in the background without you having to be concerned about data loss and security.
Siteground’s speed technology and ability to handle traffic is indisputable.
I wrote this Siteground hosting review to make you aware that you really do get what you pay for and each hosting provider appeals to a different market segment.
This Siteground review was not designed to be a Siteground vs Bluehost or Siteground vs GoDaddy type of review. I made some comparisons purely out of a need to drive home certain pertinent facts in order to keep you informed.
Siteground remains a very formidable player in the WordPress hosting arena and I will continue to pass business their way in the knowledge that my referred customers have made an informed decision.
If you don’t yet have a hosting plan, I know you’ll have one real soon.
site loading in under 400ms and I’ll show you as I proceed through this Swift Performance review exactly why the competition is left lagging!
Not only is Swift Performance a better and more efficient WordPress speed optimization tool than anything else I’ve tried, but it’s also compares very favorably with the highly respected WP Rocket.
This incredible speed is not always evidenced by GTMetrix and Pingdom results.
The true effects of speed must be properly interpreted against time to first byte, first paint, contentful paint and DOM interactive times.
Together with the best value for money hosting, I’ve been able to get my loading time to under 400ms. And that’s not on a virtually blank website like others have tested on!
Improves site efficiency and speed through minification and concatenation of scripts and stylesheets with the ability to add exceptions.
Improves SEO through Asynchronous optimization of JavaScript.
Cache Ajax requests and dynamic content.
Advanced granular control.
Best Features Of Swift Performance Pro
Works out of the box after running the setup wizard.
INSANELY FAST!
CACHE WARMER so visitors always get a cached page.
Built-in image optimizer – *UNLIMITED*.
Built-in database cleaner.
Plugin organizer.
Enqueue critical fonts.
CDN integration.
Host Google Analytics locally.
Speeds up merging process and reduces CPU usage through an API.
Swift Performance Lite/Pro Features
Features
Swift Pro
Swift Lite
Quick Setup Wizard
Y
Y
Compute API
Y
N
Whitelabel
Y
N
Google Analytics Bypass
Y
Y
Heartbeat Control
Y
Y
Image Optimizer (Unlimited Images)
Y
N
Lazyload Images
Y
Y
Inline Small Images
Y
Y
Server Push
Y
N
Avoid Mixed Content
Y
N
Page Caching
Y
Y
Cache Warming (Preloading)
Y
Y
Browser Caching
Y
Y
GZip Compression
Y
Y
Remove Querystrings (Static Resources)
Y
Y
Minify CSS/JS
Y
Y
Combine CSS/JS
Y
Y
Generate Critical CSS
Y
Y
Async Combined JavaScript
Y
Y
Defer JS
Y
Y
CDN Support
Y
Y
Mobile Detection
Y
Y
Multisite Compatibility
Y
Y
WooCommerce Friendly
Y
Y
WPML Support
Y
Y
Caching For Logged In Users
Y
Y
Database Optimizer
Y
Y
Import/Export Settings
Y
Y
DNS Prefetch
Y
Y
Critical Icon Fonts
Y
N
Plugin Organizer
Y
Y
Appcache
Y
Y
Ajax Cache
Y
Y
Proxy 3rd Party JS
Y
Y
Remote Cron
Y
N
Much More Than Just A Caching Plugin
Swift Performance is not just a caching plugin. It’s the Swiss Army Knife of WordPress, providing you with the functionality of 5 different plugins (that you can now eliminate).
1. Google Analytics Bypass
This allows you to host Google analytics locally thereby speeding up your pages by eliminating the external call (HTTP request) to Google servers.
2. Heartbeat Control
The heartbeat API is used to facilitate communication between the browser and server by means of Ajax calls (when you are logged in). An example of its application is showing authors that a post is being edited.
The default heartbeat frequency between the browser and WordPress dashboard is 60 seconds.
Reducing or disabling Heartbeat activity can reduce server resource usage and will also help to speed up your WordPress backend.
3. Image Optimizer
No need for an image compression and optimization plugin. This is built into Swift Performance and allows for unlimited images to be compressed on upload. You can also resize images on upload, saving you from having to do this manually.
There’s more that you can do do with images but we’ll get to that later on.
4. Database Optimizer
Clean up your database. Delete unneeded revisions, expired transients and trashed posts, orphan and post meta as well as reindex and optimize database tables, comments and terms.
5. Plugin Organizer
When plugins are installed, their scripts and code becomes active on each and every page.
The plugin organizer allows you to add rule that will disable certain plugins, e.g. disable Imagify image optimizer on the frontend.. An exception rule would exclude a plugin with the exception of a specific page, for example.
Swift Gets Top Ratings
… 4.5/5 stars overall on wordpress.org.
and some individual ratings.
And a poll that I conducted on the WordPress Speedup Facebook Group confirms similar results.
Swift Performance Outperforms The Fastest Competitor Plugins
Ok, so don’t just take my word for it. Others are saying the same thing.
When I was on Siteground, I was always reasonably happy with Siteground’s inbuilt Supercacher plugin until Swift Performance came along. (Don’t get me wrong here. Siteground’s Supercacher is a formidable caching plugin).
I’d sort of reached a plateau with Supercacher and was already looking at other ways to improve speed even further.
I experimented with different combinations of SuperCacher, WP Rocket and Autoptimize.
WP Rocket + Autoptimize (no SuperCacher) = A bit faster.
But when I installed Swift Performance my site started wheel spinning!
So I went on to do some comparisons with Swift Performance and WP Rocket.
WP Rocket came a good second, but only in conjunction with Autoptimize.
But in terms of UX (user experience), Swift was miles ahead.
The first paint with WP Rocket and Autoptimize was quick, but then the text on my site disappeared momentarily and re-loaded together with my background images.
This didn’t happen with Swift Performance.
Swift Performance gave a smoother, one-time page load.
CONCLUSION:
Swift Performance = UNDOUBTEDLY FASTEST SPEED + SUPERIOR USER EXPERIENCE!!
I switched from Siteground a while ago because of their excessive renewal fees.
I’ve since had zero downtime whatsoever and I enjoy insanely fast speed and dedicated resources for substantially less than what I was paying for shared hosting!
Here are some of the best features offered by Cloudways:
No Contracts.
Pay As You Go Billing.
Dedicated Resources On A Cloud Server .
Choice of 5 Cloud Infrastructures.
Scalability.
Over 60 Data Centres Across The Globe.
Support From Highly Knowledgeable Cloud Engineers.
Swift Performance Optimal Settings
Swift Performance Lite can be installed from the WordPress repository.
Personally I use and recommend the Pro version for two main reasons.
It has a built in image optimizer that provides optimization for an unlimited amount of images, so there’s no need for a paid image optimizer.
It allows you to automatically resize your images to the correct dimensions on upload, saving you from doing it manually.
Remember, this is an investment in your business and one that you’ll be glad you made because Google rankings are worth ANYTHING!
Swift Performance has, for the first time ever, got me 100/100 (mobile / desktop) in Google Page Speed Insights.
Swift Performance costs $39.99 on an annual basis …
or can be paid quarterly or monthly.
It’s worth every cent.
Google is placing a good deal of importance on site speed in their ranking algorithms. And with good rankings it will pay for itself multiple times over.
Irrespective of whether you choose the Lite or Pro version, once installed, you can run the setup wizard which is real handy.
Click start.
At this stage you could run through the rest of the wizard but if you’re new to Swift then it’s a whole lot easier to use the auto-configured settings. This activates all the default settings, which I suggest you leave enabled.
Now follow this guide.
Go to Settings and enter your license key.
GENERAL
General
Use Compute API – Enable this. It gives an overall speed gain by speeding up merging and reducing CPU usage.
Beta Tester – Enable if you want to receive version updates during the testing phase.
Tweaks
Normalize Static Resources – Enable this. It removes Querystrings from static resources, like JavaScript, CSS and image file
Prefetch DNS – Enable. This enables the collection of DNS before page loading thus eliminating the request for it when loading the page.
Collect Domains From Scripts – Enable. This collects domains from scripts which are needed to prefetch the DNS’s.
Gravatar Cache – Enable this if you allow gravatars on your site (mainly used for commenting and author bios). Leave the default gravatar cache expiry at 3600.
Heartbeat
Toggle All to select all options – Set the Frequency to 60 Seconds. Use this if your backend is slow. No real need for it otherwise, but it won’t do any harm to save these settings.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics – This is a really cool feature. No need to add Google tag manager to your page headers in order to link Google Analytics to your site. Swift will host Google Analytics locally, thereby speeding up your site by reducing the extra DNS look-ups and resolving the leverage browser caching issue in Pingdom and GTMetrix.
Within Google Analytics, go to the Admin screen and in the middle column, select Tracking Info > Tracking Code.
Now add your tracking code to the Google Analytics screen. Make certain you don’t have the tag manager script added elsewhere on your site.
Delay Collect – Enable this to send the request to Google Analytics after the first user interaction, e.g. moving mouse, scrolling. The request will not be sent to Google otherwise, which makes sense in a way. It eliminates tracking where a user lands on a page by mistake, like an accidental click for instance.
Whitelabel
Whitelabel – This is more for a hosting company that doesn’t want to make public that it’s using the Swift caching plugin for WordPress for its speed optimization. This can be used together with the Hide Footprints option on the General tab.
MEDIA
Images
Optimize Images On Upload – Enable to automatically reduce file size on upload.
JPG Quality – Choose image quality for lossless compression. I choose 100%
PNG Quality – I leave these at 100% because I believe that quality images are important. For more information on image optimization.
Resize Large Images – If you’re lazy when it comes to resizing images, check this option to have Swift Performance resize your images on upload. Personally, I make sure to use the correct image dimensions.
Keep Original Images – Check this in case you need to revert to an original image for any reason.
Inline Small Images – This messes things up with my theme. You can play with this option.
Lazy Load Images – I believe this is bad for user experience, but that’s my own opinion.
Force Responsive images – You shouldn’t need this with modern themes.
Embeds
Youtube Smart Embed – Loads Youtube videos only on user interaction.
Exclude Youtube Videos – Exclude videos from being embedded based on a matching string.
Lazy Load iFrames – If you embed numerous Videos, Google maps or other media types on a single page, for example, you can check this option to increase page loading times. This is useful if your media appears further down in the page. Don’t lazy load iFrames if they appear at the top of your page because it will increase perceived loading times.
Exclude iFrames – Exclude iframes from being lazy loaded.
Load iFrames On User Interaction – You can choose to load the iframes only when a user interacts (mouse, scroll, touchstart).
OPTIMIZATION
General
Merge Assets For Logged In Users– Leave this unchecked if you are the only user. It’s meant to enhance speed on sites with multiple users, e.g. membership sites by combining CSS files and then delaying their delivery.
Optimize Prebuild Only – This option should be checked if you pre-build your cache automatically (recommended) – check this setting in Caching screen. This runs ONLY when your cache is busy pre-building. Good for user experience!
Optimize In Background – For me, this increased load time. Play with it because it may behave differently with different themes.
Fix Invalid HTML – I keep this option checked in case of any bad HTML in any plugins. No problem for StudioPress themes though :).
Minify HTML – Keep this checked. What’s the point of caching otherwise?
Disable Emojis – I keep this checked because emojis affect speed (You’ll learn that I’m a speed freak!!).
Limit Simultaneous Threads – On cloud hosting, leave unchecked in order to use all of the server’s resources to build your cache real quickly – Keep checked for shared hosting so as to save resources. I limit cache pre-building to 3 threads at a time. You can change this depending on your hosting and resources. Unfortunately, cache pre-building will be slower with this checked.
DOM Parser Max Buffer – Don’t touch this unless you know what you’re doing.
Scripts
Merge Scripts – Enable this to merge JavaScript files and reduce the number of HTML requests from the server.
Async Execute – This loads JS files asynchronously. It is not checked by default but this is one Swift Performance’s very innovative features. You won’t see any difference in Pingdom and GT Metrix times, however, your site will have a better perceived load time leading to enhanced user experience. Combining JavaScript files into one file will lead to fewer server requests and better efficiency. However, the first JavaScript can only execute once the entire file has been downloaded. This has no effect on the rendering of the page, unfortunately. But the Async execution breaks the file up into chunks. It effectively creates separate “parts”. Once the first part (chunk) is received, the browser executes the script while waiting for the next part to download. This process repeats itself until all parts have been received. The important thing is that the first “paint” can begin immediately the first part is received, so, from a user experience perspective, it seems as if the load time is quicker than it actually is! In effect, part of the page loading is happening in the background without noticing it. I found my site loads really well like this. Play with it and see how it affects your page rendering.
Exclude 3rd Party Scripts – If you check this, plugin scripts will not be merged with your theme scripts. It’s actually turned off by default but you may need to enable it if any of your plugin functionality doesn’t work.
Exclude Scripts – You can leave the above option disabled and then exclude individual scripts from the merge. The selected script will then load in the correct order and won’t be deferred to the end of the page as is normal with merged scripts. You can enter a specific word found in the script string to exclude it.
Exclude Inline Scripts – Some scripts may be inlined within your HTML because they need to load at a specified point. This allows you to exclude them. Again, this is used if you include 3rd party scripts in the merge process.
Exclude Script Localizations – These contain variables as well as personalized data. It’s best to enable this otherwise you may land up with separate JS files for all your website’s pages.
Minify Java Scripts – This removes all white space an unnecessary characters to reduce file size, without affecting any functionality. Best to keep this enabled.
Minify With API – This is slower than the standard minification method, but is possibly worth using if the standard minification causes errors.
Proxy 3rd Party Assets – You can send any 3rd party JS and CSS through a specified proxy server. I’d leave this off. It only affects grading scores which are meaningless anyway.
Separate Scripts – Leave this unchecked. If enabled, Swift will save JS files separately for each page. It uses up unnecessary space and also affect the speed at which the cache warms (pre-loads). The idea behind this is to prevent all JS from loading on every page. Problem is you also need to manually note what scripts are needed where and human error could lead to mistakes and broken functionality.
Print Merged Scripts Inline – Leave unchecked. This prints merged scripts into the footer instead of keeping it in a file. The idea of deferring JS from running at the top of the page is great because it can make your page load faster, but if a script is needed above the fold, it doesn’t serve you. It also delays cache warming.
Lazy Load Scripts – A cool idea really. It will make your page load faster initially and the script will only run / execute after the first user engagement, for example scrolling, clicking etc.
Styles
Merge Styles – Enable this to merge CSS files to reduce the number of HTML requests from the server. NOTE: This broke my site layout until I enabled the generate critical CSS option. It’s better to have this option enabled but if it breaks your site and you can’t fix it with the critical CSS option, leave it disabled. If disabled, you cannot make use of any other options on this screen.
Generate Critical CSS – Enable this. Swift will automatically generate the critical CSS. This helps with perceived load time by rendering the top of the page first, helping to keep users from clicking away from a blank page!
Extra Critical CSS – Use this to add EXTRA critical CSS.
Disable Full CSS – I would enable this. It excludes non-critical CSS and can cause styling problems. All the CSS is there for a reason.
Compress Critical CSS – Enable to reduce file size. It works for me but check for yourself.
Remove Keyframes – I don’t enable this. It’s disabled by default. It removes animations from critical CSS.
Print Critical CSS Inline – I leave this disabled. It adds the critical CSS to the page header and saves a round trip by having to download it from the server. Inlining CSS probably benefits perceived load times but very marginally, but I’ve found that my full load times are longer, albeit marginal too. I’m also using the Genesis framework which is highly optimized anyway, but play with this – your theme may do something different. NOTE – Edit Date 23 Sept 2018: Since the time of writing I have now enabled this option, together with printing the rest of the CSS into the footer. This option is only available if you choose to inline critical CSS. This helped me to achieve 100/100 in Google Page Speed Insights!
Separate Styles – If you enable this, Swift will create separate merged CSS files for each page as opposed to using one site wide CSS for every single page – not every page needs all the CSS. If your site has a numerous types of pages, e.g. e-commerce pages, pages that use a page builder, other that use standard editor etc., this may benefit you.
Minify CSS – I’ve experimented with basic and full minification and don’t see a difference. I therefore leave it on basic – less to go wrong.
Bypass CSS Import – I don’t include imported CSS in my merged styles. Google fonts are an example of imported CSS files.
Exclude 3rd Party CSS – Leave this disabled to include 3rd party CSS in merged files. Enable it if it causes any styling issues. This is plugin dependent.
Exclude Styles – If you merge external CSS files, you can always eliminate individual ones that may not play well.
Exclude Inline Styles – If you merge styles and inline any CSS, you can exclude specific files from merging.
Include Styles. This allows you to pre-load CSS files that are loaded with JavaScript. You can prevent certain JavaScript from loading, whilst still loading the CSS that the JS calls.
CACHING
General
Enable Caching – This allows you to toggle caching on and off. Maybe useful for testing reasons? Please make sure to enable this.
Caching Mode – I use Disk Cache With Rewrites. It’s faster than PHP Caching.
Early Loader – Enable this for best speed.
Cache Path – Should populate itself using your server information.
Cache Expiry Mode – You can choose between time based, action based and intelligent mode. Action based is best as long as you don’t use an expirable asset on the frontend. The cache will be cleared if you modify something or manually clear it.
Clear Cache On Update Post By Page – Allows you to set the pages where you want Swift Performance to clear the cache after updating or publishing a post. I’ve not used this as yet.
Clear Cache On Update Post By URL – Same as above but you set the URL instead of a page.
Enable Caching For Logged In Users – I NEVER turn this on. Firstly, it could interfere with page builders. Secondly it increases cache size.
Separate Mobile Device Cache – Mostly for use where you have a separate mobile site or have AMP enabled.
Case Sensitive URL’S – This converts URL’S to lower case for caching.
Enable Browser Cache – This generates code in your .htaccess file to set expires headers. Very useful! I prefer to let Swift take care of the headers code so I removed my own from my .htaccess file – no need for both.
Enable GZip – This should be enabled. It compresses files for WordPress speed optimization. Compression rules will be written to your .htaccess file.
Send 304 Header – I don’t check this.
Cache 404 Pages – I don’t have 404 pages so no need for me to enable this. You can enable it if you have numerous 404 pages that are frequently visited.
Ignore Querystring – Leave unchecked.
Enable Dynamic Caching – Here you can specify cacheable requests. Unchecked for me.
Cacheable Ajax Actions – This is one Of Swift’s advanced features that I still need to play with. It allows you to cache resource intensive Ajax requests as well as allowing you to set expiry times. I haven’t used this yet so I can’t throw more light on this for now.
Ajax Cache Expiry Time – I have no idea what is ideal, so I assume the default time to be the best.
Tweaks
Avoid Mixed Content – If your site can be loaded via HTTP and HTTPS as well it can cause mixed content errors. If you enable this option it will remove the protocol from all resources to avoid it. Use it only on HTTPS sites.
Keep Original Headers – If you use a plugin that sends custom headers you can keep them for the cached version as well.
Case Insensitive URLs – Leave unchecked. Url’s should always be lower case.
Lazyload elements – Great for posts with many comments.
Exceptions
Exclude Post Types – This is a great way of preventing caching of unnecessary items which cause the cache to be larger than it should be, thus delaying cache warming (pre-building). When you click in this field, Swift Performance will show a list of items you can choose to exclude. Except for pages, posts and products, I would exclude all items.
Exclude Pages – By default, pages like WooCommerce cart, account and checkout won’t be cached. You can exclude other pages here. Make sure to exclude contact pages because forms may not send if cached and dynamic page, pages that include tracking scripts and the like. Once again, clicking in this box will display a list you can select items from.
Exclude URL’S – If you have items such as feeds and JSON pages, that you can’t exclude with the above, you can do so here.
Exclude Content Parts – Here you can exclude pages that contain specific content. Enter the specific text using leading / trailing # to exclude that page from being cached.
Exclude User Agents – A user agent refers to software that acts on behalf of a user. Examples are browsers or email readers. It could also refer to specific devices like mobiles.
Exclude Crawlers – Known crawlers like Googlebot should really be seeing fresh pages as opposed to cached pages, so I would check this item.
Exclude Author Pages – Enable to exclude author pages. They’re not pages that are sought after at the best of times so no need to waste cache resources on this.
Exclude Archive – Because blog pages are regularly viewed, I would cache these for speed, so don’t enable this.
Exclude REST URL’S – Enable this. No need to cache these pages.
Exclude Feed – As above. No need to cache these and waste pre-load resources.
Warmup (cache warmer / cache preloader)
Enable Remote Prebuild Cache – This uses an API to pre-build the cache. For my setup I need to leave this unchecked. In certain circumstances it could fix pre-building where it’s too slow or not working properly. You will need to play with this, but the default is unchecked.
Prebuild Cache Automatically – Check this. It warms the cache automatically after it’s been cleared. You can toggle this off if your server becomes overloaded at specific times.
Discover New Pages – Check this to have the plugin automatically discover new pages for pre-building, for example plugin created pages and pagination. Watch out for unnecessary pages, which you can always exclude as explained in exceptions.
Prebuild Author pages – Author pages are not visited very often. If you find that they’re visited often, you can check this.
Prebuild Archive – I keep this enabled. Your blog page changes regularly and is visited often, so best to prebuild this.
Prebuild REST URL’S – Leave this unchecked.
Prebuild Feed – Keep this unchecked. Not needed.
Varnish
Enable Auto Purge – Enable this if you want Swift Performance to automatically clear the Varnish cache when the Swift cache is cleared.
Custom Host – It may be necessary to enter the Varnish IP details if you use a proxy server like Cloudflare.
Appcache
This feature preloads either specified pages or your entire site (you choose) into the user’s browser application cache. It speeds up navigation remarkably.
* This feature can negatively affect the speed of your cache warming.
My site’s navigation is so quick in any event, that I don’t use this feature. You may want to experiment with it as themes and coding differs vastly!
Enable Appcache For Desktop – This enables appcache for desktop devices.
Appcache Mode – Choose specific pages for appcache preloading or the entire site.
Desktop Max Size – You can limit the size that the visitor’s browser can download. Default is set at 100Mb.
Exclude Pages – You can exclude specific pages if your appcache mode is set to full site.
Exclude Strings – Where a specified string is found in the URL, you can choose to exclude that page. You can see that Swift Performance has thought about all the permutations!
Enable Appcache For Mobile – The same settings appear for mobile devices. The only difference is the maximum appcache size. The default is 5Mb but if you want to increase this the browser will ask you to provide permission to use storage. The developer has indicated that this limit is not documented and is also highly variable and suggests sticking to the default setting.
CDN
General
Enable CDN – Toggle to turn on settings to purge your CDN cache ONLY. This option does not activate your CDN. Activation is effected with your CDN plugin.
CDN Hostname – Enter a domain only – don’t include http/s or www prefixes.
Enable CDN on SSL – Here you can specify different hostnames for secure connection. Leave blank to use the same hostname on http and https network protocols.
Cloudflare
Enable Auto Purge – Check this automatically clear the Cloudflare cache when the Swift cache is cleared, which should also coincide with changes you make on your site.
Cloudflare Account Email – Enter the email you used to register with Cloudflare.
Cloudflare API – You can find this in your Cloudflare overview tab.
Max CDN
If you’re using Max CDN, fill in your alias, consumer key and consumer secret.
*WOOCOMMERCE*:
If you’re wondering why you don’t see this screen, it’s because you aren’t using WooCommerce.
Cache Empty Minicart – Check this. It empties the number in the mini cart icon at the top right of your screen.
Disable Cart Fragments – This disables the minicart icon at the top right of the screen.
WooCommerce Session Cache – I’m not sure what this is for. Sorry.
Wrapping Up
The developers have included options to achieve just about any type of configuration you can dream of.
Summary of important points:
First and foremost, choose the best WordPress hosting you can afford.
Cloudways offers the best value for money hosting while benefiting from their brilliantly optimized stack (for speed) and dedicated resources.
In my opinion, Swift Performance provides top user experience + speed.
Remember, website speed matters!Personally, I believe the Swift Performance caching plugin for WordPress is streets ahead of most others and with a monthly plan available, there’s no excuse not to give it a try.So what are you waiting for?
A slow WordPress site is about the worst thing you can expose your users to. What you need to concentrate on is the perceived load time, the time it takes for users to believe the site has fully loaded.
Websites comprise multiple DOM (document object model) elements such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS that add overhead to any website. They’re unavoidable. But knowing how to optimize them for speed is what counts.
Get the perceived load time down to an instant and your slow WordPress site will be a thing of the past!
What Causes A Slow WordPress Site?
Well, how long is a piece of string?
There’s no single cause for a slow WordPress site.
Poor speed is normally the culmination of a number of factors, that combined, result in a poorly optimized site.
Let’s take a closer look.
Poor Web Hosting – The #1 Cause Of A Slow WordPress Site
Good hosting doesn’t have to be expensive but it does have to be fast.
I used to host my sites with Siteground who are excellent. But I switched to Cloudways because of Siteground’s excessive renewal costs.
While their semi-dedicated (GoGeek) plan can handle up to 100,000 visits per month at a regular cost of $35 per month, you can get a Cloudways plan for $11 per month that can handle way more than 100,000+ visits PLUS you get an incredibly fast stack that makes Siteground look as if they’re looking for parking!
Pretty much dictated by your hosting but if you’re privileged enough to host with Cloudways I’d suggest you switch from MySQL to MariaDB. It’s noticeably faster.
Loading Unused JavaScript And CSS
Some plugins inject their code into every page and post of your site.
Certain themes do the same thing.
Asset CleanUp helps you to determine exactly what scripts and CSS are running and allows you to disable, on a per page / post basis, those which aren’t required, thus reducing the amount of code that needs to be parsed.
You’ll be surprised how much loading time this can shave off!
Too Many Or Poorly Coded Plugins
Some plugins are wonderful. But you must be mindful that they inject additional code into your WordPress installation and therefore add overhead to your site.
The easiest way to check out the extent to which a plugin slows down a WordPress site is to do a speed check both before and after installation. I did this with Jetpack and found that the plugin added a whole 13 seconds to my load time. Funny thing is I was only using the plugin for automated social media posting and comments so all the other setting were turned off.
Strangely enough, even well coded plugins aren’t always lightweight, but poorly coded ones will certainly slow your site down. Substandard coding creates buggy behavior and is often responsible for too many or unnecessary database calls (which we’ll get to later on) which make WordPress sites unncessarily slow.
I make it a habit to keep plugins to a bare minimum and I recommend you deactivate and delete plugins that you don’t use. Personally, I take this a step further by accessing my cPanel file explorer and removing plugin folders that are left behind after deletion. It makes for a cleaner installation if nothing else. If you’re on cloud hosting, you’ll have to do this via SFTP.
Using code snippets is a great way to avoid plugins and the additional overhead they add. Just be sure to get them from a reputable source.
Lastly, make sure that the plugin you want to use is compatible with your version of WordPress.
Poorly Coded And Bloated Theme Choice
A fast, lightweight, well coded and optimized theme will most certainly outperform a bloated, graphic laden theme. That’s why I only use StudioPress themes running on the Genesis framework.
Besides the impressive list of features, the beauty of a proper framework is that the framework is the “engine” that powers the operation of the theme, which is essentially a “skin” with its own design and layout.
Improvements and updates can therefore be made to the framework without affecting the design of the theme which yoou can manipulate to get the look and feel that you want.
You can read more about the StudioPress themes and Genesis Framework in my StudioPress review.
We have seen themes which put 3x extra load to the server. Turned out it caused 3x more database queries – which is bad in itself. Then we found out that some of the queries are unoptimized. Not good.
WordPress Optimization Guide
StudioPress themes are probably the most widely used themes in the WordPress community and the funny thing is that they’re actually cheaper than most most other themes which don’t come close in terms of quality, features and speed.
They range in price from $99.95 to $129.95. This includes the cost of the Genesis Framework which has a value of $59.95. Your second theme onward are discounted and also don’t include the Genesis framework as that can be used on multiple sites, as can themes.
No Caching Or Slow Caching Plugin
Repeated requests for web pages from a server means more CPU usage and translates to a slowdown in server speed which can cause or exacerbate a slow WordPress site. Another reason why great hosting is imperative.
It’s way more efficient to store and serve static pages from a cache, thereby reducing server load and increasing speed.
This can improve performance several hundred times over for fairly static pages.
WordPress Optimization Guide
Because cached pages are readily available, they don’t need to be repeatedly retrieved (and built) from a database. They’re sent immediately to a user’s browser which improves page loading time tremendously.
This type of caching must not be confused with browser caching, although the best caching plugins include certain browser caching features such as expires headers, which we’ll get to shortly.
If you’re on shared hosting, caching is not negotiable. It’s essential.
Personally, I use WP Rocket and Swift Performance Pro on (on two different sites).
They are both really great plugins. Both sites use the same theme so it’s easy to compare the two directly. I achieve blazing fast load times with both of them.
WP Rocket is brilliant in terms of performance and ease of use.
Swift Performace Pro offers more granular control but you need to know quite a bit more about the technical aspects of caching to set it up properly.
If you’re looking for a free option, try W3 Total Cache but be forewarned that this plugin has around 9 different tabs with a multitude of settings, enough to scare even seasoned WordPress users.
The small investment in a premium caching plugin will save you endless hours of frustrating configuration and your time will be more financially effective if you spend it on generating income.
In my opinion, WP Rocket is the top caching solution in the WordPress universe. It’s a $49 investment that will pay for itself many times over.
I’ve added this section here because this aspect of speed optimization is very closely related to caching.
PHP is a server side language and is the official language of WordPress.
Every single page that loads requires large amounts of PHP code to be “parsed” (executed).
Poorly coded (code heavy) themes and plugins, as well as too many plugins (as already mentioned), cause an exponential rise in the amount of PHP code which can add several seconds to each page load.
In many server environments (especially shared hosting), this “parse” time can greatly affect performance, adding several seconds to the total time it takes to finish loading a page.
WordPress Optimization Guide
A specific type of caching called OPCache, stores or rather caches the PHP content in a temporary cache which helps to avoid the need to parse PHP code too frequently. The stored code reduces parse time and is known as a PHP accelerator.
Each new version of PHP makes speed enhancements and for this reason it’s important to always keep updated with the most recent version.
And while OPcache is supported by PHP 5.5+ it has several more options available in PHP 7+ (along with generally faster PHP performance), so it’s a good idea to stay as updated as possible.
WordPress Optimization Guide
Browser Caching – Add Expires Headers
Expires headers invariably comes up in GT Metrix and Pingdom speed optimization suggestions.
Certain assets such as images, CSS and JavaScript don’t generally change very often. For this reason, it’s more efficient for them to be cached in a user’s browser, thereby preventing them from having to be sent from the server every time the same user visits your site.
By setting an expiry date for each asset type, the visitor’s browser will store these for a specified time so that the same information can be rendered almost instantly with each subsequent request.
This makes a tremendous difference to load time for repeat visitors. It has no bearing for new visitors.
Expires headers are added to the .htaccess file in your website’s root directory. Here’s an example of what they look like.
# Media
ExpiresByType audio/ogg "access plus 2 months"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2 months"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2 months"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2 months"
ExpiresByType video/mp4 "access plus 2 months"
ExpiresByType video/ogg "access plus 2 months"
ExpiresByType video/webm "access plus 2 months"
WP Rocket automatically adds expires headers to your .htaccess file.
Enable GZip Compression On Server
As the name indicates, GZip compresses the size of your website files for quicker transmission and load time.
According to Varvy, this can save around 50% to 70% of the file size for HTML and CSS files.
Depending on the type of server, this is usually achieved by adding code to the .htaccess file or config file.
Here’s an example of a few random lines extracted from my .htaccess file.
WP Rocket automatically inserts GZip compression code into the .htaccess file.
Optimize Images
Unoptimized images eat into bandwidth and are a major cause of slow WordPress sites.
Saving images with the lowest possible file size – not necessarily dimension size – will maximize speed.
PNG image compression is lossless. This compression reduces the file size of an image without affecting image quality. Lossy compression, applicable to JPG, reduces file size and quality.
The JPG format allows for the greatest degree of bandwidth saving but most times you will be compromising between image quality and size. Nevertheless, it’s not difficult to produce very acceptable images whilst reducing file size multiple times.
Adobe Photoshop facilitates image compression at different quality levels and it’s good practice to get into the habit of optimizing images prior to uploading them to your website.
As a minimum, I recommend installing an image compression plugin which is used to compress images on upload. TinyPNG losslessly compresses both .png and .jpg images. The first 500 compressions per month are free and the cost for additional compressions, which is billed on a pay as you use basis (no monthly fees), is hardly worth talking about.
Swift Performance Pro includes an image optimizer that gives you unlimited image compression together with a handful of other image optimization tools for maximum speed, e.g. lazy loading, auto resizing and bulk image optimization.
Lazy Load Images
Lazy loading or deferring the loading of images until they enter the user’s viewport can make a vast difference to the first paint time (perceived load time) and also improves total page load time.
I’ve also found this to be very beneficial to improving / fixing CLS (cumulative layout shift) issues, one of Google’s new Core Web Vitals metrics. CLS will become a ranking factor during 2021 so definitely something to be aware of. You can check for CLS issues in your Google Search Console.
I have tested a number of lazy load plugins in the WordPress repository but honestly, the best lazy load feature I’ve found so far is included in WP Rocket.
The lazy load feature built into the Swift Performance plugin is also really good but it must be configured properly.
Prevent Image Hotlinking (Embedding)
Disabling WordPress embeds prevents 3rd parties from linking directly to your images on your site, for use on their’s.
This practice saves those 3rd parties from loading their own images onto their pages and in turn, consumes your bandwidth due to the images being loaded from your server.
If you’re a WP Rocket user, there’s an option to toggle this setting. Otherwise, add this code to your .htaccess file.
#Disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?facebook.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?twitter.com [NC]
RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]
# End image hotlinking
Make sure to replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name.
Google, Facebook and Twitter are whitelisted. Add or subtract as you wish.
Minimize Media Embeds
While we’re on the subject of media, we may as well tackle media embeds.
What I’m going to mention next is something I say with trepidation because I believe that video is going to be up-ranked in Google SERP.
Other than that, media embedding slows down your website. It’s best for speed to minimize media embeds and rather keep them on Youtube and other media sharing sites. You can always add a link where necessary.
Use a CDN
A content delivery network can greatly reduce the load on your website’s server. Thy’re most effective when used with a caching plugin and serve a dual purpose really.
To offload static assets such as images, JavaScript and CSS which reduces server load.
To distribute content over multiple data centers around the globe, thereby reducing geographical distance for content delivery.
Cloudflare has a network of data centers around the world. Whilst it isn’t a “typical” CDN, they offer a free plan which allows for routing of your site’s traffic through their global network.
Add A Cloudflare Page Rule
If you run a static site, a “cache everything” page rule will propel your performance. Please don’t use this rule if you run a dynamic site such as an e-commerce site.
This rule does wonders for TTFB (time to first byte) and contentful paint time (perceived load time).
If you use this rule, please make sure to log out of your dashboard and then purge everything in Cloudflare > Caching otherwise your users will see the admin ribbon on your live site.
Offload Static Assets To Multiple Subdomains
Depending on your hosting and caching, there may be some speed improvement by offloading and distributing static images, JavaScript and CSS files between multiple subdomains.
This also alleviates the alerts in GTMetrix to serve static content from cookie free domains.
Browsers are limited in the number of requests that can be made to a server at one time. Most can only make 2 requests simultaneously.
If the total number of files required to render a page can be retrieved from say 3 or 4 different hostnames, more requests (and retrievals) can be made simultaneously. Obviously this reduces the time it takes to retrieve all the information required to render a page, with the concomitant reduction in load time.
Optimize Or Disable Gravatars
Each gravatar that appears in your comments must be fetched from an external server. So 50 comments means 50 external HTTP requests. And it’s not just the additional requests that add overhead to your site. Your site speed is also dependent on the speed of the gravatar.com server.
Heck, it’s not surprising there are so many slow WordPress sites.
Here are 3 ways to handle gravatars.
If speed matters to you (which is why you’re here) it’s best to turn them off completely.
If you absolutely must have them on your site, you should cache them with Swift Performance. Unfortunately, WP Rocket doesn’t cache gravatars – yet.
Thrive Comments is a paid commenting system that’s built on the native WordPress comments system. It’s the best 3rd party commenting system I’ve come across so far. They have options to lazy load the entire comments window meaning that your page will fully load before the comments do. You can also choose to have the comments show only once they come into the viewport (i.e. when the user scrolls to comments).
Use A Fast Commenting System
Admittedly, the native WordPress commenting system lacks attractiveness and certain elements that make top commenting systems engaging for users.
But truth be told, it’s still the fastest commenting system.
I’ve literally spent hundreds of hours researching and testing commenting systems for speed and engagement.
Here are my results:
WordPress native comments is the fastest.
Disqus is the most engaging but it’s infamous for slowing up WordPress websites.
Thrive Comments is the best 3rd party commenting system. There are options to enhance loading times with lazy loading and it’s engaging too. Users can also subscribe to comments which they can’t do with the native WordPress system. Only thing is it will set you back $39 (once off).
If you want to make the native WordPress commenting system look cool, try this CSS.
Too many comments on your post can really hurt your loading speed.
Luckily WordPress makes it easy to split comments into pages. You can choose how many top level comments to display on any one page by changing the discussion settings from your dashboard.
Only activate this setting when it becomes necessary, otherwise Yoast SEO will tell you to switch it off.
Avoid Google Maps On Your Site
Besides the fact that maps contain an awful amount of data, they must also be fetched from Google servers creating an additional HTTP request.
Moreover, if Google servers become slow, so does your loading time.
Steer Clear Of Ad Networks
All well and good to want to monetize your site. Ad networks such as Google Adsense and Mediavine require high traffic sites to be profitable.
Besides these making calls to external servers, not all of which are optimized for speed, the combination of the added HTTP requests and high traffic will not only make your WordPress site slow, it can literally bring your site to a standstill.
Limit Revisions
WordPress stores every saved draft or update to a published post in the site’s database.
It doesn’t simply add the changes to an existing post in the database. The entire post gets re-saved with each revision.
So 3 revisions of a 3000 word post leaves 9000 words in the database. Imagine a blog with 1000 posts!
As the database grows in size, each query will take longer, causing your site to slow down.
I limit my revisions to a maximum of 3, by adding the following line to my wp-config.php file, above the ASBPATH code:
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);
All future posts will be limited. But what about all the existing revisions to date?
However, WP Rocket includes a database cleaner allowing you to clean up revisions, thereby preventing you from having to use yet another plugin.
Merge Scripts
It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to speed up a slow WordPress site or further optimize a quick one, merging scripts makes a substantial difference to speed by drastically reducing the number of HTML requests from the server.
Because of this, it even speeds up page loading on HTTP/2 servers (which are highly optimized anyway) whilst saving valuable server resources in the process.
I’ve tried a number of really great optimization plugins (e.g. Autoptimize) in the past but WPRocket does it effortlessly.
Load Scripts Asynchronously
When scripts are merged, the full merged script must be loaded before any individual one can run. Obviously this delays scripts at the top of the queue.
The Async option splits the merged scripts on the client side allowing each one to run immediately upon loading. This works together with merging and is another one of Swift’s ingenious features.
This makes a huge difference to the perceived load time and enhances user experience greatly.
You see scripts are, what we call, render blocking. Let me explain.
When an HTML page is loading, any scripts that are met along the way actually block the parsing of the HTML code (and hence the loading of the page) until they are retrieved and executed themselves.
Async loading means that the parsing of the HTML does not need to pause to fetch and execute a script. The HTML can continue to execute and the page can continue to load. The script will execute in parallel with the HTML as soon as it becomes ready to do so.
Whilst Async loading doesn’t really defer the parsing of JavaScript, it’s more effective for speed and perceived performance than deferring scripts to the footer.
Minify Scripts
Minification removes any white space from scripts thereby reducing file size and enhancing speed.
It doesn’t affect the functionality in any way.
Lazy Load / Defer Scripts
This will delay loading of the particular script until last. In fact, the script will only run when the user first interacts with it, e.g when it comes into the viewport or when a mouse button is clicked.
This is pretty much the same as deferring the parsing of JavaScript.
Because the selected scripts don’t run when the page is first loaded, it decreases loading time. Another great feature of WP Rocket.
Merge CSS
Merging CSS can break your website. You can always reverse the process but it’s important that you test this on your your website and your specific installation.
This works in exactly the same way as merging scripts. Merging CSS reduces the number of requests and therefore decreases load time, even on HTTP/2 servers.
Critical CSS is a part of the CSS that is critical to load the “above the fold” content of the site. This could also be called “Above The Fold CSS”.
Loading the critical CSS inline (in the <head> section of the site) makes the above the fold content and styles load very fast as it’s readily available and doesn’t have to be fetched from a separate file. This makes the page load without interfering with the render path and obviously improves the contentful paint time or perceived load time.
The rest of the css can be loaded as normal or even deferred by moving it to the footer.
This ensures that your WordPress site isn’t slow to load, thereby retaining visitors, increasing traffic, conversions and income.
Doing this manually requires hand coding and is time consuming. WP Rocket has done all the heavy lifting already. It automatically generates critical CSS to prevent render blocking. All you need to do is let the plugin take care of this for you.
Minify CSS
The same as for scripts, minification removes white space from the CSS thereby reducing file size. This doesn’t affect functionality.
Host Google Analytics Locally
Google analytics requires a small script to be placed on every page of your site. This will ideally be placed in the head section.
This invokes a DNS lookup and obviously has a negative impact on speed.
One way to improve performance is to place the script in the footer. This alleviates any render blocking. However, this isn’t ideal.
WP Rocket will host Google Analytics locally, thereby alleviating any speed shortcomings. And because it’s hosted locally, it also solves the “leverage browser caching” alert in Pingdom and GTMetrix.
Combine And Enqueue Fonts
As a general rule of thumb, Google, Adobe and other fonts represent about 3% of the total weight of a web page.
Combining fonts saves repeated requests for them meaning that they’re all fetched at the same time from the external server, thereby reducing overall time.
Importing Google fonts into your theme by adding @import in your stylesheet is really easy but this method prevents parallel downloading, thereby adversely affecting speed.
It’s better to use the standard method by adding the following to the head section of your pages.
The only problem with this method is that you have to either add this to your header.php file (before your main stylesheet) or your theme must provide a way to allow you to add code to the head section of your website.
If you use the Genesis Framework, you’re in luck because the developers take care of combining and loading of fonts within the code to optimize the process as much as possible. Here’s what the code looks like when fonts are combined and enqueued. The pipe operator (|) separates each combined font.
Host Fonts Locally And Adopt A Font Loading Strategy
I’ve tested extensively and found that (for me) hosting fonts locally definitely improves speed. It cuts out multiple external server requests and eliminates the DNS lookup. And combining this with a meaningful font loading strategy makes a substantial difference to user perception (perceived load time).
According to Pagepipe, emojis add 2 to 3 HTTP requests to a site, with a page weight of 5.6k to 14.7k.
There’s a plugin, of course, to disable them but then you’re adding the weight of an additional plugin to your site. Bad idea.
The best way to disable them is with WP Rocket. This is just such an amazing plugin. I mean how many plugins have we avoided so far with this Swiss Army Knife?
Minimize Redirects
If you’ve ever changed your site’s domain you’ll know first hand that if you want to retain your rankings in SERP you’ll have to create a redirect from all of the posts and pages on the old domain to all of the matching pages on the new domain.
It’s the same as changing your postal address if you move home.
These 4 small lines of code inserted into your .htaccess file are a prerequisite to retaining your rankings with Google when changing address.
Inasmuch as it’s efficient, the difference it makes to the speed of your site is significant.
It’s like ringing up your ISP to complain about a slow internet connection. After explaining in full detail to the technician what you’re experiencing, you’re told that you need to be transferred to higher level of support. And after your lengthy spiel to level 2 support, they have to pass you up to level 3.
Same waste of time when redirecting website visitors!
The same kind of redirect is used if you change a URL. It’s still a 301 redirect except that you don’t do this from .htaccess.
If you’re on shared hosting and you only have 1 or 2 redirects, you can do this from cPanel. This saves you having to use a plugin. Any more than that, I’d suggest you use a plugin like Redirection.
The best solution is to avoid redirects as much as possible.
Reduce Database Calls With Memcached
Memcached is open source software that is deployed to reduce the number of times a database must be read by storing data in memory thereby making it readily available for multiple use.
If you host with Cloudways, Memcached is included and activated in the server setup.
Use Redis Cache
Redis works in a similar way to memcached but it’s faster and more efficient.
Redis is included as a free addon with Cloudways. It’s easy to install and makes a marked difference to performance.
Show Only Post Exerpts On Archives Pages
Besides being at risk for duplicate content and a possible Google penalty, full posts on archives pages makes your pages really slow to load.
Furthermore, it becomes difficult for visitors to scroll through your postings, which is really bad for user experience.
Showing excerpts solves both speed and UX issues.
Eliminate Social Sharing Plugins
I’m not going to be very popular in the eyes of the social giants, but here goes.
Social sharing plugins can have a profound effect on performance optimization with most being responsible for thousands of slow WordPress sites.
Check out this speed test with Social Warfare (a very lean social plugin) installed.
And without the plugin.
The full load time is neither here nor there. But that’s not important when it comes to speed testing. Let’s take a look at the important metrics.
Metric (Times)
WITH Social Warfare
WITHOUT Social Warfare
Time To First Byte (Server Response)
176ms
58ms
Contentful Paint (Loading)
255ms
161ms
On a different note, because discussions are transported to Facebook, Twitter and the like, you must also weigh up the cost of lost engagement on your own site.
If you really must have them, consider the fact that almost 100% of mobile users never use them. And if you still must have them, make certain it’s a lightweight plugin and please do speed testing before and after adding the plugin.
Disable Unused Plugin Modules
Certain plugins, such as page builders, include a number of modules. Examples include counters, galleries and embeds.
JavaScript keeps these modules running so disabling those you don’t use will effectively reduce the amount of script and therefore improve speed.
Don’t Use Sliders
According to Yoast and Search Engine Land, sliders negatively affect speed and SEO.
They slow down your site, negatively impacting your SEO and conversion rate
Yoast
In fact, Google went so far as to introduce an algorithmic update in around 2012 that affected sites with little or no content above the fold.
A slider at the top of your site pushes any meaningful content below the fold.
If you absolutely must use one, make sure you choose a lightweight slider such as Soliloquy.
Use A Fast Gallery Plugin
As you know, images must be properly optimized. Remember you’ll be putting a number of them together in a gallery.
Additionally, in order not to extirpate your SEO and speed optimization efforts, a fast gallery plugin like Envira or Modula is essential.
Limit Your Hosting Account To One Website.
Hosting providers cleverly market their plans to accommodate more sites per account as the price steps up.
But each hosting account comes with a certain pre-allocated amount of resources.
Hosting multiple sites on one account is great if you don’t have complex, high traffic sites that consume greater resources. But in reality, more than one site per hosting account is going to make all of your WordPress sites slow.
Use A Lightweight SEO Plugin – Rank Math
Rank Math SEO is just over a year old and it’s gaining momentum fast.
Not only is it well coded, using only 30,500 lines of code to achieve way more FREE functionality than Yoast offers with 43,300 lines of code, but this also makes it faster, having a very positive effcet on site speed. Furthermore, it’s 100% bloat free.
My Rank Math SEO guide is the most comprehensive tutorial available on the internet and will help you to set it up with optimal settings for speed. It also provides a full post optimization guide.
Summary
I hope you’ve found this post useful and that you’ll now apply what you’ve learned to outrival your slow WordPress site.
If there’s anything else you feel I should include in this post, please let me know in the comments.
After all the years, W3 Total Cache is still a formidable caching plugin. But it’s not the easiest to configure. With over 12 pages of options, many have crashed their sites due to improper setup, so I’m going to show you how to configure W3 Total Cache for a lightning fast site.
Scores and grades do not equal speed. My biggest concern is to ensure great user experience.
It doesn’t matter to me whether a page takes 0.5 seconds or 8 seconds to fully load as long as the user is faced with meaningful above the fold content in under a second. In other words, the first contentful paint must be lightning fast. In the background, the page can complete loading all of the elements. This concept is known as perceived load time and it’s imperative to retain users on your site.
To achieve this, you’ll need great hosting and a fast caching plugin.
It’s no good trying to sort out speed problems with page caching if your hosting is crummy.
You may be able to get inconsistent bursts of speed with certain hosts but if you want consistent speed, backed with the finest hosting money can buy, I recommend Cloudways. You get a cloud server with dedicated resources that’s super responsive.
What You Can Expect
With the right W3 Total Cache settings and decent hosting, this is what you could expect to see.
Server response (time to first byte): 51ms.
Contentful paint: 252ms (pretty fast!).
The contentful paint time is the time it takes for the first bit of content to appear on the page and for a user to believe the page is fully loaded (perceived load time).
OK, without further ado, let’s look at the perfect W3 Total Cache settings.
General Settings
Preview Mode – enable this to preview your site to ensure that your changes don’t affect layout and functionality.
Page Cache – enable to cache your site’s pages and posts.
Minify – enable to remove white space from HTML, JavaScript and CSS without affecting functionality. This decreases file size thereby increasing speed.
Opcode Cache – caches PHP files to enhance speed. Enable this in order for W3TC to update the cache with each file request, thereby saving PHP from having to be restarted.
Database Cache – Enable to cache database objects. This reduces database calls and increases speed.
Object Cache – I would leave this alone. It is known to slow down your backend.
Browser Cache – Enabling this allows various data to be cached in the user’s browser. This increases speed tremendously because certain assets don’t have to be requested from the server with each visit to a page or post. NOTE: this only benefits repeat visitors.
CDN – allows you to enable the use of a CDN. Please don’t spend money on a CDN unless you’re using a good WordPress hosting provider.
Reverse Proxy – for servers that run Varnish.
Network Performance & Security By Cloudflare – please enable Cloudflare from the Extensions tab.
Fragment Cache – reduces execution time for certain common operations.
Page Cache Settings
Enable Caching for home page, feeds and SSL requests.
Don’t Cache Pages For Logged In Users – it is recommended by the developer that this be enabled.
Don’t Cache Pages For Certain User Roles – choose which user roles should not receive cached pages.
Cache Preload – the same as a cache warmer. This preloads the cache in order to always deliver cached pages to visitors, thereby enhancing user experience. Personally, I would recommend that you disable the automatic option because this will unnecessarily use server resources when not needed. I would also limit pages to 3 for shared hosting. Enable preloading upon published events.
Purge Policy – developer recommends to leave settings as per defaults so as not to degrade server performance.
Rest API and Advanced Settings – leave alone.
Minify Settings
Rewrite URL Structure – Enable.
Disable Minify For Logged In Users – your choice but I like to disable minification for logged in users.
HTML And XML – Enable, check inline CSS and JS minification. This will minify inline JavaScript and CSS.
JS – enable. I like to select async loading of JS. This won’t block the render path and will load JavaScript in parallel with the HTML.
CSS – Enable and combine CSS files.
Database Cache Settings
Leave as per defaults.
Object Cache Settings
Leave as per defaults.
Browser Cache Settings
Set Last Modified Header – Enable.
Set Expires Header – expires headers instruct the user’s browser exactly what assets to cache and how long to keep them cached before automatically clearing them.
Set Cache Control Header – enable to encourage caching.
Set Entity Tag Header – enable.
Set W3 Total Cache Header – assists in identifying optimized files.
Enable GZip Compression – very important as this compresses files for reduced size and increased speed.
Remove Query Strings From Static Resources – enable to normalize caching of resources that contain a ?
Don’t Set Cookies For Static Files – Enable.
Do Not Process 404 Pages – do not check this. Caching of 404 error pages reduces server load especially if have many of them.
CSS And JS – enable everything here except for prevent caching after changing settings. The settings here are pretty much the same as for the general options.
HTML And XML – enable everything. Settings are the same as for CSS and JS.
Media And Other Files – enable everything except for preventing settings changes. Settings are the same as for general settings.
CDN Settings
Host Attachments – enable to host all attachments with the CDN, e.g. images, download files.
Host wp-includes Files – enable.
Host Theme Files – enable this to host your theme files.
Host Minified CSS and JS Files – enable to offload these assets to CDN.
Enable custom files and canonical header.
Configuration: Objects – This is for Stackpath Signup. It will be a heck of a lot easier to sign up separately with Stackpath and then return to the settings screen to complete your link up. I’d also really appreciate the business. It helps to keep the lights on! Stackpath will cost you $10 per month.
Configuration: Full Site Delivery – this is for Cloudflare. Best is to access Cloudflare through your Siteground user area or cPanel. It’s really easy to get it set up that way. The following screen is for W3TC Cloudflare options followed with my page rule for insane speed.
Advanced Options – enable CORS header.
Cloudflare Settings
First authorize your Cloudflare. You can find your global API key in your Cloudflare account > Profile Settings.
Development Mode – enable to be able to make changes to your live content. Otherwise you will be making changes to the cache.
Rocketloader – set to ON.
Minify JS, CSS and HTML – enable for all.
Server Side Exclude – enable.
Email Obfuscation – allows you put your email address on your page but encrypt it for bots so you don’t get spam.
Hotlink Protection – prevents others from linking to your images and displaying them on their websites. This chews up your bandwidth because they’re served from your server.
Browser Integrity Check – enable.
Always Online – enable. If your server goes down, pages will still be served to visitors from the Cloudflare cache.
DDos Protection – enable. Protects your site from attack.
Cloudflare IP – enable IP Geolocation and IPV6.
SSL – very important to enable Full (https everywhere).
Cloudflare Page Rule
This page rule reduces server response time tremendously. I’v seen a change from over 200ms to below 50ms. Contentful paint times also reduce to levels that you’ve never seen before thereby enhancing perceived load times and user experience concomitantly.
Why I recommend Cloudways
Whether you want to believe it or not, Google pretty much controls the internet.
Because faster sites improve user experience considerably, site speed is now a major ranking factor.
Speed optimization doesn’t begin and end with installing a caching plugin. It’s the culmination of a number of very important factors. Some of these are mentioned in the WordPress Optimization Guide, with hosting being first.
The most crucial speed factor is hosting. #2 is a lightweight theme and #3 is caching. All other optimizations follow on from these.
Caching will certainly provide an immediate speed boost but in order to see consistently great speeds, fast hosting is crucial.
I’ve hosted sites with over 7 different hosting companies over the years. I’ve experienced all sorts of problems and the only one I can recommend without a hesitation of a doubt, is Cloudways. It’s not only blazing fast but you’ll get the best value for for money hosting in the marketplace.
Please take the time to read my Cloudways review and setup guide in order to give you a broader understanding of my reasons for suggesting them as your hosting provider.
Then why not take the FREE 3 day trial. You have nothing to lose.
Use PROMO CODE : WPMM25OFF when signup for the trial. If you decide to host with Cloudways you’ll get 25% off your your first 2 month’s hosting fees.
Wrapping Up
I hope that these W3 Total Cache settings have helped you to configure your site for maximum speed.
I have shown the settings that work best for my website. But not all themes and sites are equal.
If there are any W3 Total Cache settings that you have found to be more effective than the ones I have shown, please let me know about them in the comments.
Hope you enjoyed this post. Let me know in the comments.
Rank Math SEO is fast becoming the WordPress SEO plugin of choice. It offers many features and functionalities that were previously only available from paid plugins. A single mouse click allows you to conduct your own SEO audit and along with a number of additional settings, you can now take your SEO to a whole new level.
Most of us are scared to switch our SEO plugins. And understandably so. We’re creatures of habit. And I’m sorry to say it but most of us are also sheep. We prefer to stick around in our comfort zone and let others do the testing and then provide us with sufficient social proof before we follow suit.
Well let me tell you something. The Rank Math SEO plugin may be new on the scene, but it’s fast gaining momentum. It’s sleek, bloat free, light as a feather, low on CPU usage and eliminates the need for a number of other plugins thereby also having a very positive effect on website speed.
Does the work of 3 to 4 other plugins thereby speeding up your site.
24/7/365 support (Free).
Let’s Understand What An SEO Plugin Should Do For You.
There are already a number of Rank Math reviews floating around the internet.
Some good, some bad.
I suppose that’s only natural. But I think it’s also because many of us don’t understand what an SEO plugin is really supposed to do. And when things don’t magically transform our SERP rankings the way we expect them to, we post negative reviews about the product.
Don’t believe everything you read. Sometimes bloggers don’t even realize that the assumptions they make are incorrect. Oftentimes it’s more likely that these folks didn’t have the plugin properly configured.
I’m not here to protect the Rank Math SEO product but rather to put things into the correct perspective from the outset.
What I’m about to say applies to ALL SEO plugins across the board.
An SEO plugin is not some magical tool that’s suddenly going to get you into, or raise your rankings, in SERP unless there are features available that facilitate better SEO practice.
I’ve seen reviews (written and Youtube) that attempt to use Google analytics graphs to support claims of increased traffic from the moment they installed the plugin. One such video portrayed this using a brand new website without any prior track record of traffic over a reasonable period of time. Something you just can’t do! I’m certain, however, that the data was either purely coincidental or part of a normal, overall trend that was taken out of context.
I know that all you want right now is for me to tell you just how great Rank Math SEO is, so that you can be on your way with one more vote of confidence for the product.
Truth be told. Rank Math is great! It really is.
But in saying that, I want you to understand that my decision is backed up with a fair amount of relevant SEO knowledge.
SEO plugins are designed to assist you, as best as possible, to make full use of all of the on-page SEO practices that you need to adopt in order to stand a fair chance of reaching #1 in Google SERP.
Let’s face it, the good SEO pluguns are ALL going to help you to optimize your titles, subheadings, content, keywords, keyword density, post length, image alt tags, internal and external links and the like.
But it doesn’t follow that ALL of the suggestions are 100% correct.
To support what I’m saying, keyword densities and use of keywords in X amount of subheadings is mostly over-exaggerated. Furthermore, keyword stuffing is not generally useful for users because the content is manipulated to include words that appear out of place, making your content read poorly. This is more likely to appear spammy to search engines, a practice that will quickly get your site down-ranked in SERPS.
You’ll be better served by concentrating on optimizing your existing content for the best user experience whilst ensuring that all new content matches user intent and is absolutely killer!
But beyond these things, some of the most important functions of an SEO plugin are to help you to:
Include a separate SEO title for Google snippets and automatically insert it into your HTML.
Optimize your meta descriptions.
Automatically insert those meta descriptions into the HTML of the post or page without you having to do so yourself.
Keep your sitemap up to date, thereby ensuring that ALL your content is indexed by search engines.
Ping the search engines when you publish or update a post or page.
And any decent SEO plugin will do all of these things for you.
So what makes Rank Math SEO different to the rest? What makes it better?
Quite simply, the additional, FREE, features and functionalities it includes, under one roof, to make your life easier and your site faster.
The table below compares the features of the plugin with Yoast and All In One.
I’ll expand on these features while taking you through the ideal settings and configuration of Rank Math, making this the most comprehensive and definitive guide on the Rank Math SEO plugin.
Enjoy!
Rank Math SEO Features And Functionalities
Feature
Rank Math
Yoast SEO
All In One
Installs With Optimal Settings
Y
N
N
Setup Wizard
Y
Y
N
Site Compatibility Check
Y
N
N
Automatic Canonical URLs
Y
Y
Y
Integrates LSI Keyword Tool
Y
N
N
Keyword Rank Tracking
Y
N
N
Integrates Google Search Console
Y
Y
Y
Import From Yoast
Y
–
Y
Import From AIO
Y
N
–
Import AIO Rich Snippets
Y
N
N
Import From SEOPress
Y
N
?
Advanced SEO Analysis Tool
Y
N
N
70+ SEO Tests
Y
N
N
Actual SEO Analysis Score
Y
N
N
SEO Warnings
Y
Y
Y
SEO Failed Tests
Y
N
N
Auto Image SEO
Y
N
N
Custom Post Type
Y
Y
Y
Bulk Edit Titles & Descriptions
Y
Y
N
Google SERP Preview
Y
Y
N
Analysis Of Content
Y
Y
N
Title, Page, Meta Description Control
Y
Y
Y
Auto Add Additional Meta Data
Y
N
N
Focus Keyword
Y
Y
Y
Robots Meta
Y
Y
Y
Google Keyword Suggestion
Y
N
N
Optimize 5 Keywords
Y
N
N
Pillar Content
Y
Y
N
Internal Link Suggest
Y
Y
N
Capitalize Titles
Y
N
N
Google Crawl Error Fix
Y
Y
N
XML Sitemap
Y
Y
Y
Includes Redirection Manager
Y
N
N
Auto Post Redirect (Changed URL)
Y
N
N
301, 302, 307, 410,451 Redirects
Y
N
N
Regex Support
Y
N
N
Redirect Attachments To Parent
Y
Y
Y
Finds All 404’s
Y
N
N
WP Role Manager
Y
N
N
Google Schema Rich Snippets
Y
N
N
Rich Snippet Types: Article, Book, Course, Event, Job Posting, Local Business, Music, Person, Product, Recipe, Restaurant, Review, Service, Software/App, Video
If you were using another plugin, deactivate it first. Then go to the dashboard and select the Import / Export tab.
Rank Math SEO will determine what plugin you’ve been using and import your existing settings. You can skip the import if you wish.
If you were also using a redirection plugin, you can import your redirects. Once the setup is complete, go ahead and delete your old redirection plugin.
Run the Import.
Choose the settings you want to import.
Import Settings – Imports all settings and existing metadata.
Import Term Meta – Imports metadata for categories, tags and any other taxonomies.
Import Redirections – Imports existing redirects.
Import Post Meta – Imports metadata for posts, pages, and custom posts. Includes title, description, OpenGraph data and robots meta, among others.
Import Author Meta – Imports metadata for author pages.
I would suggest you keep all options checked. You can always manually change settings after the setup is complete.
The easiest way to set Rank Math SEO for the first time is to run the setup wizard which will configure everything you need with all the default / best settings.
You can, however, safely select the advanced option as this guide will walk you through everything.
You’ll be greeted with the wizard the first time you install and activate the plugin.
Thereafter, you can run through each individual screen and fine tune the settings you want to.
Before the setup starts the plugin automatically checks compatibility with your site.
Click the Start Wizard button to begin.
Step 2. Your Site
Choose whether your site is represented by a person or a company.
Add your logo.
Add a default social share image (aka an Open Graph thumbnail) – In short, when sharing posts from your site, information is passed to social sites via Open Graph meta tags which are included in your HTML page. If your page doesn’t have a featured image, it’s best to add a thumbnail that will appear on all posts sent to social media sites. If you don’t add a thumbnail, you will probably find an irrelevant image from your post being displayed.
Step 3. Search Console
One of the really nice features with Rank Math SEO is the ability to fetch and display Google Search Console information directly in your dashboard.
You’ll be able to see crawl errors, keywords that you rank for and other important information that is crucial in identifying content strategies and low hanging fruits, i.e. other keywords that you can easily rank for if you create content around them.
Once you get your authorization code, select the relevant website (if you have more than one).
I don’t want to state the obvious but in order to have a property in Google Search Console you must first have added and verified your site with Google Webmaster Tools.
Step 4. Sitemaps
A sitemap is basically a table of contents used by search engines to find all the content on a site. It can include posts, pages, archives, categories, tags and other taxonomies when configured to do so.
Sitemaps – Toggle sitemaps on and off.
Include images – References images from posts (recommended). This helps Google to index your most important images.
Public Post Types – Choose whether to include posts, pages or both in sitemaps.
Public Taxonomies – Choose whether to include categories in sitemaps.
I don’t recommend including categories in sitemaps as category pages can lead to duplicate content. Besides the sitemap inclusion / exclusion, I also apply a rel=”noindex” tag to categories so as to prevent indexing by search engines. This can be done in Titles and Meta > Categories.
Step 5. Optimization (SEO Tweaks)
These options help you to automate some of your tasks.
Noindex Empty Category and Tag Archives – I suggest you set this to “noindex”. What I’m not so enamored with is that the setting will switch automatically to “index” when your first post appears on a category or tag archive page. It’s best to apply a global noindex meta tag on the Titles and Meta >> Category / Tags screens.
Nofollow External Links – Not good SEO practice. Google may see you as gaming the algorithm and down-rank your site. There’s really no need to be paranoid about nofollowing external links. If you really need to apply an occasional nofollow, add this to your code using the text editor, e.g. <a href=”https://www.example.com/post-about-links/” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”></a>
Open External Links In New Window – A really nice addition that applies this on a global basis, making it easy for visitors to view an external link without being taken off your site altogether and then easily return to your site which will still be open on another tab.
Step 6. Wizard Complete
I recommend you enable the automatic updates option to ensure that any bug fixes and new features remain available to you.
Showing the SEO score on the frontend is a relatively new feature and it’s up to you whether you want to enable this or not.
That’s all there is to it. The settings are perfect to proceed with. Nevertheless, I would suggest you go through the more advanced setup options to satisfy yourself that the plugin is setup exactly the way you want it to be.
Step 7. Advanced Options – User Roles
The role manager appears with advanced settings only if enabled from the dashboard.
Another great feature that the Rank Math SEO plugin includes for you. This is really handy for sites with multiple users.
Some websites say that you can replace your Role Manager plugin on the basis that Rank Math will take care of this for you. This role manager is more focused at SEO permissions rather than WordPress Permissions. You cannot replace your plugin because they don’t target the same settings.
The settings you see are default settings. Adjust according to your own preference.
8. Step 8. Advanced Options – 404 Monitor
I find this really useful for sites that may have a number of broken links due to changed URLs, categories etc. The 404 monitor allows you to see if visitors and/or search engines come across any 404 Not Found pages.
The redirection manager works with the 404 monitor to automatically redirect to similar URLs or you can add your own custom redirects.
9. Step 9. Advanced Options – Schema Markup
Schema Type – For me, this is the #1 reason to use Rank Math SEO. This will add Google Schema structured data to your posts, pages, media, products and much more. It also enables you to get rid of your existing rich snippets plugin. Brilliant!
Schema Type for Posts and Pages – Select Article for Pages, Blog Post for posts and News Article for content that relates to a specific topic that is time sensitive.
Once you complete the wizard you will be returned to the Rank Math Dashboard.
Setting Up Rank Math SEO More Comprehensively Using Individual Screens / Tabs.
1. General Settings
On the left side of the dashboard, under the Rank Math Heading, select General Settings.
NOTE: Some screens seen from here onward must be enabled via the dashboard, e.g. Images (Image SEO).
1.1 Links
Strip Category Base – Personally, I don’t like categories showing in URLs. It makes them long and hard to remember. Also, if you have an uncategorized post, the word “uncategorized” will appear in the URL. Don’t know about you but I think it looks ugly (e.g. www.yourdomain.com/uncategorized/post-url/). I’ve also found that categories in URLs are problematic if you ever decide to change category. The post will be indexed using the original category and you will need to apply a 301 redirect to a new URL. Having too many redirects also slows down page loading times. If you strip the category base, your URL doesn’t have to change if you change the category.
Redirect Attachments – Redirects all attachment page URLs to the posts they appear in. Attachments relate to media such as images, video, sound clips, music etc. In your media gallery you will notice that attachments have URL’s that normally reference an uploads folder. This simply redirects those URLs to the actual posts those attachments appear in, which is better for SEO.
Redirect Orphan Media – Media attachments without a parent post will be redirected to the URL you insert here. The homepage is recommended.
**Remove Stopwords From Permalinks – This removes prepositions from URLs, e.g. a, the etc. This is not retrospective so only affects newly generated URLs. Choose what makes you happy. Personally I prefer to control this myself in the post edit screen. Some URLs may need stopwords so that the intended meaning is retained.
Nofollow External Links – Not good SEO practice. Google may see you as gaming the algorithm and down-rank your site. There’s really no need to be paranoid about nofollowing external links. If you really need to apply an occasional nofollow, add this to your code using the text editor, e.g. <a href=”https://www.example.com/post-about-links/” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”></a>.
Nofollow Image File Links – This is important for affiliate sites where you may link out from images to an external site. This setting allows you to apply a nofollow meta tag to the link. That said, I use Thirsty Affiliates Pro to manage my affiliate links. It’s the best software to manage and cloak all affiliate links from a central hub. If, for example, an affiliate link changes, you only need to make one change. Without this, you would have to find and change links in every post containing the broken link. It also has a brilliant feature that searches for keywords and adds affiliate links to relevant places for you. Whatever you do, don’t use Pretty Links – it broke my site. You can set a global nofollow from within Thirsty Affiliates Pro. You could then set this to off. Choose the option that best fits with your business / site.
**Nofollow Domains – This is like a domain blacklist. All domains listed here will be nofollowed. Everything else will be followed. Use this setting together with Nofollow External Links.
**Nofollow Exclude Domains – If you nofollow all external links, you can add exceptions over here. All exceptions will be allocated a rel=”dofollow” tag.
Open External Links In New Tab – All external links should be opened in a new tab. It makes for good user experience as users won’t be taken off your site. They can return to your site easily as it will still be open in its original tab. This is handy in case you forget to set a link to open in a new window with the target=”_blank” tag.
** Removed By Developer
1.2 Breadcrumbs
Enable Breadcrumbs – Very handy if your theme doesn’t automatically include breadcrumb navigation which I highly recommend for SEO. Once you enable breadcrumbs, you will need to insert the code snippet into your theme template files. DO NOT insert this into functions.php. In the past I have always inserted this into my header.php file. The code is normally placed at the end of the header code but before the closing ?> tag. Nevertheless, I have often had to place the snippet elsewhere in header.php file. You may need to play around a bit to find the right place to insert the snippet. In some themes you may need to add this to page.php or single.php. I use the Genesis Framework (Studiopress) exclusively for all my sites – won’t use any other theme. Besides the Genesis Framework being the most lightweight and SEO optimized themes, breadcrumbs are included in the themes by default and you can choose (globally) whether to include them in posts, pages, homepage etc. Rank Math SEO also provides a shortcode that you can use to manually insert breadcrumbs into individual posts or pages. You cannot insert the shortcode into a template file. The code snippet and shortcode appear at the top of the image above.
Separator Character – Choose whatever separator you fancy but the >> or | choice would be the best choice from the options available.
Show Homepage Link – I would show this. It’s makes it easy for visitors to access your homepage.
Homepage Label – You can change this to whatever you like but Home is the most apt.
Homepage Link – Insert your homepage link here. Some folks may use a different homepage but for 99.9% of people it’s your domain name with or without the www prefix.
Prefix Breadcrumb – You can prefix the breadcrumb path with say your site name, e.g. WPMediaMastery/Home/Blog/Post-Name/.
Archive Format – Set the label format for your different archives pages, e.g. category archive.
Search Results Format – Format the label for search results pages when the search function is used on your site.
404 Label – Set the label for 404 Not Found pages.
Hide Post Title – The whole point of breadcrumbs for SEO is to display the place a user is at on your site, i.e the path. Why on earth would anyone want to hide the post title?
Show Category – If you normally display categories, go ahead and enable this. Even if you don’t normally display categories in your URL, you can still display them in breadcrumbs. Quite a nice option to have.
Hide Taxonomy Name – You can elect to show taxonomies if you have any. This would apply in instances where you may have a taxonomy tree, e.g. >> USA >> New York >> Manhattan.
1.3 Images
Add Missing Alt Attributes – I wouldn’t use this regularly. According to the developer, it hinders the accessibility of a website when a screen reader is used. It should only be used when the post contains a single image. If there is more than one image, the ALT text that is automatically added wouldn’t make sense to the reader. The developer may hide this option in future updates.
Add Missing Title Attribute – I’m not quite sure why this option is here. Maybe the developers know something that I don’t. WordPress automatically assigns the file name to the title attribute so I’m not sure how this field could ever be blank. Nevertheless, the ability to dynamically add a title attribute when a post is viewed, is included.
1.4 Webmaster Tools
Verifying your site with Google, Bing Baidu, Yandex, Alexa, Pinterest and Norton Safe Web can be done from within the Rank Math SEO plugin. Enter the verification codes and Rank Math SEO takes care of the rest. This saves time in that you don’t have to upload each verification file via cPanel.
1.5 Edit Robots.txt
Robots.txt provides a way to control access to your site (or different parts of your site) by search bots.
You can add allow or disallow directives. An example of a disallow directive is Disallow: /go/. This disallows access to all URLs with a “go” directory / folder in the string.
Editing robots.txt through the plugin is certainly convenient, however, it will only work if you don’t already have a robots file in your root directory. If you already have a robots file, as I do, you will have to edit it directly from cPanel or a text editor and then FTP the file to your site’s root directory. If you don’t yet have a robots file, Rank Math will automatically generate the robots file as follows: User-Agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Sitemap: https://rankmath.com/sitemap_index.xml
1.6 Others
Show SEO Score – Toggle on to show a badge with the calculated SEO score on the frontend for selected posts. This can be disabled for specific posts.
RSS Before and After Content – Choose what to display before and after each post in RSS feeds. According to the developer, the %FEATUREDIMAGE% variable helps when someone uses an auto social media posting plugin to fetch the featured image.
1.7 Edit .htaccess
An .htacess file can be used to control and provide functionality for a variety of different things.
It’s used by WordPress to perform tasks such as rewriting of permalinks and can also be used to perform redirections (e.g. http to https or 301’s).
It is also commonly used (individually and by caching plugins) to set expires headers for browser caching purposes, set compression properties (gzip) and cross origin properties, amongst other things.
Rank Math SEO provides an easy way to edit the file but be warned that a single glitch in the file can prevent access to your site.
1.8 404 Monitor
A 404 error indicates that a page cannot be found by either a visitor or search bot. It commonly happens when a post’s URL is changed and the webmaster forgets to redirect the old URL to the new one but these aren’t the only causes. Basically a “404 Page not Found” error represents a broken link.
Mode – The simple mode logs the URL and time of access whilst the advanced mode creates more detailed logs including, for example, the referrer URL.
Log Limit – Sets a maximum row limit in a log. You can disable this by entering a value of 0.
Exclude Paths – Sets URLs or keywords that you want to prevent from getting logged.
Ignore Query Parameters – A query string is the part of a URL that contains a ?, e.g. www.example.com/this-post/?ver21_232429740229ecf036cd. Turn on to ignore query strings.
1.9 Search Console
I’ll probably go as far as to say that most bloggers don’t take full advantage of their Google search console. I imagine that having the data easily at hand may change that.
Rank Math SEO allows you to see your Google search console (GSC) information directly in your WordPress dashboard.
You’ll be able to see crawl errors, keywords that you rank for and other important information that is crucial in identifying content strategies and low hanging fruits, i.e. other keywords that you can easily rank for.
I’ve already done this but click the Authorize button to get going. Once complete, you’ll have a list of all your properties in GSC. Choose the correct site and your’e done.
The cache limit sets the time period that GSC data will be stored. You can also clear the cache and update manually if you need to.
1.10 Redirections
Debug Redirections – This setting is for admins. It displays the debug console instead of actually being redirected.
Fallback Behavior – If no similar page is found, you can set the fallback behavior to take the user to the default 404 Not Found page or redirect them to the homepage. Custom redirection is handy if you have an archive listing page that shows all your posts and pages or a custom 404 page or search page, thereby allowing the user to search for something similar.
Redirection Type – Set permanent (301) or temporary (302, 307) redirects according to your preference.
Auto Post Redirect – This is handled by WordPress. A really handy feature to create more advanced redirects that do not use the 301 (permanent) redirect type.
2. SEO Titles And Meta
2.1 Global Meta
Global Meta relates to all pages on your site. Please choose your options carefully.
Robots Meta – All the options are unchecked by default. Although you can still change these on a per page or post level, I would leave these alone, especially the No Index and No Follow options. Checking these will prevent search engines from following pages and posts and indexing your site properly. A mistake here can be disastrous!
Advanced Robots Meta – Here you can change snippet length, media time and maximum image size.
Noindex Empty Category and Tag Archives – I recommend you set this option to noindex. What I don’t particularly like is that the setting will switch automatically to index when a post appears on a category or tag archive. For this reason, it’s best to apply a global noindex meta tag on the Titles and Meta >> Category / Tags screens.
Separator Character – This sets your global separator. Your choice here.
Capitalize Titles – Self explanatory. You can always control this on a per post or page basis in the WordPress editor.
OpenGraph Thumbnail – In short, when sharing posts from your site, information is passed to social sites via Open Graph meta tags which are included in your HTML page. If your page doesn’t have a featured image, it’s best to add a thumbnail that will appear on all posts sent to social media sites. If you don’t add a thumbnail, you will probably find an irrelevant image from your post being displayed.
Twitter Card Type – Select the card type when creating a new Twitter post. This also applies to posts without a card type.
2.2 Local SEO
In order to see all the settings on this tab, Local SEO must be enabled in your WordPress dashboard.
This is where you set details relating to contact information and opening and closing hours for your local business.
Person Or Company – choose whether your site is represented by a person or company.
Name – Your name or company name.
Logo – Upload a logo for your website.
URL – The URL of your website.
**Email – Displayed by search engines.
**Phone – Your phone number may be displayed in a prominent place for mobile users.
**Address – Enter your local business address.
**About Page – Specify a URL for your About page.
**Contact Page – Enter a URL for your Contact page.
** Removed by developer
2.3 Social Meta
I’m not going to state the obvious for each entry. Enter the applicable URL, ID’s etc for Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google Places, Yelp, FourSquare, Flickr, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Soundcloud, Tumblr and Myspace.
Facebook Page URL – The URL will be displayed with the contact shortcode. It will also be added as metadata to your pages for OpenGraph and KnowledgeGraph.
Facebook Authorship – Facebook supports an authorship tag which credits authors when a post is shared on Facebook.
Facebook Admin – Go to https://findmyfbid.com/, enter your profile name and click Find Numeric ID. Enter this ID into the field.
Facebook APP – A Facebook App is normally created when setting up logins with Facebook, e.g. comment apps that support social login. If you haven’t created an app yet, use the Facebook Admin ID above instead.
Facebook Secret – Used with Facebook App. If you have a Facebook App already set up, you’ll know where to find the Facebook secret.
Twitter Username – Enter username of author to add creator tag to posts.
You certainly don’t have to link all social sites. Use these settings for the social accounts that you use regularly.
2.4 Homepage
This is where you select options for your homepage title and meta description as well as homepage descriptions and thumbnails for Facebook. The options are all self explanatory.
You can also select custom robots meta for you homepage. If you don’t, the default global meta options will apply.
2.5 Authors
This one’s a biggie!
It’s really important to choose whether your site is a single or multi author site.
Basically, if your site has only one author, your author page and blog archives page will both show the same (duplicate) content. Not good for Google!
The last thing you want is a Google penalty for duplicate content.
Disable this option if you are a single author site.
The plugin will make optimizations based on the selection.
2.6 Miscellaneous Pages
Date Archives – Disable date archives to avoid duplicate content. If you want a date archive, you could enable this setting and redirect to your homepage. This would be OK if your homepage displays posts. Otherwise disable the setting.
404 Title – Choose the variables to format the 404 page title.
Search Results Title – Choose the variable to format the search results title.
Noindex Date Archives – Set to On in order to avoid indexing by search engines and duplicate content.
Noindex Search Results – I have to admit I’ve never seen something like this before but set this to noindex in order to avoid any possible indexing of thin content when users search your site with an included search form. A novel feature.
Noindex Paginated Pages – I wouldn’t if I were you. Over time, it’s likely that search engines, especially Google, will start to deindex your content if you noindex paginated pages.
Noindex Archive Subpages – Same as above. Don’t do it.
Noindex Password Protected Pages – Google can still index pages that have login forms on them. Best to noindex as content is generally thin.
2.7 Posts
Single Post Title – Some titles are formatted with %title% %separator% %sitename% and look like this: 41 Ways To Destroy Your Title – WPMediamastery. Personally, I want the full title width to be available for my post titles, hence only %title%. Choose whatever format pushes your envelope. Post titles can be changed on a per post basis. Single Post Titles and SEO Titles are different things unless you make them the same, which I don’t suggest. A single post title is the title that users will see when they are already on your site. The SEO title is what will be displayed in SERPS. If you want to set your own SEO title, you can do so in the snippet preview section when you enter your custom meta description.
Single Post Description – For SEO, each post or page should have its own meta description that you set on a per post basis. Entering meta text here is basically a fallback / default description in case you forget to enter your own custom meta description, which you should never forget to do. I would rather let Google insert an excerpt from the post than enter a custom fallback description because it will be more relevant to the actual post. If you leave this blank, you will be warned to enter a meta description within your on-page SEO (green ticks and red crosses) notification area.
Schema Type – For me, rich snippets is the #1 reason to choose Rank Math SEO. It avoids having to use a separate plugin for schema markup and it’s great to have this as part of the Rank Math SEO plugin. There are 14 rich snippet types to choose from. See the features table.
Headline – This the SEO title I spoke about for snippets. Write your own headline / SEO title on a per post basis. Choose the variable to format the fallback SEO headline.
Description – %excerpt% is the fallback variable to format the rich snippet description (SEO description). Leave as is and enter this on a per post basis yourself. Other SEO plugins use the meta description that you enter.
Article Type – Choose Article for content that relates to a specific topic, Blog Post for evergreen posts and News Article for time sensitive posts.
Post Robots Meta – This is where you select custom robots meta for single posts, e.g. noindex, nofollow etc. If you leave this set to Default, the global meta will apply.
Link Suggestions – A real handy free feature only offered by Yoast Premium. Basically the Rank Math SEO plugin will make suggestions for linking to other internal posts on your site. Great for large sites with many posts.
Link Suggestion Titles – Choose to use either focus keywords or titles as default text for links.
Primary Taxonomy – This option will display either categories or tags in breadcrumbs, when single posts are viewed.
Add SEO Meta Box – Must be enabled. This adds a meta box to the WordPress editor for each post.
Bulk Editing – There are some handy things you can achieve in the bulk editing screen of WordPress. The options are to enable, disable or make bulk editing read only.
2.8 Pages
Refer to Posts above. The settings are the same for pages with the exception of Article Type. Set to Article for Pages..
2.9 Attachments (Media)
Single Media Title – Choose the format for displaying media titles.
Single Media Description – This is a default / fallback description that can be changed on a per post basis.
Schema Type – Choose rich snippet type applicable to your media type.
Media Robots Meta – Please ensure you apply a noindex meta tag as the content on attachment pages is thin. If you choose default, the default global meta will apply.
Media Robots Advanced Meta – Set snippet length, video times and image size.
Bulk Editing – Enable bulk editing for extended editing options.
2.10 Templates
Single Template Description – This is a default / fallback description that can be changed on a per template basis.
Schema Type – Choose rich snippet type applicable to your template type.
Template Robots Meta – Please ensure you apply a noindex meta tag as the content on template pages is thin. If you choose default, the default global meta will apply.
Template Robots Advanced Meta – Set snippet length, video times and image size.
Link Suggestions – Enables a meta box for this post type.
Primary Taxonomy – Choose what displays in breadcrumbs.
Add SEO Meta Box – Adds a meta box in the editor screen to customize SEO options for templates.
Bulk Editing – Enable bulk editing for extended editing options.
2.11 Categories
Category Archive Titles – I leave as default values but these can be changed and/or typed over.
Category Archive Descriptions – Same as for Titles above.
Category Archives Robots Meta – Make your own selections. Personally I prefer to No Index categories and tags to avoid duplicate content.
Add SEO Meta Box – If you decide to index categories, this adds a description meta box to the term editor screen.
Remove snippet Data – Remove schema data from categories.
2.12 Tags
Exactly the same settings as for categories.
3. Sitemap Settings
3.1 General
Links Per Sitemap – My installation defaulted to 200 but the developer seems to think that 1000 is a good maximum number of links on a sitemap page. Once the maximum limit is reached the plugin will make another sitemap page automatically.
Images In Sitemaps – This relates to images found in each individual post. Set this to On as it helps search engines to index important images. In the past, search engines couldn’t read images but the developer informs me that with new technology, they can!! This is another compelling reason to ensure you use good image ALT descriptions (tags).
Include Featured Images – Your choice. I don’t include featured images in sitemaps.
Exclude Posts – This is handy if you have any posts, pages and custom post types that you want to exclude from the sitemap.
Exclude terms – Used to exclude categories, tags etc. from the sitemap.
Ping Search Engines – Notifies Google and Bing automatically when a sitemap is updated, e.g. when a new post or page is added to a site.
3.2 Posts And Pages (Combined)
Posts and pages have the same settings so this applies to both.
Include In Sitemap – Include or exclude posts / pages from the sitemap.
Image Custom Fields – If you have included any custom fields in your posts / pages that contain image URLs, you can include the custom field name in order to include the images in the sitemap. One per line (not comma separated please).
3.3 Attachments (Media)
If you wish to generate an attachment sitemap, set this to On and then disable the attachment redirection to parent post. (General Settings >> Links)
Personally I would leave this off and stick with the media redirection.
3.4 Templates
Include In Sitemap – I wouldn’t!
3.5 Categories And Tags (Combined)
Only one setting here. Include or exclude categories / tags from the sitemap.
Personally, I exclude these taxonomies to avoid duplicate content issues.
4. Role Manager
Please refer to this image. (Sorry but this post is really image heavy so i don’t want to duplicate unnecessarily).
If you have multiple users that work on your site, you can manage user type SEO permissions from this easy to understand interface built into Rank Math Seo.
There are 5 user types in WordPress and each one generally has a different set of permissions.
Subscribers and contributors are generally allocated zero permissions while authors can normally perform a number of on page functions such as page analysis, social settings, general settings and rich snippet settings.
Editors can perform the same as authors with the addition of site-wide analysis.
Administrators can perform all functions.
You can always add or subtract SEO permissions as you see fit.
5. 404 Monitor
We already configured the 404 monitor under the general settings screen. When 404 pages are found by Rank Math SEO, this is what you will see in your dashboard under the 404 monitor tab.
It shows number of hits and the time of access.
You can choose to redirect the 404 page or delete it.
6. Redirections
Redirects are shown in your dashboard, as above. The screen shows the redirect “From”, redirect “To”, the “Type” (e.g. 301), “Hits” and “Last Accessed” date.
You can edit, deactivate or delete the redirect if you wish to.
7. Search Console
All of your Google search console data now appears in your dashboard.
I’m not going to go into detail as to how to interpret the information presented because that is the subject of another article.
The first screen is an overview.
Followed by Search Analytics which shows keywords that you rank for, number of clicks, number of impressions, click through rate and position in SERP.
Then on to the sitemaps that have been submitted to Google and includes both warnings and errors.
The keyword tracker is still under development.
8. SEO Analysis
Rank Math SEO includes an SEO analysis tool that you run at any time you wish. This is a great way to do an on-page SEO audit.
The initial view gives you a graphical overview depicting your SEO score, how many tests have been passed, how many warnings you have to address and number of failed tests.
More detailed information follows after the graphics.
8.1 Basic SEO
These settings are the most basic and essential SEO settings that should be in place.
If you’re not seeing a score of close to 100% here, your SEO is failing and you need to take serious action.
Common Keywords – Lists the most common keywords that were found on your pages and posts.
SEO Description – Shows your home page meta description. If you don’t see a green tick here, go back to SEO Titles and Meta >> Homepage and enter a meta description. This analysis also relates to other posts and pages and you should get a warning for missing descriptions.
H1 Heading – For your home page, this is your site title as set in your theme customization settings. For individual posts and pages it is your single post title. I use the Genesis Framework which automatically allocates an H1 tag to all post titles but not all themes do this.
H2 Headings – These are headings on your pages and posts. If you don’t have any you have a problem with your on-page SEO.
Image ALT Attributes – You should know by now that all images should have ALT attributes. These are crucial for search engines and for users who cannot see images due to a slow connection or who may use screen readers or text to speech for the visually impaired.
Keywords In Title And Description – Rank Math analyses titles and meta descriptions of your pages and posts and checks that your keywords are included in both. You will get warnings for missing items.
Links Ratio – This is the ratio of internal to external links. Naturally you should have many more internal links.
SEO Title – This analyses your SEO titles which should not be too short nor too long. These are your snippet titles or headlines.
Site Tagline – Checks to see that you have entered a tagline in your theme customization.
Blog Public – Ensures that your posts are accessible to search engines for indexing in SERP. You will receive warnings if any issues are detected.
Permalink Structure – Checks your WordPress Settings (dashboard) to see how your permalinks are structured. The standard setting in WordPress generates URLs that are pretty meaningless, e.g. www.example.com/?p=5873. It’s best to set Permalinks to “Post name” (/%postname%/). This will produce a user friendly and meaningful URL, e.g. www.example.com/great-post-name/.
Focus Keyword – Rank Math SEO performs a check to see that focus keywords are set for all posts and pages. This is important because your content should be optimized around those keywords. Remember that most SEO plugins overplay the importance of keyword density. You need to be mindful of keyword stuffing too. This means that not all checks will produce green ticks. That’s perfectly OK.
Post Titles Missing Focus keywords – It’s good on-page SEO practice to include your focus keyword(s) in your post titles. This analyses all your posts and pages and reports on any that lack keywords.
8.2 Advanced SEO
Search Preview – Gives you an idea of how your site may look in search results.
Mobile Search Preview – Shows you how your site may appear in SERP on a mobile device.
Mobile Snapshot – Produces a snapshot of how your site appears on a mobile device. It is important to optimize for mobile devices properly because Google actually uses a mobile first index for site indexing and ranking.
Canonical Tag – Checks to see if your site uses canonical links and warns you if and when it doesn’t. Canonical links are important to avoid duplicate content. For example, let’s assume your post is categorized, as follows: www.example.com/category/post-url/. This is actually a duplicate of www.example.com/post-url/. As long as www.example.com/post-url/ appears as a canonical link for the page that shows a category name, Google will understand that the content is duplicated but will not negatively affect your SEO.
Noindex Meta – If a post or page has a noindex meta tag, it will not appear in Google’s index or in SERP. Rank Math SEO checks that your pages are indexable and warns you if it picks up any problems.
WWW Canonicalization – Your site likely accessible on www and non www. This redirects both versions to the same site. You should also have specified all versions of your site in Google search console and chosen your preferred version. This way Google also recognizes different versions of the same site.
OpenGraph Meta – OpenGraph is a standard that is used to communicate your content to social media and these tags assist Facebook in understanding shared content. Rank Math checks that these tags are properly in place.
Robots.txt – Provides details of disallowed directives (which block parts of your website from search engines) in your robots.txt file, thereby forewarning you to check that they are indeed as you intended them to be.
Schema Meta Data – Schema assists search engines in understanding your content. This is a very strong feature of Rank Math SEO and my #1 reason for using it. The plugin makes it easy to add rich snippets to your site with one or two mouse clicks. There are 14 rich snippet types to choose from.
Search Console – shows you whether search console has been linked to your site. If not, you will be warned and Rank Math SEO provides instructions to fix this.
Sitemaps – Very important. Sitemaps tell search engines exactly what content exists on your site so that they can index all of it. Without a sitemap there is always a risk of deep content not being indexed.
8.3 Performance
Image Headers Expire – Expires headers are very important for WordPress speed optimization. Expires headers instruct the user’s browser to cache various types of assets for a specified period of time. When users return to your site, certain page information is retrieved from the browser cache instead of from the server. This has a very positive effect on page loading times and also reduces load on your server. Rank Math SEO performs a check to see that image expires are found in your .htaccess file.
Minify CSS – Minification removes any white space from style sheets thus reducing file size and increasing site speed. This doesn’t affect functionality of the CSS styles.
Minify JavaScript – Same as for css. White space removed and file size reduced thereby increasing site speed.
Page Objects – Rank Math SEO analyses the objects on your page. More objects lead to more requests which can slow down your site. That said, expires headers, minification, combining scripts and CSS files and reducing DOM can all be achieved with a good caching plugin and fast hosting. Swift Performance Pro is undoubtedly the most aggressive caching plugin and the one that I use, in combination with Siteground, to achieve contentful paint times of under 200ms.
Page Size – Rank Math reports on page size with a view to increased performance optimization.
Response Time – Checks for slow server response time, the major cause of slow websites. Time To First Byte (TTFB) is a direct indication of server response time. With Cloudways hosting, the WP Rocket caching plugin and Cloudflare, I achieve TTFB of under 60ms. Google recommends a maximum of under 200ms.
8.4 Security
Visible Plugins – Shows plugins that are publicly visible. Vulnerabilities can sometimes be exploited through plugins, especially those that aren’t updated properly.
Theme Visibility – Informs you if your theme can be detected by sites like builtwith.com and wptd.com.
Directory Listing – Access to your directory listings can provide hackers with enough information to “break in”. Rank Math SEO checks this at server level and reports on any issues found.
Google Safe Browsing – Google will flag your site if it finds any malicious activity on it as it makes for poor user experience. Rank Math SEO warns you about any unsafe issues.
Secure Connection – It’s been a number of years since Google started up-ranking secure sites and down-ranking insecure ones. Rank Math SEO confirms whether your site runs on HTTPS which it should do in order to provide the safest experience for users.
8.5 Social SEO
The Social SEO Analysis tool shows connections to the following social services and provides warnings / alerts for those that are not connected.
Facebook
Instagram
Linkedin
Twitter
YouTube
Blog Post SEO Optimization Guide
This guide will show you how to use Rank Math to perform all of your on page SEO optimization with a view to achieving not only a 100% SEO score but also sticking with proven on page SEO best practices.
Please remember that Rank Math, like all other SEO plugins, provides guidelines relating to various aspects of on page SEO optimization. The suggestions don’t mean that a 100% SEO score in Rank Math is absolutely imperative or 100% correct in terms of on page SEO technique.
What I’m trying to say is that you don’t always have to aim for 100% green ticks in Rank Math. It’s fine to have orange and red ticks too and as long as you are aware of why they exist, you’ll still be good to go.
I will guide you with further explanation as we go along.
We will work our way through the guide as if we are writing a post.
Keyword Research And Setting Your Focus Keyword/s
If you’re reading this guide, it’s my guess that you need to learn about blog post SEO.
Most beginners either can’t afford premium keyword tools or don’t really want to.
Rank Math SEO solves this in that Google auto suggest has been baked into the plugin. And it’s one of the best ways to find long tail keywords because these LTK’s are the exact phrases that users enter into Google search. What’s really cool is that you don’t have to leave your dashboard to find these LTK’s.
I’ll show you in a moment how to access Google auto complete with Rank Math, but for the time being I’m going to use Google to illustrate how to do some basic keyword research. Once you understand this, you can do everything via Rank Math.
First thing you’ll want to do is fire up Google search. Now Google will try to tailor search results for you based on your browser history, location and a number of other factors.
I suggest you either use a browser other than Chrome or open an incognito window for your keyword research.
As you know Google has an auto-suggest feature that shows you common search queries entered by users. This is the perfect place to start.
Let’s assume you’re about to write a post about healthy, low carbohydrate recipes.
The first step in finding LTK’s is to search using a broad keyword term. Google will then show you a number of long tail keywords that you can use to hone in on your topic.
A search for recipe yields “recipe for disaster”, “recipes with mince”, recipe for pancakes”. None of these are suitable.
You need to find much more specific search phrases. These are known as long tail keywords.
So I went on to search for “healthy recipes without carbs”. A good long tail keyword would be “healthy breakfast recipes without carbs” or “healthy vegetarian recipes without carbs” as shown by Google.
Long tail keywords are very specific. That’s what you want. Yes, search volumes are much lower but that’s what you want. They more focused towards the actual topic and with the right optimization, you’ll have a much better chance of ranking for these less competitive keywords.
At the bottom of the search page you’ll find Google’s related searches.
Unfortunately, this is the one thing that Rank Math doesn’t show you but we must understand that Rank Math was not developed to be a keyword research tool. The fact that Google auto suggest is built into the plugin is nevertheless a touch of genius by the developers. It sets Rank Math SEO apart from its competitors who, over all the years in operation, never thought to make our lives easier.
Now enter some of these related search terms into the Google address bar or search box and you’ll be presented with even more long tail keywords. Make a note of them because those that relate to your post can be sprinkled into your content for better SEO optimization.
In the Rank Math meta area, simply type a broad keyword into the field where you enter your focus keyword and Rank Math extracts Google auto suggestions automatically.
Exactly the same keywords you get from google … right there in your dashboard!
If you look carefully you’ll see that the list of LTK’s provided by Rank Math is more comprehensive than that shown by Google.
Now that you have an idea of some keywords, hit up Ubersuggest.
I entered “healthy vegetarian recipes without carbs” and then clicked on keyword ideas. (marked 1 in the graphic).
The keyword shown in the list is slightly different, “healthy vegetarian recipes low carb”. The characteristics of good keywords are as follows:
Reasonable search volume (keyword searched for 140 over the last month). In this case 140 (marked 2).
Low search difficulty, in this case 7 (marked 4). This means you will have a 93% chance of ranking in the top 20 search results.
A high cost per click. In this case it is $2.78 (marked 3). This relates to paid advertising. Advertisers won’t pay for poor keywords because they’ll get no clicks / traffic. If advertisers are prepared for pay for a keyword, it means it is good.
You will enter your focus keyword into the Rank Math meta box when you start your new post. This meta box appears below the WordPress editor in the dashboard.
It’s also a good idea to sprinkle some LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords into your content. These are similes that you can use in your content to better your SEO efforts.
Recently (2018), a well known blogger had his site downgraded by Google for keyword cannibalization.
It happens when you optimize multiple posts for the same keyword.
You can certainly use the word/s in other posts. Just make sure you don’t optimize your post for the same keyword as a previous one. It’s not good SEO practice.
Rank Math notifies you if it finds your keyword used more than once.
Post Title And SEO Title: Are They Really Different? YES!
Most of us accustomed to banging out a post title and leaving it at that.
After all, your SEO plugin informs you that your title is either too short or over the 60 character viewable limit so that’s all we need to be concerned with, right?
But what they don’t specifically tell you is that you can choose to have a different title for SERPS (SEO title) and for your readers (post title).
If you leave the variable setting of %title%, Rank Math will set your SEO title to the post title.
But you can also change your SEO title for SERP. Click the Edit Snippet button on the Rank Math SEO General tab and enter a custom title.
The SEO title replaces the %title% variable. Notice also how the title length indicator has changed to green (56 characters used out of a total of 60) indicating a good title length.
Entering a custom SEO title allows you have a much longer post title. And because this is intended for readers that are already on your site, it’s a perfect way to let them know exactly what your post covers.
IMPORTANT NOTE:I would suggest limiting your longer post titles to a maximum of 110 characters. I recently had an email from Google informing me that my site was affected by unparsable structured data. In short, Google was unable to properly “process” some data on my blog archive. The Google Structured Data Testing Tool (SDTT) highlighted 2 problems with each blog post on the blog page:
Post titles should be in the range of [0, 110]. Mine exceeded the 110 character limit.
Image: false – false is not a valid URL.
Reducing my single post titles to 110 characters or less fixed the title problem.
It is pertinent to mention that the actual single posts were not a problem for Google in terms of title length being longer than 110 characters but it seems that Google cannot properly interpret titles longer than that on the blog archive page/s.
On the Rich Snippet tab in Rank Math SEO, you can also enter a custom title for Google structured data but it must also not exceed 110 characters.
Effectively, this allows you to have 3 titles, viz. a post title of any length you wish, an SEO title for SERP and a rich snippet title for Google rich snippets. The drawback here is that doing this bloats the plugin a little.
The image problem occurred because I don’t use featured images for my posts. Adding a featured image to each post sorted this problem out. Luckily, the Genesis Framework requires a code snippet to be added to functions.php to actually show featured images on single posts. (Certain Genesis themes may have a setting that can be toggled on and off). It is my preference not to show featured images but adding one to each post fixes the structured data image problem.
Now we haven’t yet entered a focus keyword to be used for this post. We’ll get to that shortly. But I’ll mention now that old school SEO plugins will suggest that your focus keyword should appear at the beginning of the title.
This is not always a good idea for three reasons:
Your title should be focused on achieving maximum clicks.
It’s more important that your title reads well for users. Placing the focus keyword at the beginning of the title can destroy UX (user experience) because you may not be able to convey the meaning that’s really intended.
If Google picks up that you’re deliberately manipulating your title for search engines, they will downgrade your site in SERP.
Rank Math doesn’t make such a suggestion, which is line with my own views. The plugin simply tells you to place your keyword somewhere in the title.
On mobile devices, the full 60 character title length may get cut off, so be mindful that you should still attempt to place your focus keyword such that it won’t get cut off on smaller devices.
One last thing, your focus keyword / phrase must appear in the title. As soon as you enter the focus keyword into the meta box you will see that Rank Math highlights it in the title.
And you’ll also get alerts relating to the title.
Adding A Dynamic Date To SEO Titles and Snippet Headlines
I’m sure you’ve numerous blog posts that include a date in the title. But what’s the benefit?
Well, people tend to give preference to reading the most current information first and if that post answers what they’re looking for, there’s no read any further.
So a dynamic date is a great way to increase click through rate (CTR) and improve SEO in the process. More visitors = higher serp rankings.
Rank Math makes it easy to add dynamic dates to SEO titles and snippet headlines. (If you want to add a dynamic date to your post title, you will have to include some code and a filter in your functions.php file. You’ll be able to then add a dynamic date using a shortcode. I’ll give you that code shortly.
NOTE: A shortcode in your post title will not be readable by Rank Math for the SEO title and snippet headline. You will have to add these manually as follows:
Rank uses their own variables viz. %curentmonth% for the month and %currentyear% for the year.
You follow the same procedure to add dynamic dates to the snippets headline.
Adding A Dynamic Date To Post Titles In WordPress
Day, Month And Year
Add this to functions.php. Use the shortcode [date_month_year] in your post title.
You can place the shortcode within parenthesis if you want your date to look like (July, 2019).
// Add the current date, month and year to post title // shortcode: [date_month_year] add_shortcode( ‘date_month_year’ , ‘dynamic_date_month_year’ ); function dynamic_date_month_year() { $year = date(“Y”); $month = date(“M”); // “M” produces a 3 letter month. Use “F” for full month $date = date(“D”); return “$date, $month, $year”; } add_filter( ‘the_title’, ‘do_shortcode’ );
Month And Year
Add this to functions.php. Use the shortcode March 2021 in your post title.
You can place the shortcode within parenthesis if you want your date to look like (July, 2019).
// Add the current month and year to post title // shortcode: March 2021 add_shortcode( ‘month_year’ , ‘dynamic_month_year’ ); function dynamic_month_year() { $year = date(“Y”); $month = date(“M”); // “M” produces a 3 letter month. Use “F” for full month return “$month, $year”; } add_filter( ‘the_title’, ‘do_shortcode’ );
Year
Add this to functions.php. Use the shortcode 2021 in your post title.
You can place the shortcode within parenthesis if you want your date to look like (July, 2019).
// Add the current year to post title // shortcode: 2021 add_shortcode( ‘year’ , ‘dynamic_year’ ); function dynamic_year() { $year = date(“Y”); return “$year”; }
URL
After entering a post title, WordPress will automatically generate a URL to match the post title.
The matching accomplishes a mostly human-centric goal, i.e. to imbue an excellent sense of what the web user will find on the page through the URL and then to deliver on that expectation with the headline/title.
Because your post title contained the focus keyword, your URL will also. Your URL must contain your keyword.
Depending on the post title, it may be best to shorten the URL. My post titles are generally much longer than my SEO titles, which are way too long for URLs.
Much consensus exists to suggest that shorter URLs are better for SEO.
After analyzing over 1 million Google search results, Brian Dean of Backlinko reckons that shorter URLs are easier for Google to understand. Matt Cutts, (ex Google) stated in an interview that after 5 words, Google algorithms give much less weighting to those words.
Furthermore, shorter URLs are easier to remember, process, copy and paste and share, thereby enhancing user experience and overall usability.
Rank Math SEO is unique in that it doesn’t suggest the removal of stopwords from URLs. Instead it provides an option in settings to automatically remove stopwords (prepositions) on a global basis.
Google doesn’t really take cognizance of stopwords. Be mindful, however that removing them can sometimes be detrimental to user experience in the event that it changes the overall meaning you wish to impart.
Judge each URL on its own merits.
While we’re on the subject of URLs, let’s take a quick look at …
Permalink Structure
For user experience, the default WordPress permalink structure is both ugly and meaningless.
Let’s face it, www.example.com/?p=4628 is pretty meaningless for users.
After installing WordPress, this is the first settings you should change. From your dashboard, selects Settings > Permalinks and choose Post Name.
Your URLs will now look like the ones illustrated above. Much more descriptive and meaningful for users.
The meta description is the text that appears below the SEO title in SERP.
Enter a meta description in the field provided on the General tab.
Once entered Rank Math SEO highlights the focus keyword which must appear in the meta description. The length indicator goes green when length is sufficient (maximum 160 characters).
The meta description is the second most important factor in search results.
First and foremost it should aim to fulfill user intent. In other words, if someone is searching for tips to write powerful post titles, your meta description should aim to fulfill that exact need. If the meta description doesn’t provide an exact match for the search query, Google will show a suitable description that matches the query, using alternative text from within your post.
Secondly the description should invoke curiosity, encouraging users to click your link.
You will also get a green tick showing that the meta description is compliant with on page SEO best practice.
Content
Have you ever come across content that you’ve felt is on the weak side yet it ranks on the first page of Google search?
And you know in your heart that one of your posts exceeds it by leaps and bounds, yet it’s nowhere to be found in SERP?
Don’t feel alone.
If you want to stand any chance of getting your posts ranked in Google SERP, your goals must be closely aligned with Google’s.
Google’s entire business is focused around providing the best experience for all their users so your content has to be brilliant.
But there’s more to ranking than killer content.
Besides a number of other ranking factors, over 200 of them to be precise, Google also needs to satisfy themselves that if they put one of your posts up there on page #1, that you’ll be committed to providing the same level of quality content, on a regular basis, in the future.
That’s why you need to publish posts on a consistent basis, be it weekly, fortnightly or monthly.
In short, you’ll need to prove that Google can trust you.
I’ve diverted a bit to provide just a smidgeon of background understanding into the area of Google rankings. The topic is vast and more than what I’ve said falls outside of the scope of this post.
I could ramble on for ages and still, my knowledge is just a slither of what the best SEO’s out there know!
OK. Back to Rank Math on page SEO optimization.
Keyword Placement In Body
Within 20 to 30 seconds of landing on your post, users want to know that your content is going to adequately address their problems, their needs.
You see, users search the internet for information. In short, they need solutions to their problems. If you can’t provide them with solutions, they’ll go to another site that can.
They landed on your site because your focus keyword was aligned with their search query.
Therefore, it’s imperative that your focus keyword appears in the first paragraph of your content. I like to get it into the first sentence.
That way, both users and Google will immediately understand what the article is all about.
Furthermore, Google will place a greater weighting on the first few paragraphs so it makes sense to include your keyword more in the first couple of paragraphs. It helps to impart relevancy.
One caveat though. If the inclusion of your keyword makes your content sound unnatural, rather leave it out. Google’s algorithms are clever. They’ll still find ways to understand your content.
You see, if the use of your keyword sounds unnatural, Google will see it as keyword stuffing – a way of gaming the algorithm. And they’ll downgrade your post for that.
One last suggestion. Use your keyword (naturally) in your conclusion. Preferably somewhere within the last few sentences. It adds to the post’s relevancy.
Keyword Density
Most SEO plugins give you guidelines around what is considered an acceptable keyword density.
I don’t want to plant ideas in your head so I’ll not mention percentages from other plugins, save to say that Rank Math SEO maintains that there is no ideal keyword density percentage.
That’s the wisest suggestion I’ve come across in an SEO plugin. Because it’s true.
Take keyword density with a pinch of salt.
I’ve read articles written by the acclaimed “SEO guru”, Brian Dean and have been unable to find his focus keyword mentioned more than once in some of his work.
If the use of the keyword fits into the content without having to think about writing your copy around it, then by all means use it as much as is necessary. But if you have to think about manipulating your content to fit your keyword, stay the hell away!
You’ll be better served by focusing your energies on complete content and a well designed post that will appeal to users in multiple ways.
Keyword In Subheadings
Like all SEO plugins, Rank Math suggests you have your keyword in top level subheadings such as h2, h3 and h4.
I can’t emphasize enough that stuffing your keyword into subheadings because you think you should for SEO, is poor on page SEO practice. It can make your subheadings look spammy.
By all means, go ahead and use your keyword in subheadings if it appears natural.
Otherwise, take this suggestion with a pinch of salt.
Keyword In Image ALT Attributes
It’s advisable to have your keyword in at least one image alt tag.
It helps to enhance relevancy.
But the same applies here as for subheadings and content. Be wary of keyword stuffing. Make certain that the alt tag reads naturally.
While the majority of users may never see ALT tags, visually impaired users who use screen readers see them all the time.
And remember, Google judges your site based on the kind of experience you create for users!
Links To External And Internal Resources
We all make statements in our posts. But how do users validate them? How do we back up what we’re saying?
I guess the answer lies in the last question.
It’s good SEO practice to support our statements. Not all of them, but the most important ones.
More importantly, Google needs to see that those statements are supported with facts from reliable resources.
Asking your cousin to mention something on his new website and linking to it ain’t going to cut it!
Google wants to see links to authoritative sources.
Whilst not really used by Google, domain authority is a Moz metric. Install the Moz Bar extension from the Chrome Web Store and use it to find the domain authority for any site.
It also shows in search results making it easy to find links to authoritative sites.
According to Moz, the most authoritative sites usually have a high number of top quality external links.
External links to reliable resources provides Google with evidence that your claims are well supported.
It’s difficult to say what DA number represents an authoritative site but to give you an indication as a starting point, Google has a DA of 99.
Links to other resources on your own website are equally important. It shows Google that your site is like an ice cream stand, offering a variety of other related content that will interest your users.
Content Length
There’s no doubt that long form content outranks short form content.
Not purely because of length but because longer content is generally more comprehensive.
In the same post I mentioned previously where Backlinko analyzed 1 million Google search results, research also showed that the optimal post length for ranking in Google’s first page was 1890 words.
Nevertheless, I have also seen some really short content rank on page 1 of SERP.
Focus on quality content, not quantity. Write for your users, not for Google. Your post should be as long as it takes to convey your message in the most complete way. If it takes 500 words to achieve that, so be it.
Wrapping Up …
Okay. So it’s over to you. I hope you’ve found this post useful. If there’s anything you feel I’ve left out, let me know in the comments.
Now that you see what Rank Math SEO can do for you, are you going to make the switch?
Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? That you can make money from affiliate marketing on auto-pilot. It’s one of the only legit monetization methods that earns you money 24/7/365. Literally while you sleep!
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a gently persuasive promotional strategy involving the marketing of a third party’s products or services with the aim of helping people to achieve their objectives or find solutions to their problems. In short, it’s solution selling.
How do you make money from affiliate marketing?
As a referrer, you earn a referral fee (commission), paid by the product or provider or affiliate network, on the successful purchase of a product by the user.
What is an Affiliate Network?
An affiliate network is a portal that provides multiple affiliate marketing opportunities to publishers (referrers) through a collection (network) of member merchants (product providers) who offer affiliate marketing programs as a means to promote their products. This collective is beneficial for merchants in that it exposes them to a wider audience of publishers than they may be able to expose themselves to individually, while benefiting publishers in that they will be exposed to a wider variety of affiliate marketing companies and products. This arrangement is beneficial for publishers as the network can aggregate commissions and it further reduces the risk of non payment by merchants.
As you will have gleaned, there are essentially 3 parties involved in the affiliate marketing process and a 4th if there’s an affiliate marketing network.
The publisher (yourself).
The merchant (product provider).
The customer (product purchaser)
I don’t want to make affiliate marketing sound like a walk in the park. Because it’s not.
Like any other business, it takes hard work and dedication. But after the initial effort required to create and build up your blog’s content library, you will be able to monetize it for years into the future on full auto-pilot.
While most of the other monetization methods you’ll read about on the internet don’t work, affiliate marketing works and is a genuinely honest way engender passive income from the sale of products and services that you promote but don’t personally have to develop.
When creating your content, always remember that the secret to closing sales, and keeping them closed, is to market in a way that makes purchasers feel like they’ve bought something that will make their lives easier, not like they’ve been sold something.
This requires a special approach.
You must become adept at creating valuable, scalable, evergreen content that helps people, in a “non-salesy” way, to solve their problems or answer their questions.
To this end, you’ll introduce them to products or services that provide tangible solutions, allowing them to work faster, more reliably and efficiently and in a streamlined and automated manner that reduces stress and frees up time to concentrate on income generating activities whilst allowing for a more relaxed lifestyle.
When you recommend products that people really need and want, they’ll develop trust in you and you’ll stand a far greater chance of doing repeat business with them over the years to come.
In short, affiliate marketing is as much about nurturing relationships as it is about recommending the most fitting products. It’s about placing your audience’s needs first and letting your own needs play second fiddle.
I encourage you not to think about selling. Focus only on teaching.
The money will take care of itself!
The rest of this article focuses where to start with affiliate marketing and the steps you need to take to become successful at making money from affiliate marketing.
Find, Research And Define Your Niche
Users search the internet for information. Not just any information but information that provides them with solutions to their problems.
Finding a blog niche then, involves nothing more than understanding what people need and then “selling” them solutions, not features and benefits.
A specific niche is necessary to become an authority in the area in which you specialize.
When choosing a niche, ask yourself whether:
The niche is in demand.
You can make money from the niche.
You will be able to create plenty of content around the niche
If you can’t answer yes to any of the above, then it’s not a good niche for you.
You don’t have to be wildly passionate about the niche but it’s probably important to choose something you would enjoy writing about.
Passion doesn’t guarantee you a paycheck. You may be passionate about survival weapons but it doesn’t mean that there are enough people out there to support a business on the back of it.
You can always learn new skills in an unfamiliar niche.
As long as you’re up for the challenge and able to enjoy writing about the subject, you’ll be fine. But if you absolutely dislike the subject matter, you’re going to find it enormously difficult to consistently write content.
If you’re lucky enough to find a niche that’s in demand and that you’re passionate about, that’s a bonus.
But ultimately, your success in affiliate marketing will be dependent on supply and demand coupled with your ability to help people solve their problems and overcome their pain points.
How To Determine If The Niche Is In Demand
The last thing you want is to pour all of your time and effort into a niche that’s has low demand or is declining in demand and popularity.
The easiest way to judge long term demand is to enter your blog niche idea into Google Trends.
The “weight training” niche reveals that there is good interest in the topic and the trend over the last 5 years is stable.
Whilst the niche may be a little too broad (as explained shortly) it will nevertheless attract a good audience. In turn, this means you will be able to drive enough traffic to your blog to sustain a business.
Google Trends is one of the best ways to judge interest in a topic.
Whilst certain affiliate networks such as Clickbank also provide metrics, I would be a little wary of their accuracy. They are probably better for finding products than for determining niches. While they may give some direction, they are published in the interests of the network’s own business operations.
Here’s an example.
Choose your category from the options on the left side of the page and check out the results.
A higher gravity indicates higher demand for a specific product.
NOTE: The gravity rating is based on the number of affiliates that earned commission from a specific product over the previous 12 weeks. It does not indicate demand for the overall niche.
Grav – Short for GRAVITY™ performance statistic, this number represents a unique calculation by ClickBank that takes into account the number of different affiliates who earned a commission by promoting this product over the past 12 weeks. Since more recent transactions are given a higher value, this number can give you an idea of what products are “hot” at the moment
Clickbank knowledgebase
How To Determine Competitiveness Of The Niche
The greater the number of search queries, the bigger the niche and the greater the competition will be. For each search result, Google provides the number of searches.
Please don’t rely on this number.
According to a Google product expert the number is essentially meaningless and you are encouraged not to place any reliance on it.
The niche is way too broad but I used the seed keyword to show you how to hone in on keywords not to narrow down your niche and then determine on a micro level whether there will be sufficient subject matter (with lower competition) to support a wide variety of content that you can rank for and monetize.
Scroll down to the related searches at the bottom of the results page.
Let’s try “weight training exercises”.
Still too broad to determine competitiveness of micro subject matter, but a better starting point.
Now dial up Ubersuggest to look for additional keywords related to this blog topic. This has become my free “go to” keyword research tool. It helps me by providing not only keywords but also the ability to rank on Google.
We’ll start over again with the broadest keyword, simply to illustrate how different the search results number is compared to what Google showed us.
The search term “weight training ” reveals 12,100 monthly searches which is great.
The ability to rank within the first 20 search results is 72% (100-28), which is also good.
However, the CPC column (cost per click) reveals that nobody is paying for advertising for this keyword ($0.00), confirming that the keyword is, in fact, too broad.
This makes sense because weight training could be undertaken by people for the purpose of bodybuilding, strength training, high intensity interval training (HIIT), fitness or weight loss. Because of its broad nature, it’s impossible to determine your audience.
“Weight training exercises” has 1000 monthly searches, which is to be expected for a less competitive keyword.
There’s an 82% chance of ranking and businesses are paying for advertising.
However, I wouldn’t be too happy yet because we still can’t determine our audience, i.e. weight training exercises for who and for what purpose?
We need some more specific keywords.
Weight training exercises for weight loss is becoming more specific but as you see, search volume is very low and nobody is advertising.
Nevertheless, the search results reveal a number of other keywords that are perfect for content creation, show low competition and good ability to rank in SERP.
With 260 monthly searches, an 89% chance of ranking within the top 20 search results (low competition) and paid advertising of $6.18, “weight lifting for weight loss male” is an ideal keyword for (micro) content creation.
And as you can see, there are plenty of others too.
Take Away: Good (long tail) keywords are those that reflect:
Low search volumes.
LOW COMPETITION.
A good chance of ranking in Google SERP (over 70% – SD of under 30).
Advertisers are willing to pay for.
The public internet has been operating for approximately 27 years.
As of 2018, there were 1.8 billion websites on the worldwide web. If you think you’re going to find a niche with huge volumes of interest and little to no competition, you’re not.
All the best niches have been explored. They’re all competitive. But that’s actually a good thing because it means that there’s money to be made from them.
I’d be really concerned entering a niche with little to no competition.
Don’t Niche Down Too Much
When you fish with a rod, you can only catch a single fish at a time. But if you went out on a fishing boat, dropped a net into the water and trawled for 30 minutes, you’d likely catch hundreds of fish.
Same with an audience.
Isn’t it better to make decisions based on what your audience wants rather than what you think they want?
Widen your net and get it straight from the horse’s mouth!
You can always cater to a smaller segment of your niche by writing posts that target them specifically.
For example, an article like “weight training exercises for women over 40” would be quite focused.
But at the same time, you can write about “weight training exercises for improved strength”. A catch all type article.
And the beauty of a wider audience in a broader niche is that you also widen your earnings potential.
How To Determine Whether The Niche Can Be Monetized
The whole objective here is to be able to earn money with affiliate marketing so you need to look at how you are going to monetize your blog.
Here’s an easy way to judge, straight off the bat, whether your niche can be monetized.
Perform a google search for the topic in question.
If businesses are advertising for that search term it’s an indication that the topic is profitable.
In the weight training niche there are likely to be hundreds of products that you could earn from by way of affiliate marketing sales, especially with the Amazon Affiliate program.
This leads me to the second method.
On the search results page, check through the top few articles to see how those blogs monetize their posts. This will give you a good idea of which monetization methods are working in that niche.
Determine If You’ll Be Able To Produce Plenty Of Content
Attempting to make money from affiliate marketing on the back of thin content, can never work.
The only way you’ll see any success in selling affiliate products is to have an intricate understanding of:
The problems that users have and need to overcome.
What they want to achieve.
What holds them back from purchasing products that can genuinely make their lives easier.
Working knowledge of the products that will help them to become more productive whilst removing the negative thoughts that arise from the above mentioned issues.
This requires a good deal of explaining through content that subtly convinces them that the product you are explaining will adequately meet their needs.
There are likely to be five main reasons that cause problems with producing content.
Some niches don’t lend themselves well to being able to write plenty of content.
You abhor the niche.
You haven’t used the products you are writing about and lack the understanding needed to promote them.
You don’t enjoy writing.
You lack the time to devote to becoming successful.
If you foresee a problem with any of these aspects, choose a different niche – or profession.
Choose Your Affiliate Products (Programs)
Now that you’ve found your niche, it’s time to choose what products you’re going to market to your readers.
It’s better to promote just a few good products that you know really well rather than a bunch you know very little about.
In the first instance, you need to ensure that you never break the trust you have built with your audience.
Secondly, you must be able to create in-depth content around the products that you’ll be marketing. You’ll be more successful at making money from affiliate marketing by concentrating on delivering content to you audience that demonstrates how a product has helped you personally. In so doing, you’ll never look as though you’re selling a product or promoting a feature but rather providing a solution that your audience is likely to need in the same way that you did.
Naturally, this approach requires an in-depth and working knowledge of the products that you’ll be marketing, hence the need to use, or have used, the products yourself. A lack of working knowledge of a product sticks out like a sore thumb.
I encourage you NOT to “run the numbers”. If you’re going to choose affiliate programs based on the highest commission rates, you’re destined for failure.
I can sympathize if you feel it’s not worth spending huge amounts of time promoting products that pay peanuts. I felt the same way initially. But it’s pure economics approach. I recommend Namecheap from time to time as a domain registrar and I earn $2.40 on a $12 domain. I certainly don’t do it for the money. I do it to look after my audience. I have found that bigger things follow. After the domain purchase comes hosting, themes and caching. That’s where I make some lolly! But if I let that little service slip through the cracks, I’ll lose customers to someone else who’s committed to building their online business through relationships and the best possible service. And incidentally, I don’t have to spend much more than a minute dropping an affiliate link like Namecheap into my content!
Another thing to be mindful of …
Affiliate programs showing high reversal rates don’t necessarily make them unsuitable for promoting. Those stats can easily come from poor promotion.
WPEngine is a prime example. A $200 commission is quite enticing for anyone, but there are affiliate marketers out there who, in chase of a quick buck, may mislead consumers thereby resulting in reversals.
WPEngine is an extremely solid hosting provider. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you any different. When it comes to hosting, the real test is when you make websites fast and scalable under traffic. Big traffic. That’s when you wave good bye to shared hosting and say hello to WPEngine.
Choose programs / products that are best for your audience, not yourself. The rest will take care of itself.
Once a product fits in with your own values, it will resonate and fit in with the values of your users in a similar way.
So like I said before, focus on teaching, not selling. Your audience will be thankful to you and therefore more inclined to click on your affiliate links.
How To Find Affiliate Programs / Products
There are two ways to find and research affiliate programs.
If you’re already using a product that you enjoy and know will benefit your readers, you’ll normally find a link to their affiliate program in the footer of their website. If not, do a Google search for “company name + affiliate program”.
The second way is to find products / programs via an affiliate network such as Shareasale.
An affiliate network serves two purposes:
It’a a network comprising many different affiliate programs that acts as an intermediary between affiliate program developers and affiliate marketers, making it easy to find multiple affiliate programs for use on your site whilst also making it easy to register for affiliate programs and aggregating commission payments.
It provides developers (product developers) with greater exposure to affiliate marketers that may not otherwise be reached. They may also include benefits such as payment processing and tracking technology.
Popular Affiliate Networks
Viglink – The ultimate way to monetize your site. Viglink scans your website for link opportunities and then automatically adds links to monetize your site. It turns your outbound links into affiliate links allowing you to earn money when you wouldn’t normally. Merchant members include: eBay, Nike, Amazon, AliExpress but there are thousands more spanning almost every vertical.
ShareASale – My personal favorite. Thousands of products under their belt. 3900+ affiliate programs, Verticals include (over 40 in total): Home and Garden, Fashion, Business and tons more. Examples include: Studiopress, WP Rocket, WPEngine, Namecheap.
Clickbank – One of the oldest. Main focus is digital products. 6+ million unique products. Examles include: Freemake Video Converter, Affiliorama.
Impact Radius – A network offering a platform to track affiliate performance. Examples include: Stackpath CDN, Shutterstock, Airbnb, Gravity Forms.
Rakuten (was Buy.com, LinkShare) – One of the top e-commerce companies around. 90,000+ Products. Examples include: Walmart, Macy’s, Udemy.
FlexOffers – 12,000+ Affiliate programs. Millions of products spanning all verticals. Examples include: AppSumo, Beaurepaires, Crabtree UK.
PeerFly – An affiliate ad network. Accepts publishers (you) in any vertical. Examples include: Fiverr, CBS, Uber, McAfee, Target.
e-Commerce Affiliate Programs
Amazon Associates – Everyone knows Amazon. Founded by Jeff Bezos, it’s the largest e-commerce marketplace in the world (+ cloud computing) offering an affiliate program spanning over 1 million products in every category you can think of PLUS you can earn from Special Program Earnings, Prime Video Channels and a Trade-In Program (USA). Commissions vary by category up to a maximum of 10%. Here’s a fees schedule. Before joining Amazon, please do your research on the affiliate program. They have different rules to other affiliate programs in terms of links (may not be cloaked), promotional methods (online only – no email, eBooks etc.), social media promotion and disclaimers, among a large list of others. Failing to comply with Amazon’s Terms Of Service will get you banned. Furthermore, if you start a blog based on the Amazon affiliate program, be wary of just copying and pasting product descriptions onto product pages on your blog. Google may slap you on the wrists for thin and duplicate content. Don’t be discouraged. It’s a great program. I’m just giving you a heads up.
eBay Partner Network (ePN) – Monetize your site with products spanning the globe. Commission is category dependent and ranges from 40% to 80%. Affiliates who have accumulated earnings of at least $25 in their home currency (USD, Euro, CAD, AUD, GBP) are paid each month, either by way of direct deposit (available in 11 countries) or PayPal, both of which are free. The only drawback is the cookie duration of 24 hours.
AliExpress – Also an e-Commerce site offering an affiliate program as well as a drop shipping program. You can combine the two for boosted earnings. Commission rates 3% to 9%. Check out the schedule.
Etsy – A marketplace where global audiences connect to buy and sell handmade and vintage items. The affiliate program is similar to Amazon, allowing you to link to Etsy products and earn a commission on successful sales. Cashback and voucher sites are not eligible for the affiliate program. Cookie duration is 30 days.
Recommended WordPress Affiliate Programs
Cloudways
Cloudways runs a really good cloud hosting platform.
Now most people aren’t techie enough to setup and manage their own cloud servers.
Through Cloudways, you can set up a hosting server on either Digital Ocean, VULTR, Amazon, Google or Linode. The choice is your’s.
Besides being very innovative in other ways, they offer a really nice choice of commission strucure. You can opt for either a slab or hybrid structure.
The Slab (tiered) structure works as follows:
Leads
Amount
End Year 1
End Year 3
End Year 5
1-5
$50
$600 – $3K
$1.8K – $9K
$3K – $15K
6-20
$75
$5.4K – $18K
$16.2K – $54K
$27K – $90K
21-45
$100
$25.2K – $54K
$75.6K – $162K
$126K – $270K
46-80
$125
$69K – $120K
$207K – $360
$345K – $600K
80+
Custom
Custom
Custom
Custom
With the slab structure it doesn’t matter whether you sell the cheapest or the most expensive plan – the commission is constant.
The Hybrid structure provides for a regular recurring lifetime commission. It’s a nice way to build a passive income stream, but because the initial commission is lower it will take some years for this structure to catch up with the slab structure. It all depends on what plans your referred customers opt for. The more expensive the plan, the greater your earnings will be.
Initial commission: $30 per sale.
Recurring lifetime commission: 7%.
Here’s an illustration based on an average plan – a 2GB plan with Digital Ocean ($22p.m.). NOTE: Some rounding has been used in this table in order to save space.
Leads
Amount
End Year 1
End Year 3
End Year 5
1-5
$30+7%
$462 – $2.3K
$2K – $10.2K
$4.5K – $22.6K
6-20
$30+7%
$2.7K – $9.2K
$12.3K – $41K
$27K – $90.5K
21-45
$30+7%
$9.6K – $20.7K
$43K – $92K
$95K – $203K
46-80
$30+7%
$21K – $36K
$94K – $164K
$208K – $362K
On the face of it the slab structure looks more attractive. But remember that the illustration I’ve done assumes a $22 per month plan for all referred customers.
Based on this, the hybrid structure will catch up with the slab structure between year 10 and 11, where after it will start to exceed it.
If all your referrals took the $42 per month plan, the hybrid structure will overtake the slab structure between year 5 and 6.
You can change between commission structures at any time, but remember that if you switch from slab to hybrid, you will have to build up lifetime commissions from scratch. Think carefully.
Cookie duration: 90 days.
P.S. If you decide to join the Cloudways affiliate program and you you also wish to host with them, use this promo code to get 25% off the regular plan price for your first two months: WPMM25OFF
When it comes to shared hosting Siteground certainly outperforms the rest in terms of speed, uptime, support and value for money.
I’ve used over 7 different hosts over the years and I seen my fair share of problems.
And the only shared hosting that I feel comfortable recommending is Siteground.
I’ve spelled out everything you need to know in my detailed Siteground review.
I owe much credit to Siteground who were instrumental in helping me to get my loading times down to under 180ms – something I was never able to achieve with other shared hosts. They’re always first to implement the latest speed technologies.
They’re also the only hosting provider I’m aware of that offer their affiliates a free one month trial on any of their shared WordPress hosting plans.
So there’s absolutely no reason not to give them a try!
Mainstream advice recommends Bluehost because their initial commission is higher. But Bluehost is part of the EIG Group who have an infamous reputation for cutting corners and putting profits ahead of users.
It’s a bit of a shortsighted view because once you achieve over 5 sales with Siteground, their commission starts to exceed that of Bluehost.
Siteground offers a 60 day tracking cookie, awarded on the last click.
So if a user visited Siteground by following a link from a previous website and subsequently visits Siteground from one of your links, you will receive the commission.
Sign up for the affiliate program and receive your one month trial account.
WPEngine was founded on WordPress and is one of the very best WordPress hosting providers.
The technology they employ is phenomenal and their hosting speed leaves a lot to be desired.
If you’re after great page speed and top quality hosting then WPEngine is the logical choice. It’s truly managed, so you don’t have to concentrate on speed optimization and the like, thereby freeing up your time to concentrate on what’s important – business!
Here’s how it works.
You will need to sign up with the Shareasale Network to join the WP Engine affiliate program. This will also give you access to a vast number of other affiliate programs.
Commission rate per sale is the greater of $200 and 100% of the first payment.
Together with a 180 day tracking cookie, this is one of the highest paying affiliate programs.
They also offers an incentive bonus. The more you refer (and sell) the more you earn.
Additionally, they have a 2 tier affiliate program. After referring an affiliate marketer, you get a $50 “override” for each customer that sub affiliate refers.
Besides this, here’s another great deal to promote to your users.
WP Engine recently acquired Studiopress.
They’ve always given their clients the first 2 months of WordPress hosting for free. Now they’re offering an additional discount on their WordPress hosting plans which translates to 3 months of free hosting.
Studiopress themes come with lifetime everything. A lifetime license, lifetime support, no annual recurring charges and use them on as many domains as you wish.
I use the Genesis framework by Studiopress for all my sites and I’ll never change.
My Studioress review gives you everything you need to know so I won’t go into a fortune of detail here but the framework is the underlying “engine” on which each child theme runs. The concept is similar to say Toyota using the same engine for the Corolla, Corona and Mark X, with each model (skin) being different in design.
The Genesis framework (a separate installation file) comes with the first theme purchased and because the Studiopress themes come with a lifetime license, it can be installed and used on multiple domains, as can each theme.
What’s great is that there are no recurring annual fees and themes come with lifetime support and updates, unlike many other themes that don’t match up to Studiopress.
By the way, Studiopress were bought out by WPEngine during 2018.
Two Tier Lifetime 10% Commission on referral signups via your link.
Reporting.
Theme costs: A membership of $8.29 per month (paid annually) for all 95 premium themes PLUS 18 premium WordPress plugins. This is suitable for developers who may need access to many different themes. Alternatively, individual themes range from $19 to $35. After one year, a $19 nominal fee per year covers ongoing support and updates.
For those that don’t know, MyThemeShop is also the developer of Rank Math SEO, the new SEO plugin that I now use on all my sites. It’s completely free and you’ll be blown away with the free features, some of which are only available from paid plugins. If you decide to install it, you can use my setup guide, that Rank Math themselves say is the most comprehensive guide to Rank Math they’ve seen.
When it comes to building themes and plugins, these guys really know their game.
A single licence runs at $39 annually but those that prefer to preserve cash flow can opt for a monthly plan of $4.99.
Unfortunately, there’s no clarity in the affiliate terms and conditions on the workings of the commission payable on monthly and quarterly plans so I can’t comment at this stage.
WP Rocket has a long track record of success and is, without doubt, the fastest caching plugin in the WordPress space.
Not only does it handle caching, it’s also a site optimization tool and being a stalwart in the WordPress space, WP Rocket is designed to optimize page speed and deliver your website to users in the quickest and most efficient manner possible.
The nice thing is that it’s super easy for beginners to set up and it works straight out of the box. Read my review here.
I highly recommend the affiliate program and the product.
Some of the cool features include:
Page caching
Cache preloading or warming
Compression
Minification of JavaScript and CSS
Image lazy loading
Remove querystrings
Disable Emojis
Combine Google fonts
Includes database cleaner
Integrates with Cloudflare
Google analytics integration
Product cost: $49 with a discounted annual renewal cost of $39.
This affiliate program is available through the Shareasale network, who manage some of the best affiliate programs in the WordPress niche.
Both the WordPress Classic Editor and Gutenberg are great but they both have limitations or drawbacks.
I use Beaver Builder for all my sites because it allows me to create whatever type of elements and formatting I want to without having to spend time on unnecessary HTML coding. It speeds up my content creation dramatically and I have to say that it has virtually no effect on my loading times.
And because it includes things like subscription forms, contact forms, social sharing, galleries etc, it also allows me to keep my plugin count to a minimum, further enhancing speed. And anyone that follows me knows that I’m fanatical when it comes to WordPress speed optimization.
Beaver Builder works seamlessly without any problems!
Thrive Leads is an opt-in and conversion tool designed to grow a subscriber base.
It integrates with at least 30 email marketing providers so building email lists has never been easier.
The design aspects are tied in with their very own Thrive Architect product (page builder) which happens to be a very formidable page builder in its own right and is also very focused on conversion optimization.
Here’s a list of the type of conversion products that are included in Thrive Leads:
Thrive Box Lightbox – this is basically a modal pop-up (unblockable) that’s displayed on top of your content.
Screen filler – A pop-up that fills the entire screen.
Scroll mat – This is a screen filler that comes in from the top of the page. It doesn’t cover the content, it simply pushes it down.
Sticky ribbon – A ribbon that “sticks” to the top of the page (header area) until closed.
Inline forms – Inserts an opt-in form anywhere you choose, e.g. at the bottom of your posts.
2 Step opt-in forms – This allows a user to first click on a button (e.g. Yes Please button) and then opt in to an email list.
Slide-in – Slides in at a corner of the screen – usually bottom right. This is far more user friendly than a screen overlay but equally as effective.
Opt-in widget – adds a form to your sidebar.
Content lock – Comes up over your content at a specified place and prevents the user from viewing any further content until they subscribe – I would never do it to my readers! I am also quite certain Google would down-rank your page for doing this – you’ve been warned!
Yes / No forms – offer your readers a yes or no alternative to subscribe to your email lists. Nice and user friendly too.
Multiple choice forms – same as yes /no.
Optinmonster is also a great product, but Thrive Leads offers the best value for money with the same functionality.
Thrive Themes don’t charge an annual recurring fee for updates. The product includes lifetime updates, so the software is always kept up to date. And … the plugin comes in at a single price point making it a great choice.
All this makes Thrive Leads one of the better affiliate programs to have under the belt.
Thrive will reward you for ANY product purchased from your affiliate link and there are many, including the next one.
Thrive leads product cost: $67 for single license, $97 for 5 licenses.
I’ll concede that the native WordPress commenting system is probably the speediest of all. Unfortunately, it’s in need of a major makeover.
I spent many months researching and looking for a WordPress commenting system that’s:
Functional
Is visually appealing
Promotes user engagement
Is fast
Allows social login
In my opinion, Thrive Comments is the only one that fulfills these requirements.
The developers have used the native WordPress comments system as a foundation and have built on it from there.
It allows for lazy loading of gravatars so it doesn’t affect page speed. Gravatars are loaded only when the comments come into the viewport.
You can up-vote and down-vote (beware of trolls), change comments sort order, save your details for the next time so you will be remembered, direct users to a landing page or web page after commenting – as I said Thrive is very conversion orientated and this is built into the commenting system too.
It also allows for Social login which is really convenient.
I use it on my site. Check out how it works by leaving a comment.
Thrive leads product cost: $67 for single license, $97 for 5 licenses.
All of the brands below offer affiliate programs. Most of these belong to one or more affiliate networks.
Fashion
Adidas
TK Maxx
ThinkGeek
Boohoo
& Other Stories
Frank & Oak
Nordstrom
Revolve
American Apparel
Whistles
Anthropologie
Puma
Fanatics
Missguided
Vans
Clarks
New Balance
River Island
Net-a-Porter
SportChek
Toms
Free People
Vestiaire Collective
True Religion
Keds
Under Armour
Pretty Little Thing
Mr. Porter
Saucony
Nike
Eddie Bauer
The Real Real
Urban Outfitters
Ssense
Bloomingdales
Zappos
Hudson’s Bay
Macy’s
Topshop
Electronics
SkullCandy
Sony
Sennheiser
BH Photo
GearBest
DJI
Apple
Olympus
Best Buy
Microsoft
Dell
Beats by Dr. Dre
Canon
iTunes
Homeware
Overstock
Habitat
The White Company
LinenChest
Wayfair
HomeDepot
Made.com
JSYK
Types Of Affiliate Programs
Single Tier
You earn a referral fee / commission on the successful completion of a product or service based purchase originating from your affiliate link or banner.
Two-Tier
This is similar to an override commission. You refer other affiliate marketers to an affiliate program and earn referral fees on all of their referred sales.
Examples include WPEngine, A2 Hosting and Viglink.
Commission Types
Level
You receive a flat rate of commission per sale.
Stepped (Incentivized)
Your commission is based on a flat rate as above. However, you will be offered an incentive whereby the rate increases depending on the number of sales. For example:
1 to 10 sales – $50 per sale.
11 to 20 sales – $75 per sale.
Thereafter – $100 per sale.
Personalized
Regular top producers are sometimes offered a personalized rate after a specified number of sales has been achieved.
Recurring
Some programs such as SEMrush (one of the very best keyword research tools) offer recurring commissions each year on renewal of the product.
Locking Period (Vesting Of Commission)
Purchases are sometimes cancelled for a number of reasons and can include things like the product not being suitable for the purchaser or funds being insufficient to meet the purchase price.
A locking period is a fixed time set by the merchant after which the commission vests in full and cannot be reversed.
Cookie Duration and Commission Payments
When a user clicks on one of your affiliate links and is taken to a merchant’s website, a cookie is stored in their browser.
If the user makes a purchase, you earn a commission for the referral. However, the user may not make a purchase immediately but may return to do so a few days later, for example.
If the user returns to make a purchase at any time during which the cookie is still valid, you will still earn your commission.
But what happens in the event that a user visits a competitor site after visiting your’s and also clicks on their link to the same product? Who earns the commission?
The answer lies in the merchant’s terms and conditions. Some merchants respect the the most recent cookie while others respect the first placed cookie.
A point to note is that, if the user clears his browser cache (including cookies), there’s no way to track the activity back to your affiliate link and you will therefore not receive any commission.
Affiliate Link Management
Once you’ve joined a few affiliate programs, you come to realize that some of them may include multiple links that direct you to different products and pages on their website.
As an example, I use the Studiopress themes by Genesis for all my websites. There are over 35 Studiopress developed themes plus an additional 30 (approximately) third party themes (all approved by Studiopress) on the Studiopress website with affiliate links to each and every one of them.
As you join more affiliate programs the number of links can become cumbersome. Without a link management tool you’ll have to access a merchant’s website every time you want to use a link because you’ll never remember links that looks like this: https://www.example.com/r.ckg?b=80&u=8626419&p=67.
But that’s not the only reason why link management is advisable.
Some of the other good reasons may include:
A central hub to manage links.
Prettifying links.
Shortening links.
Cloaking links.
Let’s take a closer look …
Central Link Management Hub
Besides wanting to easily manage a large number of affiliate links, there’s a more compelling reason to want to manage your links from a centralized hub.
Let’s assume that over time, you’ve added a reasonably large number of links for X product to a many different posts. In fact, too many to remember.
If at any stage the merchant decides to change the link – and it does happen – can you just imagine having to find and change each and every one of those links in each and every post?
Each one of those links is potential income.
And if a user clicks on a link that doesn’t work, besides losing your commission, it makes for extremely poor user experience.
A good link management tool such as Thirsty Affiliates allows you make a single change to a merchant link that applies to each and every affiliate link across your entire site – within seconds!
And adding a link is as easy as highlighting some text, clicking the TA button in the editor and start typing.
Thirsty Affiliates then suggests links that you can add.
Prettify And Shorten Links
Long links with strings of numbers are not only impossible for you to remember, but they also look ugly when users hover over them (desktop devices).
Thirsty Affiliates allows you to shorten the links and assign meaningful names to them, making them easy to remember and insert into blog posts, emails and social media posts whilst also improving user experience.
Cloak Links
Affiliate link cloaking has always been a contentious issue in affiliate marketing circles but let me assure you that the practice isn’t nefarious. There are some very valid reasons to cloak links which we’ll discuss shortly.
I prefer to refer to affiliate link cloaking as re-directing, whereby a cloaked link automatically redirects you to another website.
What’s the difference then between a normal external link and a cloaked affiliate link?
In terms of user experience, absolutely nothing!
With both of these, you are directed to an external website.
So why do I say re-directed?
It’s simply because of the technical process involved.
When you click on a link cloaked with Thirsty Affiliates, your browser connects to the Thirsty Affiliates server and requests a page to be displayed.
Because the merchant’s web page doesn’t live on the Thirsty Affiliates server, the server duly responds with an error, stating that the page does not exist.
It then redirects the user to the affiliate merchant’s website using either a 301, 302 or 307 redirect, as chosen by you in the global options.
There’s no difference between this and a conventional redirect.
FYI: I highly recommend the Thirsty Affiliates plugin. I experimented with another well known brand (name withheld) and it messed up every single affiliate link on my site. I had to manually switch back to Thirsty Affiliates which wasted an enormous amount of time.
Let’s look more closely at some compelling reasons to cloak affiliate links …
Prevent Commission Theft
This is one of the most compelling reasons to cloak your affiliate links. And so you should. You work hard to earn your commissions.
A typical affiliate link looks something like this: www.affiliatenetwork.com/r.ckg?b=80&u=8626419&p=67.
The bold part following the domain name is the tracking code.
Scammers inject spyware into your web browser. This type of malware is software designed to spy on your own computer in order to retrieve your affiliate tracking code.
Once obtained, they change the tracking code in your browser to their own code, and any commissions earned from referrals that come from your hard work are automatically routed to their accounts.
If your affiliate link is cloaked and looks like this for example, www.yourdomain.com/go/studiopress, its use on another computer would track back to you.
It’s not possible for a scammer to replace your domain with their’s because there is no merchant tracking code associated with the other domain.
Tracking
In the same way that you can track clicks with Google Analytics, so too can you track your affiliate links.
A good affiliate link cloaking plugin like Thirsty Affiliates can track every external click on your affiliate link so you can track, over a period of time, how many clicks your affiliate links have attracted.
This helps you to monitor what parts of your website are working and which aren’t, enabling you to focus on what works.
Global NoFollow Links To Prevent Page Rank Leakage
There are two types of external links, viz. “dofollow” and “nofollow”.
These show in the HTML code of your web page (which you won’t see by viewing the page source) and look something like this,:
If you don’t make the affiliate link a nofollow link, you effectively leak some of your page rank to the merchant site.
So, in order to retain your full page rank, you add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link.
Thirsty Affiliates, allows you to make all links “nofollow” on a global basis by selecting this in global options. You’ll never have to remember to do it manually.
Automatic Keyword Linking
A Pro feature that makes Thirsty Affiliates worth every single cent and is one of the most ingenious features of the plugin.
This allows you to add affiliate links to assigned keywords throughout your content.
It’s a brilliant way to monetize your past content without having to manually add links to hundreds of posts.
How And Where To Use Affiliate Banners
I wouldn’t use them within content if I were you.
Banners look similar to ads placed in white space by ad networks such as Google Adsense or Mediavine.
Don’t know about you but I find them distracting and annoying especially if they’re animated. Why subject your audience to that after you’ve spent hours putting great content together and formatted it to look the best it can.
To me they look salesy and desperate.
Within your content, it’s cleaner to add links in pertinent places. It’s a more effective way to encourage clicks.
The only places I could condone banners is in sidebars (no animation) or as images on a resources page.
Genesis Simple Sidebars is a dedicated plugin that will help you display Genesis custom sidebars on different posts and pages, enabling you to use a different sidebar on single posts on your blog page and/or home page.
Besides images making your posts look great and improving user experience, you can make them work for you by adding affiliate links to them.
Again, Thirsty Affiliates is probably the best way to add affiliate links to images because the plugin will apply all your preset global options such as opening the link in a new tab and adding the “nofollow” rel attribute.
First add an image to your post. Then select it in the editor.
Click the Thirsty Affiliates button. Start typing the name of the link and the plugin will find it automatically.
Start A Blog
Theoretically, you could make money from affiliate marketing without a blog.
If you have an email list, you could market to your client base. If you have a good following on social media, you may consider marketing to your followers.
However, Facebook and Twitter use algorithms to restrict your post visibility to about 5% of your followers. Understandably, they want you to pay for advertising.
There’s a reason why the most formidable affiliate marketers promote products with blogs.
Honestly, I can’t remember much about Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and Shopify. It’s been many years since I compared the different website building platforms.
WordPress.org is an open source platform so there are no licensing requirements (which is where the bulk of costs otherwise come in) and it’s programming code is available for anyone to use freely.
Please don’t confuse it with wordpress.com which is a managed web hosting platform and a going concern (Automattic, Inc US), in business with the objective of making profits like any other business.
You can build ANY kind of website on WordPress and you don’t need any special technical knowledge to do so.
Domain Name
Prior to Google’s EMD (exact match domain) algorithm penalty update, webmasters were buying domains that matched the keywords they wanted to use and were ranking higher in Google SERP on the back of thin content.
There’s really no longer a need to buy exact match domains.
What’s more important as a Google ranking factor is to buy a domain for a term of at least 4 to 5 years. This shows Google that you’re serious about your online business.
Make sure you stick with a top level domain (TLD) and avoid spammy extensions such as .biz.
The .com domain is the most popular TLD you can buy. It enables you to target worldwide traffic.
Other popular TLD’s such as .co.uk (United Kingdom) or .com.au (Australia) are country specific. You can use these to target local traffic if you wish but there’s also nothing stopping you from using a .com domain locally. You can then set Geographical targeting in Google search console.
It’s also best to buy a domain that has never been used before. One way to check this is on the internet archive site, although this is not absolutely foolproof. A used domain can take some time to have impressions appear on archive.org
A previously used domain name could have a Google penalty attached to it and this can have a very detrimental effect on your business.
I’ve found that Namecheap is not only very user friendly but also offer savings of up to 93% on some of the best TLD’s. The savings will help you buy a domain for a longer term.
Hosting
Hosting is the most crucial speed factor listed in the WordPress Optimization Guide. It’s also critical for ranking your posts #1 in Google SERP.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re about to set up a website or you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, Cloudways offers superb value for money and dedicated resources.
It’s rated very highly in regular conversations extracted from Twitter by Review Signal.
The above data not come come from polls. It is derived from normal everyday conversations that people have on Twitter, out of their own free will. No quesions. No prompting. No undue influence.
Review Signal turns conversations on Twitter into web hosting reviews. We’ve collected over 335,000 reviews about web hosting companies and publish them for consumers. Our mission is to take valuable insights publicly shared by others and transform it into useful information.
Review Signal
Install WordPress
Before installing WordPress, please install your free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate.
It’s much easier to have this in place so that when you start your WordPress installation, you can immediately install onto an HTTPS protocol. You’ll select this option during installation.
Choose A Theme
This is the next biggest decision you need to make when setting up your blog.
I made some hugely time consuming mistakes myself way back when I started my first online business. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which way you slice it, time is money.
If you want to make money from affiliate marketing, the last thing you need is theme customization bogging you down at a crucial time.
What I’m about to tell you has nothing to do with free or paid themes. It has everything to do with functionality.
If you want to start off on the right footing, please refrain from using:
Any of the free themes from the WordPress repository.
Themes purchased from Themeforest (Envato Market), Template Monster or any of the like.
Many of the developers using these portals are doing theme development part time and very often they stop updating the themes due to lack of interest or funds.
The other problem is that they’re no cheaper than the best themes money can buy. Just to the contrary. You may purchase a theme for say $79. After a year, you can only get updates if you renew your subscription. Updates are required to keep your theme current with the latest version of WordPress, which is updated regularly.
Unfortunately, thousands of unsuspecting individuals get caught by these developers.
The framework itself will set you back $59. You purchase it once and you can can use it to power as many sites as you wish. What’s more is you get lifetime support and updates.
Depending on the theme you choose, you’ll be in for anywhere between $40 to $60. Again, it’s a once-off payment. You can use it on as many sites as you like and you get lifetime support and updates.
Besides the money aspect, the Genesis framework is lightweight, bloat free and blazing fast!
Ask any blogger in the know and they’ll tell you that the Genesis framework is the best investment you can make.
There’s no question, you need content to support your blog. After all, content is king. But just how much content should you be producing.
There’s a serious misconception out there that you should aim to produce a post a day in the formative stages.
Big mistake!
You see, if you want to rank #1 in Google SERP, you need to focus on quality content not quantity.
There’s just no way that anyone can produce a quality content post in a day.
Well known SEO expert, Brian Dean, sent me an email message some time back claiming that he had only 44 posts on his Backlinko blog.
Every one of them ranks on Google’s first page where relevant keywords are searched for.
So here’s the thing.
Google loves the same content that your users and followers love to read.
They’re so committed to providing search results that best match the needs of their users, that user intent and user experience (UX) are becoming firmly entrenched in their algorithms.
If you want traffic you need to be mindful of this at all times.
Here are some power tips to ensure that your content stands the best chance of ranking so that you stand the best chance of making money from your affiliate marketing efforts. You’re welcome to copy and print the list so you can refer to it every time you write a post:
Know your niche and who you’re writing for.
Ensure that your content stays focused. Stick to the subject and the needs of your prospective audience.
Your content must be aimed at solving problems that your audience is having and providing solutions to those problems, or;
Your content must meet a specific need.
Make certain that your content is really helpful to your prospective audience and that it is actionable.
Ask yourself if you believe your content is the very best it can be. If not, make it epic. Skyscraper your own content if need be. If you want backlinks, producing the best content is not negotiable. It’s essential. When linked to by the right websites, the effects will snowball.
Keep your content natural. Write for your users, not for search engines. Google doesn’t like keyword stuffing. Neither do any other of the search engines.
Write power headlines (Titles) that readers will want to click on.
Don’t try to optimize for competitive keywords. You’re not likely to rank for them. Rather opt for long tail keywords. It doesn’t matter if search volume is low as long as competition for the keyword is attractive. You be able to rank for those and even if you only get low blog traffic volumes, it will grow further down the line.
Try to write evergreen content. Content that may not be valid in years to come will ultimately fall by the wayside. You want to make sure that your content is always helpful to users, not just this year.
Aim to build up your arsenal of quality posts. The more quality and helpful posts you have, the more people will find them in search results.
You can’t expect to retain visitors on your site unless you have other helpful, quality posts for them to read. Give them more reason to stay on your site for longer. Keep them entertained and engaged in all of your content. Give them a reason to return.
Some readers may not convert immediately. Very often it’s because there’s an obstacle or the timing may not be entirely right.
Keep them interested so that when they are ready to purchase an affiliate product, that they do so with you and not someone else.
Add A Resources Page To Your Site
Make sure you don’t skip over this step.
A resources page is an easy and non salesy way to make money from affiliate marketing and something that every affiliate marketer should have in their arsenal.
Add a prominent link to the page in your navigation menu and make certain to mention and link to it in your broadcast emails, automated sequences and blog posts.
Pat Flynn reckons that half of his affiliate earnings are made from his resources page. That’s how important it is.
Drive Traffic To Your Site
You can’t make money without blog traffic. Let’s dig in and take a look at the different types of traffic and how to generate it.
Organic Traffic
This traffic is not only targeted but it’s also free.
It’s the traffic that comes to you through search engine results pages (SERPS).
Generating organic traffic is a continuous process. It’s time consuming and tedious but the benefits will be reaped long after the effort is forgotten.
Aim to rank within the first three listings in SERP in order to get maximum benefit from organic traffic.
Search engine optimization (SEO) should be your number one, long term blog traffic generation goal. If I told you any different I wouldn’t have your best interests at heart.
Paid Traffic
This type of traffic comes from inbound marketing campaigns.
This may include PPC (pay per click) advertising through Google or one of the alternatives offered by Bing and Yahoo.
You may also promote posts via Facebook or some other social media platform.
PPC advertising certainly works. It’s easy enough to put an SEO campaign together. You’ll get immediate traffic, but it’s going to cost you.
Social Media Traffic
Social media has always been a good generator of traffic but this type of promotion comes with its own set of problems:
Most social platforms use algorithms which they cleverly manipulate to prevent the majority of your followers from seeing your free promotional posts, thereby forcing you to pay for advertising. Perfectly understandable because it’s their primary source of income.
The bigger issue with social media platforms is that, whilst you may have friends and followers, you still need to establish a targeted audience in order to drive the “right” traffic to your website.
Referral Traffic
Comes from links (backlinks) to your website from a third party site. Backlinks are also a ranking factor.
A link from a third party website to one of your blog posts is basically an endorsement from that site.
In essence, the author of a third party post makes a recommendation to his users to read your content because he believes it’s going to be useful and helpful to them.
Think of backlinks like this …
If you tell a friend about a restaurant it’s because you really enjoyed eating there. You wouldn’t give your friend a bad recommendation because it would make you look bad.
And it’s exactly the same with bloggers. I wouldn’t link to a post or website unless that post or website is going to provide exceptional value for my users – something that either expands on what I’m talking about or reinforces what I’m saying.
Obtaining backlinks requires a good deal of research as well as a huge amount of manual outreach, both of which require a fair investment of your time.
But you will be rewarded with traffic because backlinks are one of the two most important factors when it comes to getting your posts to rank in Google search results.
Direct Traffic
Traffic generated when users enter your website address into their browsers.
And that’s only going to happen when you’ve made a name for yourself. In other words, you need to build your brand.
Building a brand is also a huge SEO win, but it takes time to grow a brand.
Email Marketing Traffic
Traffic from promoting your posts to your subscribers (audience).
It’s a great way to drive traffic to your blog and it’s also works wonders for your organic rankings because Google will up-rank your posts if they see them attracting traffic.
It’s also the “warmest” way to promote your products or services and therefore essential for making money money with affiliate marketing.
But this is a bit of a catch 22 situation and one that I wish some internet marketers would get their heads around. It’s easy to talk about email marketing but you can’t build your email list without traffic!
Aim to generate traffic by any means you can. Then offer content upgrades to your users to encourage subscriptions.
Build And Market To An Email List
I mentioned earlier that an email list is a great way to market affiliate products to your audience.
Every time you publish a post, send out a broadcast email message to you all your subscribers with a link to your new post.
You need to be clever with the way you word your email because you need to create a solution to a problem in order to get those subscribers to click through to your blog and read your post.
Therefore, your email should contain some good introductory content.
Any traffic that you can get to your blog will be noticed by Google and regular blog traffic will signal to Google that users are finding your content really helpful.
So again, make sure your content is killer and add internal links to others posts in a very convincing way so as to reduce bounce rate.
Bounce rate is one of those metrics that can be interpreted in a number of different ways.
But Google’s interpretation is what counts here, so the more you can improve upon bounce rate, the better the long term effects will be for your blog traffic.
You can also add affiliate links into your email content. A broadcast Email is a warm way to introduce and talk about products to your audience and a great way to generate affiliate income without looking “salesy”.
Remember not to include links to Amazon affiliate products in your emails as it is againgst their TOS and will get you banned. You can, however, link to pages on your site which in turn links to Amazon Products.
One of the best ways to build your email list is to offer content upgrades in your posts.
A content upgrade is free give away (in exchange for an email address) such as an eBook, a roadmap, checklist, workbook or something similar.
I’ve never had success in getting subscriptions from an email newsletter subscription box in my sidebar, but content upgrades work.
Convertkit is the best ways to add content upgrade forms to your posts and to manage your email subscriptions, newsletters, email sequences and automations.
Promote Only Affiliate Products That You Use Or Have Used
If you’re thinking you can cherry pick and promote products that you’ve never used but relate to your niche, you’ll not make any money from affiliate marketing.
Ethics aside, it’s impossible to explain and convey to your audience, the workings of a product unless you have first hand experience with it.
You’ll not be able to write about the finer intricacies of the product, nor will you be able to use screenshots to support your content.
As a result, your content will appear thin and users will see no benefit in purchasing the product.
Before I started using Convertkit (on a personal finance site of mine) to send subscribers automated emails, I was using Mailchimp – because it was free.
I switched because Mailchimp just wasn’t able to provide me with the functionality I needed and the interface was not very user friendly.
I imported my subscribers into Convertkit and then set up an automatic sequence. I added only one (the first) email to the automation sequence which I set up to send immediately, thinking that I’ll start adding to the sequence within the coming week.
I had added myself as a subscriber in order to confirm that everything was working as expected.
The following day I added another email to the sequence but I noticed that all my subscribers, including myself, were no longer subscribed to the sequence. Once all published emails have been sent for that particular sequence, Convertkit assumes the sequence is finished and then unsubscribes people from it and moves them to the next step in the automation.
There’s no fault whatsoever with the software. It works this way for very good reason. Once a sequence finishes, you can automatically (and without intervention) add those subscribers to a new sequence with a different content strategy. I mean, why would you want to offer a product to subscribers that have already purchased it?
Not only is that a brilliant marketing option but it’s also a brilliant promotional strategy!
But without that personal experience, how would I possibly know to explain this in a post that promotes Convertkit?
It would be easy to add something like; Convertkit is the best email automation software I’ve ever used. But that’s meaningless for my audience because it doesn’t solve a problem, tell them about any useful functionality or address a need.
You’ll be better off regularly promoting one or two products that you use / have used and know really well, rather than trying to promote multiple products without the required knowledge and experience to write extensive content around them.
Just by the way, there is a way to ensure that a sequence never ends with Convertkit. Simply publish an email with an end date of 99,999 days. This will obviously never be sent but it’s a way to prevent a sequence from ending. Then you can add in more sequence emails at any time.
Convertkit also includes an inbuilt form builder that can be customized to create some of the best looking content upgrades for your posts.
If you’re an affiliate marketer in the US, you are required by the FTC to make disclosures to that effect.
If you’re not in the US and you’re endorsing products of an American business, the FTC may still have jurisdiction over your activities.
Irrespective of legal requirements, it’s always best to add affiliate disclaimers to let your users know that there may be affiliate links in your posts or other places where you add affiliate links, such as email marketing and social media and that you will receive compensation from purchases made via your links.
Some affiliate programs enforce this in their TOS.
I have a sentence right at the top of each and every post informing users that there may be affiliate links within the content. It recommends, by way of a link, that users read my full disclaimer page.
The FTC states that affiliate disclosures should be very clear and placed as close to the link as possible in order that users don’t have to scroll away to find it.
I’m dead against hiding affiliate links from users but it’s not always practical to include a disclosure with each and every link. I believe it detracts hugely from user experience. That’s why I make it known at the top of every post.
If you’re on the Genesis framework, you can add the code below to to your functions.php file to add something similar to your site. Remember to replace the text and links with your own.
//add affiliate disclaimer after title
add_action( 'genesis_entry_header', 'aw_disclaimer_after_post_entry_title', 12 );
function aw_disclaimer_after_post_entry_title() {
if ( is_singular('post') ) {
_e( '<em>This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my <a href="https://www.wpmediamastery.com/disclaimer/">disclaimer</a> for more info.</em>', '$text_domain' );
}
}
Final Thoughts
SEO is absolutely crucial if you want to make money from affiliate marketing. If you can’t rank on on Google, you’ll struggle to get traffic to your site.
No traffic, no clicks, no money!
That’s part of the reason that this post has taken me close on 3 weeks to put together. It’s over 12,200 words long and I hope it’s super informative and been really helpful to you.
If you want to make money from affiliate marketing, stick to a schedule of publishing one power post per week.
Don’t take shortcuts. Power posts take time and affiliate marketing is not just as simple as slapping affiliate links into your posts.
It’s super easy to get started on the Cloudways platform and it’s better than shared hosting in every respect, from speed to value for money. By the time you’ve read through this Cloudways review and set yourself up on Cloudways, you’ll know just as much as I do.
I Switched And I Never Looked Back
I have to admit that the thought of switching my hosting provider was daunting.
Not that switching hosts is difficult, it’s just that I’d never been on cloud hosting before and I was pretty familiar with cPanel, so learning about a new platform and how to set things up required a good deal of reading before taking the leap.
To be honest, it’s probably more difficult for the cPanel aficionados to get their heads around a different management panel than it is for newbies who don’t know any different.
But I was actually amazed at how easy it was to migrate to Cloudways and equally surprised at the simplicity of their custom built control panel that it left me wondering whether I wasn’t missing something. Everything you need is at your fingertips, far more so than with cPanel.
I felt compelled to write this Cloudways review and comprehensive setup guide for everyone else who may want to benefit from super fast hosting and dedicated resources at more than attractive prices but may be reticent in taking the first step.
This guide provides a shortcut to getting started on Cloudways without having to read through multiple knowledge base articles.
You’ll be up and running within 15 to 20 minutes maximum and save yourself heaps of anxiety.
And if you use my promo code WPMM25OFF, you’ll get 25% off your first 2 months.
It doesn’t get any sweeter than that!
REVIEW
1. How Cloudways Works
As a cloud WordPress hosting provider, Cloudways boasts over 60 data centers around the globe and operates as a server management conduit between 5 different cloud providers and their clients.
As such, their focus is on managed cloud hosting.
Nevertheless, they also cater for developers who wish to run their own PHP applications. Deployment can even take place from a GIT repository. Each time the repository is updated, the application updates automatically. Command line access is provided through SSH but root access is not possible due to security reasons.
In truth, you could go direct to a cloud infrastructure provider such as Digital Ocean and set up your own “droplet”. It may save you a couple of dollars but then you’re entirely on your own.
Considering the management and support you get in return for a really small management fee, it’s money well spent.
SIGN UP WITH PROMO CODE: WPMM25OFF FOR 25% OFF YOUR FIRST 2 MONTH’S FEES IF YOU HOST WITH CLOUDWAYS
1.1 Super Easy Control Panel
There are 2 Control Panels plus an Account Management Panel.
No more messing about with an outdated and difficult to use cPanel.
The Application Control Panel is simple, modern, natural, easy to use and everything is right there at your fingertips.
The Server Control Panel is just as easy to navigate.
1.2 The Cloudways Bot
The Cloudways bot is a highly intelligent and automated monitoring and notifications assistant which eyeballs your account on a regular basis.
It will notify you about the health of your servers, applications, security, billing and performance.
Depending on the channel you choose to receive notifications (Hip Chat, Slack, Email, API) it will alert you to recommendations, tips and tricks on how to improve the performance of your server.
Moreover, it helps with support as you will see later on.
Ability to scale up but not down. (Although you can always clone the server to a smaller one).
Backup/restore processes are a bit slower than with Amazon (backups stored on Amazon infrastructure).
8 Data centers across the USA, Europe, Singapore and Japan.
From $12 per month.
4.3 VULTR
Relatively New Provider but growing quickly.
Most economical provider of all offering almost unlimited bandwidth.
Very reliable infrastructure.
Cheap bandwidth. Great if you use plenty of it.
Ability to scale up but not down. (Although you can always clone the server to a smaller one).
Backup/restore processes are a bit slower than with Amazon (as Cloudways stores backups on Amazon infrastructure).
High performance SSD storage.
Data centers across 13 locations.
From $11 per month.
4.4 AWS (Amazon)
On the expensive side (especially for smaller servers).
Extremely reliable infrastructure.
Ability to scale up and down.
Quick backup/restore processes (as Cloudways stores backups on Amazon infrastructure).
Snapshot backup available.
Bandwidth is expensive so expect bigger invoices with higher usage.
Data centers in 14 locations.
Well recognized brand.
From $36.51 per month.
4.5 Google
Cheaper than Amazon.
Extremely powerful infrastructure.
Ability to scale up and down.
Quick backup/restore processes but a little slower than Amazon (as Cloudways stores backups on Amazon infrastructure).
Snapshot backup available.
Most expensive bandwidth.
Aimed at large businesses and resource intensive websites.
Data centers in 13 locations.
Well recognized brand.
From $33.30 per month.
5. Managed CMS And PHP Services
Cloudways offers a number of managed CMS platforms and PHP services.
WordPress.
Magento.
PrestaShop.
Joomla.
Drupal.
PHP.
Laravel.
Open Cart.
6. Designed For Maximum Speed
6.1 Advanced Stack
Cloudways have ingeniously designed their webstack so as to pump up both performance and stability.
Nginx is well known for performance while Apache is renowned for Stability.
Cloudways uses both of them and then sandwiches Varnish (cache) in between, creating a perfect combination whereby the static content is served by Nginx and the dynamic content is passed to Apache which is cached by Varnish in between.
This intensifies stability from back and speed from the front.
Brilliant!
To further enhance speed, the stack comes with built-in caching such as Memcached (speeds up database queries), Varnish and Redis together with the latest PHP versions (default is PHP 7) and a choice of MySQL or MariaDB databases.
6.2 Dedicated Resources
Unlike shared hosting where resources are shared, Cloudways allocates completely dedicated resources to each and every server. The resources referred to include memory, bandwidth, disk space (storage) and processor (CPU) resources (the better the processor the greater the amount of traffic your site will be able to handle and the quicker your pages will be loaded).
Additionally, servers are SSD based which speeds up disk access tremendously. These are fully managed by Cloudways.
You still have full control of your own cloud server with blazing fast global response times.
6.3 Additional Speed Enhancements
FREE Breeze page caching plugin.
Cloudways CDN, powered by Stackpath – formerly MaxCDN. The additional data centers across the globe means that your site will be served to visitors from the center closest to their location, thereby speeding up the delivery of your site. The cost is ridiculously low at $1 per 25GB of bandwidth.
7. Top Shelf Security
Dedicated Firewall Plus Regular Security Patches– Protects all servers.
1-Click SSL Certificate Installation – Additional protection is provided with a FREE Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate or Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL. A really nice feature is that you can easily add additional domains to update your certificate – something you can’t do with shared hosting.
Automated Backups – By default, backups are performed daily but you change frequecy from every hour through to every 7 days.
Restore – 1-Click.
Auto Healing Servers – Auto healing server restarts ensure that most cloud server issues are automatically healed so you won’t have to worry about your site crashing.
Two Factor Authentication For your Account.
IP Whitelisting – For unrestricted access when using SFTP and SSH.
8. Unrenowned Flexibility
Pay As You Go – No long term contracts. Pay only for the resources you use.
1-Click Vertical Scaling – Resources can be easily scaled without affecting server customization.
Easily Allocate Addition Storage – Without changing other server parameters.
1-Click Deploy – Install unlimited applications (sites) on a single server.
1-Click Revert – Rollback changes pushed from staging to live environment. You can also revert a restored backup with 1 click.
9. Expert Support
9.1 Support Via 5 Entry Points (Bot, Live Chat, Ticketing, Knowledge Base, Forum)
You can request support in one of 5 ways.
Cloudways have developed their own intelligent bot designed to provide answers to a number of queries without having to waste unnecessary time with a support person.
This service is invoked through search and the live chat facility and oftentimes you will be provided with links to knowledge base (KB) and how-to articles. You can also access knowledgebase articles directly.
Should you want to speak to a live person, simply type “person” into the chat field. You can request a chat transcript by email with any chat service (bot or live).
You also have the option to send a support request by ticket if you feel your issue deserves a greater level of attention.
Support can also be sourced through the forum.
9.2 Active Community
Not only does Cloudways have their very own community forum for logged in users, they also have a Facebook group dedicated only to users.
Both of these platforms will give you input from various different experts in their respective fields.
9.3 Managed Migrations (One Free)
You get one free managed migration. But seriously, migrating a site to Cloudways is as easy as pie!
Simply install Cloudways’ migration plugin, enter a few details from your Cloudways control panel and the migrator tool does the rest.
Your site is migrated to a Cloudways URL (within minutes) which cannot be indexed by search engines so there’s no fear of duplicate content.
To make your site live, simply point your domain to Cloudways.
That’s all there is to it!
10. Easy Staging And Cloning
Staging your application (website) is achieved in a total of 2 clicks.
The staging environment is password protected so no need to worry about duplicate content. An SSL certificate comes pre-installed. You can elect to use a custom certificate if you wish.
Staging provides a completely separate but exact copy of your site on either the same server as your live environment or a new server. Your choice.
You use staging to test out any coding changes, design changes and plugins without affecting the live site in any way.
Once you’re happy with the changes on your staging site, you simply push them to the live environment.
INGENIOUS FEATURE: If you have pushed changes from your staging environment to your live environment, you can revert the changes by using the Rollback option (in the staging section of the live environment).
You can copy data back and forth between live and staging at any time (push and pull operations).
It’s worth noting that, being a testing environment, the Cloudways CDN is not available on staging.
Cloning is used to make an exact copy of your live site to a new environment. You make it live on the new environment after effecting any changes you wish to.
11. Add-Ons
DNS Made Easy – Easily manage all of your DNS services right here under one roof. If you are going to use Cloudflare, then your DNS will be managed there.
Rackspace Email – If you need mailboxes for your domain. Managed by Cloudways for $1 per month per mailbox.
Elastic Email – For high volume emails such as newsletters and campaigns. These are sent via your server. Cost varies according the number of emails chosen (different packages). Personally, I would recommend you use an email service provider like Convertkit. You also benefit from being able to add subscribe forms on your site in order to build your email list.
12. Pricing
The pay as you go pricing model is based on actual resources used in any given month.
The above illustration shows some of the most popular plans offered using Digital Ocean as the cloud infrastructure.
You can monitor server usage from the control panel.
And then keep a tab on your up to date billing.
13. Review Summary – Pros And Cons
I choose to host with Cloudways because I firmly believe that their hosting platform is top shelf and offers tremendous value for money compared to other hosting providers.
Granted, you can go direct to the likes of Digital Ocean and set up a “droplet” for as little as $5 per month (compared to $10). But most of us aren’t equipped enough to setup and manage servers.
Considering what Cloudways are putting in behind the scenes, the small premium is well worth every cent.
Were it not for the fact that the Cloudways CDN integration (for $1 per 25GB bandwidth) is pretty much limited to use with the Breeze cache plugin, I would have given Cloudways a rating of 5 (out of 5) and not 4.9.
That said, it’s a free world. Cloudways don’t disallow integration with other caching plugins and CDN service providers. If you choose not to use Breeze, then you have to do that independently at a slightly higher cost (and I strongly recommend Stackpath) or run Breeze together with your own caching plugin, which I wouldn’t suggest.
Other than what I’ve mentioned, you’ll see from the setup tutorial below that Cloudways is a breeze (pun intended) to use. Not only do I have no hesitation in suggesting them, I am 100% confident that they are the very best out there and I highly recommend them for all levels of hosting, from beginner through to advanced.
REMEMBER TO USE MY PROMO CODE (WPMM25OFF) FOR 25% OFF YOUR FIRST 2 MONTHS.
REMEMBER TO USE MY PROMO CODE: WPMM25OFF FOR 25% OFF YOUR FIRST 2 MONTH’S HOSTING FEES.
You automatically get a 3 day free trial. Click either “Try For Free” or “Start For Free”.
Complete your details and enter my promo code WPMM25OFF fore 25% off your first 2 months. This will take effect once you upgrade to the paid plan. Make sure you do this before your trial expires.
Head on over to your email inbox and confirm your email address. You’ll then be presented with the following screen.
Fill out all the necessary details, as numbered.
The process to launch the server could take anywhere from 7 minutes to 13 minutes.
When complete, you will see a screen with your IP address.
It can’t get any simpler.
Your server is setup and WordPress is installed.
Let’s move onto configuration. You can go to your application by clicking on the www link (as seen above) or by following the Applications link on the website’s navigation menu.
2. Map Domain And Install SSL Certificate.
You will notice that Cloudways has assigned an application URL (1), a WordPress admin URL (2), a WordPress username and password (3) as well as a database name and password (4).
At this stage, the site is not yet live on the internet.
The above URL’s will change as soon as the domain name is mapped. Once you point your domain name to Cloudways and the DNS propagates, your site will go live.
Before mapping the domain, it’s best to visit your domain name host and point your domain name to Cloudways by setting up an A record for both www and non-www versions of your site. (I’m with Namecheap but Cloudflare handles my DNS so the illustration below uses the Cloudflare interface. They work exactly the same way).
Now select Domain Management on your control panel.
Add your canonical and non-canonical domain.
That completes domain name mapping.
Select SSL Certificate.
Key in your email address and domain name. Then click Install Certificate.
If the SSL certificate does not install at this stage, it’s because your domain name has not fully propagated. You can check for propagation at whatsmydns.net.
If you return to the Access Details tab, you will notice that the application URL and WordPress admin URL have been changed.
Your site is now live.
3. Migrate A Site To Cloudways.
Migrating to Cloudways follows almost the exact same procedure as setting up a site.
Cloudways has built a plugin that makes it real easy to migrate your existing site.
Here’s how you do it.
Follow steps 1 and 2 above to create an account, set up a server on Cloudways, map your domain and install an SSL certificate.
Now login to your WordPress dashboard on the site you are going to migrate. Go to Plugins > Add New. Then search for Cloudways WordPress Migrator.
Now fill in details marked 1 to 7 below.
You can match the field entries using the 2 images below with the corresponding numbering.
The Email address you used to register with Cloudways.
The full URL of the site on the Cloudways server. This should match your current site.
Database Name. Copy from Application Settings screen.
IP Address. Copy from Application Settings screen
SFTP Username. Copy this from Server Management > Master Credentials.
SFTP Password. Copy this from Server Management > Master Credentials.
Agree to the terms and conditions and click Migrate.
You will be returned to the Cloudways platform where you will wait until the migration completes.
That’s all there is to it!
4. How To Set Up Cloudflare (Free) On Cloudways
The Cloudflare CDN adds a whole lot of data centers from which your site will be delivered to visitors in close proximity thereby giving you the extra benefit of cloud hosting.
Moreover, Cloudflare speeds up websites by 100% and reduces the number of requests from your server by over 65% with a concomitant decrease in bandwidth usage.
This will save you hosting costs and the great thing is it’s free.
Head on over to Cloudflare and sign up for an account. (I already have a Cloudflare account running a number of sites so your initial couple of screens won’t appear here).
Now Add a Site.
Click on the Free Plan and then the Confirm Plan button.
Now confirm.
Cloudflare will query your DNS.
Click Continue.
Go back to your domain host and change the nameservers. Here’s how I do it with Namecheap.
Cloudflare will complete the nameserver check. You may need to click on Re-check Nameservers.
You will receive an email when Cloudflare is done. Then return to the Cloudflare website, click the Overview button and refresh your page.
Now go back to the Cloudways Server Management dashboard > Settings and Packages > Advanced. Then select Cloudflare under the WAF module. This will allow your server to see the visitor’s real IP address.
Done!
Settings You Need To Enable Within Cloudflare
Changing the nameservers at you domain host to point to Cloudflare automatically assigns your DNS management to Cloudflare. Any additions or changes will have to effected through Cloudflare’s DNS management tab.
Forcing HTTPS is better achieved with a rewrite rule in the .htaccess file. (See the rewrites section). A 301 gives Google and other search engines a clear idea of which version of your site is the canonical.
Don’t confuse this with forcing HTTPS. They are not the same. This function rewrites only the URL of the specific resource that may exist on HTTP.
Please don’t enable minification twice. If enabled through your page caching plugin then disable it here or vice versa.
I use the WP Rocket caching plugin and I enable minification and concatenation (merging) of JavaScript from there. For me Rocketloader doesn’t improve speed. You may like to experiment with this as each site is different.
5. Cloudways CDN
Unlike Cloudflare which caches a domain, a CDN caches static assets such as images and other media, JavaScript, CSS and HTML files.
This is called Offloading. Because these assets are stored on the CDN’s network, it greatly reduces the number of requests from your server (and traffic) whilst also reducing bandwidth and subsequent hosting costs.
Furthermore, due to the geographical distribution of edge servers, a CDN will also have a very positive effect on page loading times.
The Cloudways CDN is powered by Stackpath (previously MaxCDN), the very best CDN in my personal opinion.
The CDN integrates seamlessly with the Breeze caching plugin which was built by Cloudways specifically for use with their hosting platform and if you activate and integrate the Cloudways CDN, Breeze will be automatically installed too.
Whilst I personally don’t use Breeze, I can understand why some people claim it’s the fastest caching plugin around.
If you’re happy to stick with Breeze cache, the Cloudways CDN comes at a cost of $1 per month (for 25GB), which is insanely cheap. If you prefer to stick with your own caching plugin, then it’s best to go direct to Stackpath and integrate the CDN with your site. This option will cost you around $10 per month. All the best caching plugins have included integration with Stackpath.
OK. Let’s get to the setup.
Head on over to your Applications Control Panel and select the CDN tab.
Enter your site’s full URL including http / https and click Create.
Now integrate the CDN with your application by clicking Apply.
If you ever decide to remove the CDN subscription, please make sure to visit the Breeze > CDN tab and disable the integration and remove the URL (CName) before deleting the CDN subscription. If you don’t do this, you may find broken parts of your site.
Rewrite Rules You Must Add To .htaccess File
If you have set up your DNS records correctly, you may have 4 versions of your site living on the internet.
https://www.example.com
https://example.com
http://www.example.com
http://example.com
When your site runs on HTTPS, you need to ensure that users who may manually enter your site’s URL using the HTTP protocol are redirected to the secure (and canonical) version of your site.
Please place the following rewrite rule into your .htaccess file.
This rule forces HTTPS. Without it, someone using the HTTP protocol will get a security warning and will not be able to access your site.
Make sure you use this rule and not another one you may find on the internet:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
If your site runs on HTTP, use this rule:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} ^https$
RewriteRule .* http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}</IfModule>
If your canonical site is preceded with www, I would suggest you add another rewrite rule that directs all traffic to this canonical.
Don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain details.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301,NC]
If your canonical site is non-www, use this rule.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
The above redirect rules serve 3 purposes:
They help Google (and other search engines) to understand which version of your site is the canonical version. This is important because …
If you don’t put them in place, you may (inadvertently) be diluting your SEO juice by sharing it between 4 different versions of your site.
They create sound user experience protocols because users will ALWAYS reach your website.
That’s All Folks
Well that’s it for the setup guide.
It’s now up to you to go through the rest of the control panel screens and familiarize yourself with what’s there.
As you can see, it’s super easy to navigate your way around Cloudways.
Are you ready to switch to the best Cloud Hosting Platform available?
