Each tool will probably give you a handful of suggestions in how to improve your site’s speed. However there are 2 most essential components that you need to be sure have been implemented on your website or server. They take only a few minutes to set up but give the most noticeable impact to the site’s performance.

If you are using Apache webserver, below are the instructions to add them.

Enable browser caching

Add this into your .htaccess file:

## ADD BROWSER CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
</IfModule>

Enable gzip compression

Add this into your .htaccess file:

## ADD GZIP COMPRESSION ##
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css text/plain text/xml text/javascript application/x-javascript application/x-httpd-php
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

Sometimes due to the server’s configuration, the gzip compression works on every other file except CSS and JS files. If this happens, you could try adding this before the ## ADD GZIP COMPRESSION ##:

## TYPES FIX ##
AddType text/css .css
AddType text/javascript .js

That’s it. Give the site another test on page speed tools and see how much the score has improved.

The post How to enable browser caching & gzip compression on Apache webserver appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

There are tons of WordPress plugins out there and for different purposes. Most are designed to add new features or integrations with other services, some to make it looks nicer, and so on. Below I am going to list a number of plugins that will help to increase your SEO score.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

What does it do?
A lot. This is the top plugin in the category, not only to improve your blog’s SEO, but also to expand your understanding about SEO. Its one of the most important features is that you will be able to set different meta title and description which will be displayed on the search engine results. It also helps you in reviewing the content of you post with a targeted keyword or keyphrase.

Why does it matter?
Basic SEO practices encourage you to optimize your meta information to help search engines to display a more relevant preview of the page they are crawling. That aside, if you follow all other tools available from this great plugin, you are already improving your blog SEO a few levels.

Go to WordPress SEO by Yoast Plugin Page

W3 Total Cache

What does it do?
It helps improving your blog performance through many methods without actually having you to move to a bigger hosting. At its heart is the caching tools that will reduce the time and resources to generate your web pages.

Why does it matter?
Search engines love sites that load fast. Reducing your page load will certainly increase your SEO score.

Go to W3 Total Cache Plugin Page

Akismet

What does it do?
Coming from the same company who brought us WordPress itself, Akismet is a web service that checks comments made on your blog for spam.

Why does it matter?
The biggest reason people or bots are spamming on people’s blogs to get backlinks to their sites, which mostly are shady. Getting spam comments on your blog means having backlinks to questionable websites and URLs, which search engines do not like. By freeing your blog, or at least reducing the number of spam comments, your blog will look more legitimate.

Go to Akismet Plugin Page

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

What does it do?
As the name says, this plugin allows WordPress to automatically generate related posts to the one your visitors are reading. There are lots of similar plugins of course, but YARPP is most of the most popular.

Why does it matter?
Placing internal links to other posts helps search engines to index other pages on your blog and a suggested SEO practice.

Go to Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) Plugin Page

Google XML Sitemaps

What does it do?
It can automatically generate XML sitemap of your blog. It offers quite extensive settings so you can select categories to be excluded, post types and so on. Note that WordPress SEO by Yoast has this feature built-in and just as good, but in case for some reason you do not want to install that, then this one is a must.

Why does it matter?
XML sitemap is the ‘map’ for search engines to crawl the information your blog. Have it constantly updated, then you will be sure to have all your pages and posts indexed.

Go to Google XML Sitemaps Plugin Page

There are probably still dozens of other plugins that can push your SEO quality and I only share ones I use and can recommend. Feel free to share your favorites by posting your comments below.

The post WordPress Plugins to Increase Your Blog SEO appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.

Great tool to benchmark your web page performance and load time.

The post WebPagetest – Website Performance and Optimization Test appeared first on Michael Sunarlim.