Speed up your WordPress site on Hostgator

How would you like to speed up your WordPress site, hosted on Hostgator, from go kart to race car speed for free?

Quick but not fast enough

Before going into details about how to speed up your website, I will share a little history with you.  I have been using WordPress since 2004 and have hosted all of my websites and blogs on Hostgator (affiliate link) since 2006.  After all of those years, I never put much thought into optimizing the performance of my blogs with the exception of using one of the many cache plugins available for WordPress.
It wasn’t that I didn’t care about the speed of my websites but I felt that all my sites loaded fast enough.  Now that most users have high speed internet access or high speed mobile access, I was short sighted in thinking that that my websites would load fast enough for everyone else but a recent slowdown motivated me to dig deeper.
Within the last few months, I noticed that my blogs were taking more than a few seconds to load.  My blogs are not image heavy or loaded with a lot of plugins and if anything, they are minimal overall so they should load fast but they were not.
The first place I looked was the YSlow Chrome extension to find out how slow my sites were and how I could improve them.  When I first tested this blog, the speed result was 84%, which isn’t bad but I knew I could get some more speed out of it.

cPpanel, optimize website and the WP Fastest Cache plugin

Step 1:
After some quick searches on Google, I stumbled upon a setting in Hostgator’s control panel called Optimize Website. This option has three simple choices, 1 – Disabled, (default), 2 – Compress all content and 3 – Compress the specified MIME types.
Without getting into the technical details, after some research, I found that the best setting is 3 – Compress the specified MIME types.  You select the radio button next to that choice and then enter the following MIME types into the text box.
text/html
text/plain
text/xml
text/css
application/xml
application/xhtml+xml
application/rss+xml
application/javascript
application/x-javascript
The MIME types above are from an article that I found at Tim Bonner’s blog which are working well for me.
In the most simple terms, this allows these types of files to be compressed at the web-server which will cause less data to be transferred between the website and the browser and will allow your site to load faster.
Step 2:
I have used different WordPress caching plugins on my blogs before and I guess they worked but all the settings and too many configuration options made me set them to the default configuration.  I am sure I could have gained more performance by tweaking the settings, but I wanted a simple plug and play option that would solve the issues that YSlow found with a click of a few buttons.
After some more research, I found a plugin called WP Fastest Cache.  This is a simple plugin, with a handful of settings, that is easy to configure but gives a great performance boost.  You can install it from your WordPress admin panel and then go to the settings on the bottom right of the menu area to configure the following options.
I have the following options enabled:
Cache System
New Post
Minify HTML
Minify Css
Combine Css
Combine Js
Gzip
Browser Caching
I left logged in users and mobile disabled.
The options that I enabled are the same problem areas that YSlow results said I needed to improve to speed up my blog.

From go kart to race car

Before making these simple changes, the YSlow result was 84% and afterward it is 98%.  These results in real word usability gave the following improvements:

• Page load time went from over 3.28 seconds down to 1.61 seconds or less than half the time to load.
• Total page size dropped from over 300k to 271k.  Not a huge drop in size but any savings is an improvement.

This entire installation process, both the change on Hostgator and adding the plugin to WordPress can be done in about 10 minutes or less since I have done all the research for you.
I am running this exact setup on four of my most active blogs and will soon implement it on the rest of my blogs over the next few days.  I would like to say that this setup is 100% safe and that it will work for everyone but make sure that you can undo any changes you make if it doesn’t work for you.
Leave me a comment below if you have any questions.  If you find this useful, please share it with others to help make the internet faster for everyone.