How to Make Your Concrete5 or Wordpress Website Load Faster in 2018

There are a few easy and basic things you can do for your Wordpress or concrete5 website to make it load pages faster and increase the page speed. It will usually take less than 5 minutes to get done and you'll have a better user experience and possibly better SEO rankings, buy that small time investment.

First, in your .htaccess file add these lines at the bottom of the file:

# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days"

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

The first turns on compresses your files to make them smaller before delivering to web browsers so there is less work for the browser to do and thus pages will load faster. The second group of lines tells a browser if it should serve cached versions of files or not. Cached pages load much than having the server rebuild a page by querying the database, so the end result is that site visitors see the pages faster and you have less load on your web server.

Make sure you have concrete5 page caching turned on for your website. You can find the settings in the Dashboard of your concrete5 website. These simple steps, will take less than 5 minutes to complete, but you can save seconds for each page load as a result.

Next, go to https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insi... and type in your website's domain name. The report that follows give additional details specific to your site that can help improve site performance.

You can test your site's load time using this free tool at https://tools.pingdom.com. I would suggest you try it before you make any changes on your website and then again later, so you can test the improvement of your concrete5 websites' page load time.