One of the most important factors, oh with websites is speed, speed is good for you. It's good for your users. It's good for SEO, even Google takes it into account. If you have a slow loading site, you're more unlikely to receive good rankings in the search engines. So you absolutely have to keep on top of speed. And there are a number of things you can do to speed up your website and I'll talk about a few of them here, but it's something you've always got to keep an eye on.

So first of all, choose a good theme. I would use Genesis by StudioPress. And that is a very well coded theme that will work fast in any situation on any host. Secondly, choose a good Host This is the host, I use the UK based so they'd be very good for UK websites. I've been involved with them for years, actually, a client of mine was hosted by them. And I just saw how obviously they dealt with my client.

So that's why I'm with Vidya host. I've been with them only for a year actually. But definitely the best host I've I've worked with so far. And I've worked with very many of them. Thirdly, gets a CDN. Now, I'm not going to do this for this site at the moment, this is connected to hosting in that a CDN will store your websites on various servers around the world, and will actually serve the website for your host or via your host.

You set it up the one time and you pay a yearly or monthly fee. And it speeds up your website and it's just you set it and forget it. It's absolutely excellent. I would recommend maxcdn but I'd recommend you use a CDN anyway. And just keep on top of your HTML, this might not slow you down. But it's an SEO factor.

If you've got dodgy HTML, it doesn't really look good. And it's more likely to stick and the page may not fully load. So it's always a good idea to check your various pages in the HTML Validation Service. And here you see I've got two errors. That's not too much to worry about. And one of the errors is in the icon I put in for the apple touch in the head.

And the other one comes from that dig dig plugin. So you got to keep an eye on these some some plugins may give you loads of validation errors, and they won't be so good. But a couple of errors on your HTML isn't the end of the world. There is no problem there. It's a question of keeping them down rather than having no errors at all. Another good thing on WordPress sites is not to have too many plugins.

I wouldn't have any more About 1213 1415 plugins and make sure they're good ones, make sure when you load them that they had lots of reviews that they've been updated recently, etc. Another thing you can do with PageSpeed is just load an extension for Chrome called Google PageSpeed PageSpeed. All one word. There it is Add to Chrome. And they see the PageSpeed icon has been added to my extensions icons up there on the right. So let's go back to the blog.

And now we use the same quick key for developer tools that we use when we're developing the size Command Option I on the Mac Ctrl Shift I on the PC, and then the last one on their page speed, and just click Analyze. And what it does, it loads the site and sees if there's anything you can do to speed up the site. This is a course a free service from Google. And I've got one hop one hybrid IRC here, which is enabled compression, I've got a medium priority, which is levering browser caching. And there's low priority things that I can do to speed up the site. Now a lot of these you can talk to your host about and say, Look, I've got Google's PageSpeed saying, I've got to enable compression.

How do I do that and they can help you. But one of the things you can do is to load a plug in yourself, which would be a caching, plugin. And caching plugins basically speed up your site, one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress is W three, total cache. There it is W three total cash. And that is an excellent caching plugin. I would recommend that to anyone but actually, my host Vidya has recommended me to use another one and that's called Super Cache.

And WP Super Cache is another excellent caching plugin. So I'll install that now. and activate plugin. It says WP Super Cache is disabled, please go to the plugin admin page to enable caching. This plugin admin page is also here on the settings WP Super Cache. And here immediately, you can just turn caching on.

And update status, click test cache, and it says timestamps on both pages match. And it all looks like everything is caching pretty well. And here, you might want to talk to your host and ask them what settings you need here. I happen to know that for my house, they prefer to use modern whites to serve the cache files. and here we can compress pages that serve more quickly to visitors. These are all little tweaks to the settings that will increase PageSpeed.

So I can update status there and that will work even better. Hopefully, I haven't set a CDN on this site yet, but if you do you have to change the settings here. And I would very much recommend you do that with maxcdn or something like that. And in contents, this is quite a useful page because it's quite useful to delete the cache every so often, all a cache does basically is save a version of all the files for the website. So it can just deliver the website quickly to a user, rather than going through all commands and going into all the different folders and reading the web page. That way, this is all well and good until you change one of the documents somewhere maybe you change the style in the style CSS, and the caching program doesn't know that and it just serves the old site.

So when you're developing that can be quite annoying. So when that happens, you just do a cache there, click that like that. And then you know that it will load the most recent version of your website. And here you see a little warning here rewrite rules required by this plugin have changed or missing. Scroll down the advanced settings. page and click the Update mod rewrite rules button.

So we'll shall do that. There it is update rewrite rules. And that's come to green, go back to easy. And that warning is off now. So that's the cache plugin successfully loaded and the settings tweaks to how we want that now that will affect the site quite considerably. You might even notice it loading quicker yourself after you've enabled a caching plugin, aside from the caching plug in.

Another thing you can do is load a minify plugin. So if you go to plugins, add new and search for WP minify. And that WP minify there, install now and activate the plugin and there's absolutely nothing you need to do to this plugin. If you go to settings, WP minify. You'll see that minify engine config PHP was configured automatically so you know it's working. It's in there.

It's minimal. Fine, so there's actually nothing you need to do to set it up in this case. But what you can do if you go into developer tools and click on PageSpeed again, and then analyze, you'll see now that the score is 83 out of 100, whereas before, I think it was 74, or 75, you should try and get the score up to the high 80s, or 90s out of 100. Another thing you'll see is that high priority suggestions have now disappeared as a result of loading those two plugins. The last thing you should think about, of course, is images. We'll do this when I show you how to set up blog pages and everything like that.

But when you're uploading images, this is a very big image. Of course, just go into Photoshop or whatever graphics program and make sure the image is optimized as much as possible in order to keep the file size down to being as small as possible. That's quite important with images because they do tend to be the largest file sizes of anything else on the page. So just the last point about Images there. But I hope you enjoyed that this is a very important lesson about speed PageSpeed is huge importance. I've just given a quick overview there.

If you have any questions about it, do come and ask me because it is incredibly important subjects and one you'll be returning to again and again as a website owner. Okay, thank you very much.