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Introduction

If you have a WordPress website, website speed is super important. A slower website can mean a lower ranking in Google, fewer visitors, and less business. Turn it around, and a fast website can mean a higher ranking, more visitors, and more business. This tutorial shows how to make a website faster. I will use 30.com, my own website. It loads like this and it looks like this. If I copy this link and open a new tab to Google PageSpeed, I can go to the first link, PageSpeed Insights from Google. I enter my URL, click analyze, and then I see how fast my website is.

Performance Score

At this moment, I don’t use any speed up plugin or any caching plugin. Once the analysis finishes, SEO is great, best practices are great, accessibility is great, but the performance is 45. If you scroll down, you will see the first contentful paint. That is the first moment something appears on your website, and it is just over here. It takes some time to load the website, and then there’s the cookie policy.

Test Website Speed

Mobile First

This should be faster. This is for mobile, and these days it’s mobile first. People are more on their mobile than on a computer screen, so more visitors to your website are probably visiting through a phone.

Desktop

On the desktop, the score is 84. But for a desktop it should be faster. Some of these metrics are orange and they should be green. A few are okay, but others are not good. From the second frame on, we see something over here.

Go to Airlift

To make that faster, we go to 30.com/airlift. You can also use the link in the description or in the first comment. Then we land on this website.

Sign Up

I click on get started now and sign up with Google or with my email account. I will use my email account. Create a password, confirm the password, and click on sign up. You may need to confirm your account with a code. Somehow I’m already accepted. It says welcome aboard, let’s get your site flying. I click on get started and fill in my site URL, https://30.com. Then I click on continue. Now I need to download this plugin.

Install Airlift

Upload Plugin

Now I go to the back end of my website, to plugins. Add a new plugin. I click on upload plugin, drag in the plugin I just downloaded, and click on install now. I activate the plugin and automatically go back to Airlift, where we configure and manage our website.

Image Optimization

The options here are preload LCP image, resizing, WebP conversion, and compression. Every image that is a PNG or a JPEG will turn into a WebP version, which is better. Then there is image lazy loading. That means if you go to your website now, only this image will be loaded, and if you scroll down, the next image will be loaded. The images will not be loaded all at once, because that can slow down the whole process. That’s what happens here. Then I click on next.

Font Optimization

For font optimization I will turn on everything. It optimizes PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and I click on optimize now. In the background our website will be optimized. Right now our speed is 45, and for desktop it’s 84. Let’s see what happens after we have configured Airlift.

About Myself

Airlift asks a few questions about you. I am an agency, I manage my site by myself, and my top priority is faster migrations. You’re all set. Go to the optimization screen.

Optimization Results

It can take a few minutes, but in this case it was less than a minute. My site is already fully optimized. The optimization results say it’s now 100. The file size is 5.6 megabytes, and there’s a performance boost of 37%, according to the statistics Airlift uses to measure things. The original looks almost exactly the same even though our website is a lot faster now. There are a lot of check marks for things that are done.

PageSpeed Insights Again

Now I go back to the same tool I used in the beginning. Keep in mind the 45 for mobile. Let’s take a look at the mobile result. If I analyze it again, look at this. It is 100. Everything is there at once from frame one.

Desktop Result

Let’s take a look at the desktop. 100. I never had 100 here before. I had 99 or 97. Accessibility often has to do with animations. I like to use animations, and that can slow this process down. I’m super happy with this. We’re still using the free version. Of course, always take a look at your own website. Go to 30.com. Is it loading at once? That looks good. And here it is on a phone.

Optimize WordPress Website

Upgrade

That loads very fast, but I still want to take a look at the upgrade. Maybe you wonder how there can be an upgrade when your website is already super fast. I hope that’s the case for you too. Let me know what your score is, whether it’s faster or not. Let’s go to airlift.net and open pricing.

Free Version

What you get in the free version is page caching, dynamic CSS, and the steps we went through. What it does not include is dynamic image resizing, which makes the image even smaller, font subsetting, lazy loading of stylesheet images, and auto purge cache on post update. When you publish something new or adjust something, the cache will be purged automatically. If you want that, you can go for the pro version, and then your website can be even faster.

Pro Version

Let me show you how it looks. At the time of recording, it’s normally $20 per month, and this time it’s $10 per month. If you go for a year, you pay $99.50. So you get an even bigger discount, and the discount only applies to the first year. I can click here or here, go to upgrade now yearly, and click on buy now. I fill out my details and then click on pay securely.

Dashboard

Now I go to the dashboard. From here I can add multiple websites if I want to. As soon as you get the pro version, your website will be optimized even more. To show you, if I go to optimization and reoptimize because I just upgraded, it says a sync is already in progress, so please wait for it to complete. As soon as you pay, an even faster version will be created.

Why I Chose Airlift

I have tried a few speeding up tools, and this is the fastest one I’ve used. The people that made this are good at backing up websites, making websites secure, and keeping websites fast. They seem to know what they’re doing, and that’s probably why the website is so fast.

Verify Email

Here I have to wait until I see that the new sync has completed successfully. It says my email is not yet verified, so I will go to my email account and verify my email address.

Speed Test Results

Pro Plugin

Now if I refresh, this notice is gone. I have to wait until the optimization is finished, and then I will run another PageSpeed Insights analysis and show you the results. Let’s check our website again with the pro plugin. It was already 100 with the free settings. I’ll copy this, paste it here, and again enter https://30.com. I click on analyze and what I see now is the same score, but look at this. Let’s see if I can get them at the same height. It is 1.3 versus 0.9, or 1.3 versus 1.1. Total blocking time is 0 milliseconds. This is the same, and the speed index is also a bit faster.

Free Version or Pro Version

The website is even faster. Whether you use the free version or the pro version, it made my website much faster. I tested multiple speed up plugins and this is the fastest I’ve used. What I also like about this one is that when you use the free version, nothing on the website says it is optimized with the free version of Airlift. It’s not there. I am really happy with the results.

Let Me Know in the Comments

Let me know in the comments if your website is faster or not. I want this to be an honest place. If your website is slower, let me know too, so people that see the video and find their website is slower can see they’re not the only one. If they see that a lot of websites are faster, maybe that can help other people see what some real results are. Thank you for watching this video. My name is Rudy and I will see you in the next video.