 So Nealey, I have this new exciting blog, Alex Eats, but it takes forever for everything to load, to pull up. I mean, how do I fix that? That is such a common problem, but luckily that's what we're gonna cover here on the journey. Stay tuned. All right, so slow websites are just an epidemic online. The slower a website is, the quicker visitors are to just bounce and never come back again. So it's such a great topic that we're covering today of how to optimize your site speed. Now really to start off is figuring out what type of hosting do you have. So Alex, what type of hosting do you have? I use just basic shared hosting. Okay, that's super common. It's a pretty inexpensive option for most small businesses, but with shared hosting means you share the resources with everybody on that server. So less resources for you means less resources for your website. So we cover a video on the different types of hosting you can check out right there. All right, so next I really need to understand why your site's running so slow with a little site speed test. Let's really figure out what's going on under the hood. Yeah, let's go diagnose that food coma. All right, let's go check it out. All right, Alex, so I have your website up here. Let's go ahead and do one of my favorite tests using gtmetrics.com. What you do is you just copy the URL right here, open up a new tab and go to gtmetrics.com. Pretty simple, right? Mm-hmm. And then go ahead and add the URL in and choose test your site. This'll take maybe a moment or two depending on their queue and then how slow your website is. And then it's gonna give you a test result basically of all the things that are good and bad with your site in regards to speed. One second, you said it was slow. Come on. You only have people's attention for so long. All right, so if you're trying to get this even faster or if your site isn't one second fast, Alex, there are lots of things on this page that can help you out in determining what might be an issue. So if you see here, you have serve-scaled images, leverage browser caching, and all these different things on here. Now, this may not mean a whole lot to you right now, but if you expand it, you can go, what's this mean? And it'll kind of give you a little bite-sized summary of what it is and then an option to read more. There's lots of cool tabs on here as well. So Why Slow has more content, more suggestions for you so you can figure out what you may want to update or adjust on your site. I really like looking at the waterfall test. This basically shows a waterfall of all the assets loading on your site. So what does that mean? So you don't have a lot of stuff going on. So especially with WordPress and speeding it up, there are literally hundreds of files being called to basically prepare your site up for a visitor. It's like making a burger, right? It's not just one thing. Gotta get the bun, the mayo, the meat, everything else and serve it up. Same thing with your site. So every single script has to load and it's showing you how long that script is taking to load. So if you see one that's taking just way too long, you know that cool, that's an issue. Deciphering this though can be an absolute pain. Like I've been doing this for a while and I don't even like doing this part of it. So we're gonna go through some plugins and stuff to help you out, but there's timings on this tab and you can even see a video if you sign up and create an account. It's free to use and then history. So if you can kind of keep track of how long, maybe day one and maybe like you have one second but you start adding your plugins and content, maybe now it's like 17 seconds and then you actually have an issue not now with one second. So you can see one thing started going downhill. Right, like what did I do? Got it. So now when building your website, one of the first things you do, like we talked about in one of our other videos is you go to and choose a theme first. Not all themes are created equal. There are free themes, there are premium themes. What you really wanna do is try to find a theme that's super lightweight, which means it doesn't have a lot of the add-ons and flair that some of the cool premium themes have but you wanna make sure that they load fast because at the end of the day all that flair maybe for nothing if someone's not can actually visit your site. So the less add-ons, the quicker the loading time? Absolutely, like you have the theme Hestia. Hestia is pretty solid, super lightweight, not a lot of add-ons to it so it makes it fast that one second load time like you had, there's Astra, there's Genesis. There's all sorts of like themes and frameworks that you can use but those are some of the ones that we just had here. Okay, so you mentioned before plugins, they can solve all my problems, right? Yes and no, too many plugins can be an issue so if you have like say 50 plugins which I've seen on some sites, that might be a problem. So the very first one that I'm going to recommend for you is a plugin called WP Smush and it's gonna do exactly that. It's going to smush all your images on your site so they're not as big. So to download it, you go to plugins and add new and then type in WP Smush. You're gonna get some other results here that'll kind of go by keywords but here the Smush image compression and optimization. Go ahead and install now and then click activate and it's there. So let me take you through some of the settings since you do have to activate some of them. Okay. So click on Smush directly. It's gonna go ahead and say, hey Alex, nice work installing Smush. Thank you. All right, go ahead and begin setup. Cool, I wanted to automatically optimize new uploads. I want to strip image data. I want to enable lazy loading. Lazy loading is a cool new feature WP Smush added. Essentially what that does is you blog a lot, right? So you have a ton of posts. So instead of loading all the images at once on your posts, it'll only load the ones the visitor actually sees all that really matters, right? So that way when the requests are called or we're scrolled to, right, then they'll load and then it has less load on the actual server, makes your site running super fast. So next again and then finish setup wizard and it's gonna go through, just recently checking your image to see what else needs compressing. And then it goes, cool, Alex, you have four attached for that needs smushing. Let's smush. Let's smush. Smush it up. And then it'll just take a few seconds. We only have four images, so it's not gonna take that long. If you have a ton of images, you've been doing this a while, it'll probably take a while. The free version of WP Smush will do 50 at a time. So you basically do your first 50, let that go, then smush again, then smush again. And then we're done. And then save this 95.7 kilobytes. That might not seem like a lot, but it does in the long run. All right, so more plugins. You said plugins fix all your problems. These ones are gonna hopefully fix your problems. The next one's called auto-optimize. It's like auto-optimize, smushed. So just type in opt-optimize, hit enter. I didn't scroll that right. Take two, Neely. All right, then it's gonna pop up here. Same principle, install now. Might take a moment, and then you click activate. Cool. Almost always it's gonna take you back to the plugin screen. This one makes it easy. You can just click settings right here to go to it. Then it's gonna give you a lot of information. So it's gonna not show you all the advanced settings, which is fine. It's gonna keep it nice and basic for you. If you are a little bit more experienced, you wanna check those out. This little button at the top will do that for you. But I just wanna optimize JavaScript code, optimize CSS, optimize HTML, and then save changes to empty cache. Now once this happens, basically all these scripts are gonna get smushed. So there's not that extra space on there, making them less file size, makes them load a little bit quicker. Okay. Onto more plugins. Let's go ahead and plugin add new. All the plugins. So have you ever heard of clearing your cache? Yes. Cool, so the same thing goes with your website. Browsers, cache data, but so can a website. So you can set up a caching plugin on your site. So instead of all those scripts being called at once, it'll condense it and basically give you a copy of your site, super quick to your visitors. There are lots of caching plugins and everyone has their preferred. I'm just gonna kind of choose one here, but let's go with, let's go with W3 total cache. Why not? It was second line. So again, as always, install now and then activate when it wants to install. And then you click activate, cool. And then it's right here on the left hand side. We got performance. Go ahead and just click that. Now this shows a ton of options to go through. We don't have the time today to go through all of those. You can kind of check them out. Every plugin usually has some type of documentation or a website to go and learn more. So you don't have to be super overwhelmed. But I want to set up page cache and looks like it's already done for me. Perfect. Perfect. So now when visitors come to your site, it's not gonna take as long to load. I mean, you already had a one second load time, so you're fine. But if your site's loading a little bit slow, this definitely helps. Well, thanks for all the helpful information. Hopefully my website is super fast now. I guarantee you this. Absolutely. We'll let us know in the comments below how fast was your website when you did that speed test? Yeah, and this is a great foundation for getting your site a little bit faster. There's always so much you can do and we'll probably cover it in later videos. But if you got some value out of this video, make sure you smash that like button. Let us know. Subscribe to our channel so you can get these videos. First, this is The Journey. We'll see you next time.