Here is a non-code method to make your WordPress site optimization effort faster and smarter. With 1-click, boost your WordPress optimization level to 300%.
A well-informed website owner knows and understands that it is not simply enough to have a presence online.
A diligent website owner knows that a highly-optimized website is the kind of website that can help him or her achieve business goals.
He or she aims for the website to be able to:
- be available when visitors & potential customers arrive at the website
- not degrade the experience of the visitor in any way
- work flawlessly so that the visitor can turn into a customer or a subscriber
- appear organically in search results
One of the most critical aspects of website optimization is search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO … well, is a term that stretches across several layers of website management.
Whatever the aim is, the end goal has always been to have a website that is known for its speed, performance, and security.
These will of course lead to better rankings and visibility within organic search results.
But our focus is on some of the technical aspects of an SEO effort.
Technical SEO is about making your website faster, easier to crawl, and more understandable to search engines.
Of course, you want the website:
- to be fast, clear, and easy to use for users
- to be search engine robots crawlable & indexable
- to be secure either through HTTPS/TLS implementation or via other options
- improve your visitor’s experience with the most important URLs
- etc
Achieving this level of optimization used to be a task best undertaken by trained professionals.
In the years long gone by, an SEO service such as this can start from $1000.00 – $25000.00 per month.
Even with this level of expense, the website has to go through several iterations and experimentation before it could be seen as a highly-optimized optimized website.
A lot has changed over the past 3 years.
Most of the technical challenges have been abstracted away.
But while the barriers have been so lowered that most website owners today can fine-tune their website without the need to use paid services, understanding the performance of production systems can be difficult.
This is even more true for development environments.
Performance measuring in test environments usually fails to replicate the pressures on an actual production system.
That is why we want to make it super-easy for customers (especially customers hosting WordPress on our systems) to be able to have the tools they need to optimize their WordPress CMS.
Starting from today, we have made available via our control panel a Site Optimization option that could help customers optimize their website with just a click.
The process is fully automated.
There is no need for manual action.
All that is needed is to toggle a switch to apply smartly-generated suggestions to improve the performance of a WordPress website by over 300%.
It is free.
It is automatic.
There is no need to go a-fiddling with 3rd-party optimization plugins that often create more problems than they solve.
There is no learning curve.
You will see an improved page load speed and better user experience which will lead to reduced cart abandonment or subscriber rate.
There are simply a few optimization plugins comparable to it.
And if there is, you will need to be a tech whiz to be able to properly get it configured.
WHAT TO DO TO BENEFIT:
As stated previously, enabling this capability is a 1-click affair.
To start (for existing customers), visit your cPanel and login.
Scroll down to the “Software” section.
Click on AccelerateWP.
When the page loads, you will be greeted with a screen-shot like this if you have a WordPress website installed on your hosting account:
Before you can use toggle the button to start using WordPress Site Optimization, you need to turn off conflicting plugins using your WordPress admin page.
If you don’t, you won’t be able to enable the plugin and will meet a warning like this: “Incompatibility: Conflicting plugins are enabled. Found conflicting plugins: $pluginName“.
How To Deactivate A WordPress Plugin:
Login to your WordPress admin either via WordPress Toolkit, WordPress Manager, or using admin email and password.
Visit your WordPress Plugins to see a list of installed plugins.
On locating the WordPress caching plugin you have been using, click Deactivate.
You can also use this wp-cli command:
wp plugin deactivate $pluginNameBut it is simply not enough to deactivate a plugin.
Often these plugins do add directives to your existing config files (e.g. htaccess)
So go back to your cPanel File Manager and inspect your hosting account .htaccess.
To locate all .htaccess files in your hosting account, either scroll down to the Advanced section and click on Terminal for cPanel.
Accept the warning notice “I understand and want to proceed” and click to proceed.
Or use your local machine SSH terminal.
Type in the next command:
find . -name .htaccessYou can also find this file by enabling the “Show Hidden Files” option in cPanel File Manager.
- To use this option, log in to the cPanel account for the website.
- Click on the File Manager icon under the Files section.
- In the upper right corner of File Manager, click on the Settings button.
- Put a check next to “Show hidden files” if it is not already checked and click Save. (This is required for you to be able to see the .htaccess file in File Manager).
- Locate the .htaccess file for your website within the File Manager, or create one if it does not already exist.
- Select the .htaccess file and click on the “Edit” button in the toolbar along the top of File Manager.
- Make sure that there is no remaining directive left by the now-deactivated caching plugin in any of the htaccess files.
- Click the Save Changes button in the upper right corner.
If you are not sure how to edit this file, consider creating a new .htaccess file.
If you are proficient with the command-line interface, you can easily do this with:
mv -vi .htaccess .htaccess.{,.backup}or
mv -vi /home/$username/public_html/.htaccess{,.backup}Create a new .htaccess file with:
touch /home/$username/public_html/.htaccess
chown $username:$username /home/$username/public_html/.htaccessIf you don’t want to use the command-line interface, then use cPanel File Manager.
- Log in to the cPanel account for the website.
- Click on the File Manager icon under the Files section.
- In the upper right corner of File Manager, click on the File button with a ‘+’ sign.
- Fill in the New File Name: as “.htaccess“. Please make sure you are in the correct directory.
- Click the “Create New File”
You can also generate a .htaccess file by using cPanel’s MultiPHP INI Editor or Select PHP Version.
Having edited or recreated your WordPress .htaccess file, visit https://wordpress.org/support/article/htaccess/ to see and copy the examples of WordPress .htaccess rules.
It is worth mentioning at this point that when Apache reads a .htaccess file, the rules are applied recursively to any sub-directories from where the rule was found.
For example, if .htaccess is located in the path “/$sername/public_html/.htaccess”, any rule you add here will also affect any of the sub-directories located within “public_html”.
There is one more thing to do before you can enable the WordPress Site Optimization plugin.
Disable mod_pagespeed:
mod_pagespeed is available in all production regions.
But it is not enabled server-side.
To use mod_pagespeed, customers have to explicitly enable it on per domain/website basis.
WordPress Site Optimization plugin is not compatible with mod_pagespeed.
If used together, this will cause duplication of tasks which will lead to unexpected results (since they are using almost the same mechanism to optimize the site).
If you will be using WordPress Site Optimization, you need to remove this directive:
<IfModule pagespeed_module>
ModPagespeed on
</IfModule>Or comment it out like this:
#<IfModule pagespeed_module>
# ModPagespeed off
#</IfModule>then save the .htaccess file.
Once that is done, return to Software >>> AccelerateWP.
Toggle the Site Optimization to enable the plugin so that it looks like this:
Now that the process is completed, visit your WordPress Admin >>> Plugins to see CloudLinux Site Optimization listed and enabled:
Click Settings.
Explore the various options and features.
Visit cPanel File Manager.
Open your .htaccess and you will see the new directives auto-configured for you.
Enjoy.