Here’s another post about how we’re improving our site. Since we got hit by Google Panda in the winter of 2012, we’ve been tweaking, optimizing and enhancing this blog just to speed things up and to provide better experience for our readers.
Since one of the many factors that Google considers when displaying search results is how fast a page page loads, we’ve been consistently trying new things to improve our website performance.
In fact many webmasters are doing exactly the same thing. They are installing caching plugins, enhancing their code by minifying it, and applying other techniques that will help improve their website performance and rank better on Google result pages. If you’re running a successful online blog or website, you should definitely learning and applying these tricks.
Since we were hit in 2012, we’ve switched our web server from Apache2 to Nginx, tried the most popular WordPress caching plugins from W3 Total Cache to WP Super Cache and other. We finally settled on WP-FFPC which is a great caching plugin with works with any web server.
We’ve also switched to Google Domains from Domain.com and just recently switched to Google Compute Engine to host our content. After all of the tweaks and moves, the results are finally in.
Our site performance has improved, Google bots are crawling our site more frequently as the result of our pages loading faster and as you can see below, the time it takes for Google bots to crawl our site has decreased dramatically.
Not only has our site improved, but we’re also saving money just by moving to Google Compute Engine.
When our site was hosted on 1and1, we’re paying abot $80 per month for a single site. For that $80 dollars, we’re given 3.7 GB of memory, 500GB hard drive space, 100GB bandwidth traffic and root access to the server.
The issue with paying fixed amount for web hosting is that you pay for the services even if you’re not going to use all of it. Whether you used it or not, your bills stay the same.
At Google Compute, we pay per the hour. What we get for that is 3.7 GB memory, hard drive space is pay as you go and according to what you use (for us it’s about $3 per month), bandwidth is also pay for what you used (for us, its about $4 per month) and other services.
At this rate, our payment per month is roughly $55 bucks. Saving money and at the same time improving our website performance.
Below is a screenshot of the time Google bots take to download a page from our site. The time it takes for Google bots to crawl our site has decreased noticeably.
Google bots are also crawling more pages since we switched to Compute Engine. The chart below shows you how it has improved.
So, right now we have our domain hosted by Google which also includes private registration to protect our information, our content is hosting by Google Compute Engine, and Google PageSpeed plugin is being installed on this blog as we write.
It seems like I am relying too much on Google, but if that is going to get me back in Google good graces, then I will continue to migrate to Google services.
If you’re experiencing the same thing I am going through and wish to share, please comment below and share with out audience.
Enjoy!