Here at Bluehost, we are dedicated to providing our customers with the best, most powerful tools available. To that end, we’ve recently teamed up with CloudFlare to help you enhance your website’s speed and security. And the best part? You can enable CloudFlare for FREE with every Bluehost account!

CloudFlare is an advanced content delivery network (CDN) that provides optimal performance and security to your website. With over 14 data centers around the world, their CDN automatically caches your static website files. While dynamic content remains on your Bluehost web server, static files are physically closer to visitors. CloudFlare then uses a technology called Anycast to route your visitors to their nearest data center, helping your website load faster for visitors, regardless of where they’re located. On average, websites using CloudFlare has 65% fewer requests and uses 60% less bandwidth.

Using their intelligent global network, CloudFlare also blocks threats and limits abusive bots and crawlers from wasting bandwidth and sever sources.

We integrated CloudFlare into our Bluehost systems so that it’s easy for you to install and start using in minutes. Simply log into your Bluehost control panel (cPanel) and click on the “Upgrades” tab. From there, you can decide which CloudFlare plan is best for your site(s) and then click “Install” to get started.

CloudFlare comes in two plans: Basic and Pro. The basic CloudFlare plan is absolutely FREE and includes faster site performance, broad security protection, and basic reporting.

If you’re looking for maximum optimization, CloudFlare also offers a pro plan for $14.99, which includes real time statistic reporting, mobile optimization, advanced site security, advanced reporting, and even greater site performance improvements.

We’re excited to be working with CloudFlare to make your website, even better! If you have any questions regarding CloudFlare or how to get started, leave a comment below or call us anytime, 24/7, at 888-401-4678.

Using good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics is an essential part of creating a successful website. SEO refers to all the things you can do to help your site rank higher in search results, which is the absolute best way to increase the traffic your website receives. In this post we’ll review some great tips for performing effective SEO on a WordPress website.

SEO tactics work by helping your site appear more relevant to the topics you address. This in turn makes it easier for search engine crawling software to find, identify, and index your site for relevant searches. If you’d like to learn more about SEO, feel free to watch our video.

Now there are a lot of web building platforms out there, but if you want a tool designed with SEO in mind, you certainly should consider using WordPress. Right out of the box, WordPress sites and blogs come pre-packed with great search engine optimization. Nevertheless, this does not mean there aren’t things you can do to improve SEO on a WordPress website. In fact, truly good SEO requires continual adjustment to be as effective as possible!

Improving SEO on a WordPress website is similar to performing SEO on any website, but there are few tips and tricks that make it a little easier to perform on WordPress.

Plugins: As we’ve discussed in previous blog posts, WordPress developers have created plugins for pretty much everything. So it’s no surprise that there are several great plugins for SEO.

Generally these plugins provide you with ability to add meta data to your posts and pages, separately from the main site itself. Some of the plugins can also help you write better content, giving you keywords to include when producing your content.

Some plugins we recommend are: Yoast, All-In-One SEO, and SEO Title Tags.

Finding keywords: Keywords help search engine software identify your site as relevant to certain content categories or topics. So incorporating relevant key words into your content helps your website appear in relevant search results. However, for the most effective use of SEO keywords, you’ll need to do some research to find out which words are the most relevant and most frequently searched for your topic. There are free tools that can you help you find these words such as Adwords Keyword Tool, KeywordDiscovery, or Wordtracker.

Word of Caution! Utilizing keywords more than 2-4 times in a single post is not recommended. Simply repeating a word many times often causes search engines to flag your post as spam. So make sure you are judicious in how often you employ key words in your content. Instead, try to choose several unique keywords and use them sparingly as they naturally fit in the context of your writing.

Adding “alt” tags to images. Many photo plugins come pre-built with the ability to easily add “alt” tags, which make your images indexable by search engines.  But in the case that you don’t have a plugin, you can use this html tag: <img src=”url” alt=”some_text”/> in your image link to manually improve your SEO and help your search result ranking.

Optimization. Site optimization is one of the most effective tools for improving a website’s SEO, but sadly it is also one of the most overlooked tactics. Optimization refers to how to make your website faster, leaner, and more efficient.

Consider two websites that are exactly the same, but one is better optimized so that it requires less resources from the server on which it resides, loads faster on the computer browser to which it is being sent, doesn’t suffer from bloated or out-dated software, and is certified to be malware & virus free. Which of these two websites is more likely to rank higher in search results? Hopefully the answer is obvious. Search engines favor websites that are regularly optimized.

To learn more about WordPress site optimization, click here.

These are just some of the great ways in which you can continually improve your SEO on WordPress. Make sure to maintain and keep up-to-date with these practices to ensure your website is optimized for search engines to receive as many visitors as possible!

Tiffany
Bluehost

One of the most crucial ingredients to a successful website is good performance. A truly well-designed website is optimized so it demands as few resources as possible of it’s host server. This helps your website load quickly for visitors even when receiving sudden increases in traffic and can even help with SEO!

WordPress is very amenable to optimization. There’s a lot you can do, but here are several tips to help you get started:

1. Limit the number of posts presented per page and the number of feeds shown. Around 5 posts is usually a good rule of thumb, but this can vary depending on your typical post length.
2. Limit the total number of images and other media on your page. Of those you do use, make sure they are as small a file size as possible. If you use a lot of images, keep a few of the most important directly visible on your posts and keep the rest as click-able thumbnails.
3. Adjust your Permalinks. Steer clear of settings that are “not recommended for performance reasons.” Check possible options here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks
4. Don’t keep old, extra plugins or themes around. Hoarding plugins slows things down. Throw out anything you can possibly get rid of.
5. Most WordPress backup plugins are overpowered and resource-intensive. Limit using them as much as possible or avoid them altogether. Try using a weekly cron to backup your database. Read this article for help on how to do this.
6. Review and optimize your database(s). This article is great…yes, all four pages!
7. Test your site with various services to identify inefficiencies. Try http://www.webpagetest.org/, http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/, and http://gtmetrix.com/
8. Use optimization plugins for image compression, caching, and javascript management. This article offers many suggestions (e.g. #16). Use as many applicable options as possible.
9. Enable FastCGI. Depending on your website, this can help a great deal. Test your site before and after to notice the difference. You can enable FastCGI in the PHP Config icon in the cPanel. (Also try the ‘Optimize Website’ link in cPanel and enable mod_deflate.)

At the end of the day, there are infinite ways to optimize a website. But even following just these tips will make a world of difference. Try not to skip any! In our experience with customers, following all these steps eliminates almost all site performance issues while simultaneously increasing SEO rankings. Good luck and happy optimizing!

Micah B.
L2 Support Agent