= It's me again with moar hosting speed testing! =

The last time I posted about my weird speed test I got a lot of positive responses (and some well-deserved flak, see the end of this post), so I thought I'd share something I've changed about my sites

I make the most money from display ads on my sites, and ads tend to slow a site down quite a bit, so I was always on the lookout for lean optimizations, minifications, etc. I looked into everything - micromanaging my htaccess, disabling code page-by-page, custom minimal Google Analytics code, the works. For a long time, I was running this set-up:
WP Rocket for caching (my config json)
Cloudflare for CDN
Autoptimize for minification
Shortpixel for image compression/webp
Perfmatters for page-by-page script management
Minimalist analytics snippet from here

Yes I know, it seems like overkill, but it was fairly fast, and since there seemed to be no alternative I lived with it

However, many of the functions clashed, and it was anbloaty Frankenstein of several different plugins. This is what it felt like

At one point, I heard of Nitropack from a fellow r/juststarter, which promised to be a one-stop-shop for all things caching and speed, including their own CDN, image compression, minification, etc. I tried it and liked it for a while until I was at my folks' house and went to one of my websites on a new device. My product boxes were missing images. I tried some troubleshooting and realized that it was Nitropack. I tried their support and we couldn't find a solution, so I refunded my year package with them

I went back to my Frankenstein. This was last year

Early this year, there was a discussion at the Facebook Group for AdThrive publishers, and a lot of people recommended Nitropack again there. I decided to give it a try again, and this time there was no problem with any images anywhere (I don't really know why). My scores were finally looking great, I was passing Core Web Vitals and loading under 2 seconds. I now use Nitropack on all of my ad-serving sites

Anyway, I remembered my speed test and went back and recreated it all, but this time, I enrolled each site to Nitropack. These are the results:
Overall, the change is impressive. Sites that were bumped up by 40-50 points, almost every one of them shows an almost perfect score and loads in 1-2 seconds


Like last time, there's a link to Google Drive with screenshots of all scores before and after Nitropack: Google Speedtest (mobile and desktop), GTMetrix (the two first pages), and screenshots of Nitropack's dashboard that shows improvements to the scores

Random findings:
Average Largest Contentful Paint decreased by 7 seconds!
Generally, TTFB decreased by an average of 400ms. In the case of GreenGeeks, it decreased by 1700ms!
In the case of Kinsta, TTFB increased by 20ms, I guess it's expected since they have their own optimization and caching in place

Bluehost has theGTMetrix score even after Nitropack. Whereas most hosts moved from B or C to A, Bluehost was still B even with heavy Nitropack optimization

Like last time, at the end of the post on my blog, there's a link to download all the reports for yourself

Let me know what you think

Last time I posted I also got some flak for not including a managed VPS provider as an advanced alternative to run-of-the-mill shared hosting. So I went back and tested Cloudways on a small Digital Ocean droplet. The whole experience felt very streamlined and in no way inferior or more difficult to shared hosting, and the scores were good, except, for some reason, for an abysmal 8 seconds of Largest Contentful Paint! I have no explanation for this except maybe the site is bottlenecked by the size of the droplet? Which doesn't sound right. Anyway, I updated the original post with the scores for Cloudways

On another note, I decided I didn't want to be a devil's advocate and removed GoDaddy from the winner's list while keeping the scores. I don't want to be called an endorser of EIG hosting

Pretty sure I was one of the ones going on about cloudways last time. Glad to see you tested it more and to see that I wasn't crazy in feeling it was way faster than a lot of run of the mill shared hosting providers (I didn't do much testing beyond a few speed tests myself)

It's ato see that while nitropack seems to do such a good job, all their packages seem to be per site pricing. I'd love to see a bandwidth/visit based package that I can dump onto aof sites most of which will get tens/hundreds of views and average out the cost between them

Did you do any testing with cloduways built in CDN stuff? The pricing on it was dirt cheap and it seemed to work well when I tested but I again haven't done any in depth A B testing

Hey thanks! No, I didn't try the CDN. Otherwise I would have to try the CDN with every other host etc. Just the barebones setup

Also, the droplet itself was pretty small IMO, I would never get that even for a starter site, but I followed my initial approach of choosing the cheapest package available


About the price, tens or hundreds of views aren't something that makes you much money I guess, so I think just Cloudflare and something simple like W3 Total Cache until it generates enough to pay for Nitropack. Same with VPS. Start small and scale

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