How to create your own blazingly fast Wordpress blog

Regardless if you need to get your personal story out, need a website to your business or want to sell products online – a modern WordPress blog is the way to go! One of the most important factors to retain visitors and get good search engine rankings is the page loading speed. I will explain in the following my experiences with setting up the Light Prism Blog – and show you exactly the steps needed to create your own blog.

My motivation

What drives me to create this blog and share the steps I applied? Well, I had a rough 2020 so to speak, which has radically transformed my life to the better, through enormous suffering and hardship. I experienced so many crazy and inexplicable things of a transcendent nature which I’d like to get out into the world.

I don’t need to monetize my blog right now, I just want it to be easily accessible by as many people as possible. If my information just helps one of you, e.g. by deriving some insights to apply to make your life slightly better, it is already worth it! Hence, my goals are to create a blazingly fast blog using leading-edge technology, that will be appealing to visitors due to short load times. Also it will reach higher search engine rankings if it loads quickly.

In this guide, I will show you how to set up a shared hosting plan with the provider Hostinger and how to install and configure WordPress and many useful plugins.

Shared web hosting with Hostinger

What’s so great about Hostinger? Actually a lot of things! They are a highly innovative Eastern European company who offer very competetive pricing for their hosting plans. Reading their blog posts, I quickly realized that they have a brilliant development team who is not afraid of adapting the newest available technologies, optimizing and adapting them for better performance and user-experience. Oh and they have a very helpful and easy-going support team (I had a great time chatting with them).

Their plans and pricing

I chose the “Premium Shared Hosting” plan of Hostinger, which offers excellent technical features (Unlimted bandwidth, free domain, free SSL, 20 GB SSD storage, 99.9% uptime – just to name a few).

You get the cheapest monthly price if you sign for 4 years. That was too long for me, so I chose the 2 year option as a good trade-off for about $4 per month, which is not more than for a cup of coffee. There are many payment options but the great thing is they also offer payment in cryptocurrencies (LTC, BTC, ETH).

Setting up everything

Once the payment has gone through, we can login and use an assitant to finish the setup, which is super easy and highly automated. For instance, we can install the SSL certificate onto the site – everything is happening in the background automatically and we do not need to worry about anything.

To administer the website, we can access the hPanel once we are logged in. This also is an innovation of Hostinger and I personally find it very clear and well-structured, thus much easier to use than the tools of the competitors. Now we just need to set up WordPress by using the Auto Installer as shown above. With a few clicks, it will automatically install a blank WordPress on your website – ready to use!

One last thing before entering WordPress: In the hPanel, let us enable the “Automatic cache” option in the Cache Manager. This automatically enables a caching plugin called Litespeed Cache inside WordPress to store static copies of your website and deliver them at light speed to the visitor. While there are other cache plugins for WordPress, Hostinger has already provided everything for you in well-optimized settings (they are using a LiteSpeed webserver in the background which is harmonizing perfectly with these settings).

WordPress setup

In the following, I lay out the steps for finishing the configuration of your WordPress instance quickly and without headache.

Plugins to install

I will just give you a short list of the plugins I installed and what added value they bring for you (ordered according to their importance):

• Autoptimize: Optimizes all CSS, JS and helps to reduce load time greatly
• reSmush.it Image Optimizer: Offers the option to reduce the size of uploaded images, which are often the largest part delaying page load times.
• UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore: A backup plugin to automatically do regular backups to a connected cloud storage (such as Google Drive).
• Rank Math SEO: The best free search machine optimization plugin, helps to make the page “compatible” to be understood by search engines and thus ranked higher.
• wpDiscuz: Replaces the standard WordPress discussion engine with a very slick, elegant and easily usable alternative.
• Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights: Connects Google analytics to the site to get information about visitor number, how they find the webpage etc
• Akismet Anti-Spam: Automatically checks new comments for spam and filters them, takes a lot of manual effort from reviewing comments manually.
• Ajax Search Lite: An interactive replacement for the standard search bar, i.e. search results are updated during typing into the search bar.
• Custom Twitter Feeds: Embeds a selection of Twitter feeds onto the website, which also can be indexed by search engines and thus provides great extra value for free.

Theme

I had tried various different themes but my favorite was the Highlight theme, which is simple yet elegant and relatively easy to customize with its own pagebuilder Mesmerize. Once it is installed, it will have a relatively bloated sample but you can just delete everything using the graphical page builder (click Customize on the front page).

Evaluation through speed test

So let us execute a couple of speed test through various different tools:

So we obtain very high page loading speeds and good scores in all testing tools. A confirmation with different browsers and smartphones as well qualitatively validates that the page is running smoothly and provides a highly responsive user experience.

I hope you have enjoyed this read! Do not hesitate to ask if there are any questions, feel free to comment below.