Blocs works as a theme or template engine. BlocsPro turns it into a Wordpress theme builder. Speed matters. Blocs can be fast. Wordpress can be fast. Together they can be fast. Since speed has just as much if not more to do with the hosting provider/servers. Who is using what? Thanks in advance!
Hi Monark,
To be fair, I’d say that, unless you’re using the absolute cheapest of the cheap kind of hosting (which does overselling to make the server profitable), your hosting will not impact your speed as much, as long as you take the following into account:
- Geolocation: is your target audience in Europe? Get European hosting as close to the audience as possible. Is your target audience globally spread (with no real country that dominates their userbase) I’d go for a decent hosting in combination with a CDN solution
- Page optimization: Blocs (and Blocs Plus) will render very well optimized code, but it’s our responsability to simply not go overboard on animations, scripts, images or other media. Try to keep your total page size around 1 MB or below. No matter how powerfull/performant your hosting is, if your page is for example 12 MB in size, the experience won’t be good.
- Caching: if possible, use a decent caching solution (Varnish for static HTML, Varnish + Redis for WordPress sites). This way the pages can be server quicker with less load on the webserver/database-server.
That being said, my customer base is in Belgium, so I’m using https://www.combell.com (also because I’m a DevOps engineer there in charge of building their hosting platform, just as a disclaimer)
Also, there have already been quite a few threads on hosting and user experiences. This one might be worth looking into: Web hosting discussion - I Need Help - Blocs Forum
2 Likes
Since speed has just as much if not more to do with the hosting provider/servers.
You could not be more wrong here. Your server doesn’t matter (unless you use a free or dirt cheap shoddy service). The tools choices you make and how you build your site, is what counts.
Servers today are reliably, way beyond what we need to deliver fast enough speed of delivery to our mobile or desktop devices. It is the slowest delivery that you need to focus on, that requires to building of fast sites. For almost every case, Pagespeed can and will ignore the server speed.
PageSpeed / Lighthouse downloads your web page and analyses the downloaded content, and provides useful guidance on how to improve your score. It isn’t ultimately about the speed of download, it is about highlighting what you can do to improve.
Lighthouse also uses real world data from Chrome users and will report on slow servers as far as I can recall.
We know that Blocs5 cab build 100x100x100x100 sites.
I have to agree to disagree on this one. Wordpress has a lot more overhead and specific requirements that Blocs alone cannot address. An optimized fast server to process the code is required. Of course caching and compression helps a lot and I’m trying to decide what direction to go on that front.
This is for the USA mostly though my content will be relevant to the whole English speaking world. But I am the first to admit that Americans typically think differently than most. Not always better just different.
Sadly a great number of people seem obsessed with saving a few dollars a month, because they either think all servers are the same or just dead set on lowest possible prices.
There is a reason the likes of GoDaddy etc have huge numbers of customers and it’s not because of their stellar performance or customer service. A lot of people just want cheap and then scrabble around trying to compensate with 101 tricks that largely make troubleshooting more complex.
I’ve seen more than few threads blaming things on Blocs, only to discover their web host is some dirt cheap option with over crowded servers. A couple times I’ve tested those same things on my own server for them like a streaming video and suddenly it was all fine.
Getting back to the original point, we can do a lot worse than to implement solid htaccess rules for performance and security.
2 Likes