This week we will be talking about WordPress Optimization and focusing on Caching and Image optimization.
WP Rocket for caching: https://wp-rocket.me/features/
Imagify for Image optimizing: https://imagify.io/
Transcript:
Adam
Hello and welcome to the HIPAA Vault Show, where we discuss all things HIPAA and WordPress. My name is Adam Zeineddine your co host, and I’m joined today by the CTO and founder of HIPAA Vault, Gil Vidals. Hey, Gil.
Gil
Hey, Adam. Looking forward to another episode today.
Adam
So today we’re going to talk a little bit about WordPress optimization before we get started. Please click the subscribe button in order to get more features and content about WordPress and HIPAA compliance. So when it comes to WordPress optimization, there are many factors that go into speeding up your WordPress site. Today we’re going to focus on a few of them. First, Caching. And for those unfamiliar, caching is a computing term that refers to storing data in a readily available location for later use. So, Gil, would you care to expand a little bit on Caching and maybe touch on how Caching helps with WordPress and site?
Gil
Sure, I think I’d like to comment on that. And keep in mind, our audience is the average audience that we have is not highly technical. So I’d like to describe it in two ways, more technical and less technical. So at a high level, Caching is the ability to serve your web page content very quickly. And the way that’s done is to make a copy of your content to a place that’s more accessible. So think about your house. That’s the analogy I want to use. And think that you have stuff in the attic. To get to the attic, you got to go upstairs. You got to get a ladder. You got to move the tile. It takes a long time to grab something.
Gil
But if you could copy what’s in the attic, let’s say an old picture of your grandmother that you keep in a frame up there, and you grab a copy of that and you put it down on your kitchen table. When someone says, hey, I’d like to see that old picture you have of your grandma in that frame, you go, Here it is. You don’t have to go upstairs and do all that. So that’s what Caching does. It takes a copy and it puts it right next to where the audience is so they just quickly look at it. And so that’s at a high level. So more technically speaking, there’s usually cache files and directories where the copies are placed, and it could be in Ram as well.
Gil
So depending on how much Ram the computer the web server has, some of it could be placed in Ram, which is the fastest location.
Adam
Okay, and then could you talk a little bit about the difference between caching locally and then on the browser and remotely? What’s the difference?
Gil
Sure, sure. Caching is a topic that you can go pretty deep in it and there’s different caches. So you have a cache in your local browser. Most people use Google Chrome. And Google Chrome has Caching built in. So for example, let’s say you go to a website, it loads kind of slowly to the second and third page, it loads much faster. And that’s because maybe the big fat logo they have, has already been placed in your browser. When you visit the first page and every subsequent page, it doesn’t have to reload that logo, it’s there. So that’s your local browser cache. And that just works. You’re not tweaking it or doing anything. The remote cache would be on the web server. So the web server can have cache that has to be configured on the web server.
Gil
And then finally you have another layer of caching, which is these content networks. Like the more popular one is CDN or cloudflare, which is a content distribution network. But there are many websites that offer cloudflare caching at the perimeter remotely.
Adam
So we’re going to be focusing on web caching today, right?
Gil
Yeah, I think that’s really what we want to focus on because that’s something that our audience, the owner, the medical practitioner, or the healthcare app developer, they can enable that themselves at a very low cost. The CDN cloudflare, that can have a higher cost. And so maybe that’s not the first area they want to go to.
Adam
Right, and so how can our viewers get caching set up on their WordPress site?
Gil
Well, like many things in WordPress Adam, there are plugins that focus on caching and there are many of choices. And one of the ones we’ve seen that’s popular because it works well and it’s robust, is the WP rocket. And so that is a plugin that you could download and put on your website, enable it so that it starts to cache the pages again. Remember, caching is just simply keeping a readily available copy of your web content, a static copy. But that’s one plugin that we know is popular that people use.
Adam
Okay, great. Yeah. And I’ll link some more information on WP rocket in the description below. Are there any considerations when it comes to security for caching and where the data is stored?
Gil
Sure. Well, as you know, this podcast is all about WordPress and HIPAA compliance, which revolves around security. And caching can have some security vulnerabilities that the bad actors, the hackers, could take advantage of. So what you can do is as a user that has enabled caching is go through the settings carefully. When you enable caching, they usually have options. It’s not just on or off, it’ll be on. And then you’ll see options pop up depending on the plugin that you use. Pay attention to the ones that have the Word security next to those options to see if they’re enabled.
Gil
Even if you’re not an expert and you don’t know exactly what they do, you could look at those, you can enable them, and then you can read the documentation or send a help desk ticket to the author of that plugin and ask him, hey, what do these security features do? I’d like to learn more about them if you have time. Otherwise, there’s usually nothing wrong with enabling extra security.
Adam
Gil were there any other considerations that we missed out for Caching?
Gil
Generally speaking, it’s best to get the licensed product, especially if you’re going to be HIPAA compliant. It’s very rare that you can find a plugin where you’re just going to go for the free one and keep the free one for months and months. So even if you find that Caching plugin that you want to use and you try it for free for a while, that’s okay. But don’t just leave it free. You must enable the premium version so that you have all the features available and you get the benefit of the upgrades that come from time to time. So that is something that you want to really pay attention to in terms of trying the trial version. But don’t forget to enable it once. Put it in your calendar. Say, okay, I’ve tested it for a couple of weeks.
Gil
My developer is happy with it. Well, your calendar should flag you and say, hey, it’s time to pay for that plugin. And the costs are pretty minimal. For most of these, you’re talking costs between $5 a month to maybe $50, $75 a year. So that’s something that I recommend.
Adam
Moving on to our next item, which is image optimization. The concept of image optimization is essentially reducing the size of the images on your website as much as possible without sacrificing the quality of the images in order to increase the speed of your site. Gil is this image optimization, is it a common issue that you see our hosting customers facing with WordPress?
Gil
Yeah, definitely. And I do want to clarify one point, and I’ve said exactly what you said. I’m on the phone talking to someone and I’ll say, hey, you want to reduce the size, but it’s not the size. So let’s say this is your logo. You’re not making it tinier. What you’re doing is reducing the density of the image. So the size is the same. The file size, the file size, yes, the density of the file. We’re talking about DPI dots per inch. So there are programs, typical programs like Adobe Photoshop, many other programs where you can change the density. So what does that mean? That means if you lower the density, it could become blurry, the quality drops, and what you’re looking for is the ideal density, the density that allows the image to look really rich and crisp, but not blurry.
Gil
And so that is the challenge. The software does that automatically for you. So instead of sitting there in Photoshop playing with it for 2 hours. You can use tools to do that.
Adam
Yeah. That brings me on to my question about image optimization and the tools that could be used. Imagify, is that a good one?
Gil
Imagify is how I pronounce it. But yeah, those tools are helpful because they save you time. Again, many developers, you might be an expert, our audience might have some experts in Photoshop and they just love that and they’re quick at it, so just use that. But if you’re not an expert in graphics and you don’t have the time to dabble in that, just find a tool, a plugin like Imagify and it will automatically recalibrate the image. So it has the best optimization. By the way, the lingo the term uses web optimized, right? The image is web optimized. That means that it’s only good or best for viewing. And that’s different than printing. If you have an image that’s really good on your monitor, that’s terrific. But if you go to print it won’t look good. So don’t get confused.
Gil
If you print the image and it looks bad, that has nothing to do with the web quality. They’re completely different.
Adam
Okay, from a security standpoint for healthcare providers, other than definitely not publishing an X ray or a patient image on the website publicly, is there any considerations when it comes to image optimization?
Gil
Well, the storage of the images. So on a web server there are many folders. Just like on your Windows laptop, you have any folder you want to create. Be careful where you tell the plugin to store the files. You don’t want them storing it in a publicly accessible folder. You can easily test that. You don’t have to be a technical person. You could just simply type in your website, say Acne.com, and then whatever directory you picked to store your files, you could put that directory there and if it comes up, then pay attention to that. In other words, if this is going to be sensitive information, patient image of some kind of prescription, an X ray, then only your customers, your end users that have logged in with their username and password, and hopefully two factor authentication should be able to see that, right?
Gil
So you can go into your browser, log out of everything, or go to Incognito. Hit CTRL Shift N in Chrome. It opens up incognito. And then try to go to that web address Acme.com yourdomain.com that directory, and hopefully you get an error. You don’t want it to pull up, that’s the ideal thing. If it does pull up, you’ve got a problem because you haven’t logged in. That means anyone in the world could see that. So just pay attention to that. I wouldn’t expect it to be an issue if the plugin is a good one, but certainly it’s warrants taken the 15 seconds to test it yourself.
Adam
Are there any other considerations when it comes to optimization in general?
Gil
Well, in general, I have seen too many cases where no one pays attention to the images. Everyone is used to high bandwidth now, Adam. Everyone’s got, oh, I got Gigabit from Spectrum or I got Google gibbit. And people are getting spoiled. What that means is that it doesn’t matter how big the image is and it loads quickly. But when you get spoiled, it’s not good for when your audience, let’s say they’re in a subway with their smartphone. They don’t have gigabit in a subway on their smartphone. And so now they’re going to buy your medical services or products. And the thing is loading too dang slow. Now, forget this site is too slow, so don’t just test it on your fast gigabit speed.
Gil
Test your website one of these web URLs that you can go to and they’ll tell you, here’s the time it takes to load your pages on a slow connection, it takes this long on a medium connection, high connection. So if you look at it and you say, oh my gosh. On a slow connection, it takes 30 seconds to load my web page. That’s not good. And that’s something. Again, you don’t have to be technical to do this. Anyone can do this. You just copy paste URL, go to a website that has the speed testing, website optimization testing, and you’ll see it yourself. And you should do that.
Gil
As a manager, I stress management always, because too many times us managers try to just give this to somebody else, when in fact it should be our eyeballs on it ourselves to be satisfied and ensure that it’s working properly.
Adam
Yeah, no, they’re all really great points and I just like to add to that with HIPAA Vault, when you sign up for our managed WordPress hosting, we can actually use our experience to help you with optimization and we do have a lot of experience with that. So check us out@hipaavault.com if you’re interested in more details. If you have any questions that you’d like us to bring up on the podcast, feel free to reach out to us at podcast@hipaavault.com. You can also tweet us at @hipaahosting. And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for stopping by.