Ever since I’ve started using Wordfence here on my site, which has been at least for a year or so now, I have been a big fan. I use the paid option, and am very happy with it. But since I’ve been making major enhancements on the site lately, like upgrading the site from HTTP to HTTPS, and starting to use Cloudflare, I’ve seen improvements all around.
Today, though, I decided to test out the Wordfence Performance Setup option, called the Wordfence Falcon Engine, which apparently is supposed to increase the performance (load time) of your pages by 30 to 50 percent. Seriously? Up to 50 percent faster load times with this enabled? Even for an HTTPS site? I thought I’d give it a try.
So here is the load time stats of my site’s home page before enabling the Wordfence Falcon Engine:
As you can see, my site’s home page loaded at 2.36 seconds before the test. This is using the Pingdom web speed test. When I ran this test, I had the WP-Super Cache plugin installed.
Well, let’s take a look at the performance after removing the WP Super Cache plugin, and enabling the Wordfence Falcon Engine:
As you can see, my site’s home page now loads at 1.51 seconds, nearly a half of what it took to load before, even using a caching plugin. I have also allowed caching of HTTPS pages, here are the Wordfence Performance Setup settings I use:
So, when it comes to caching plugins and trying to get your site’s pages to load faster, it looks like in the future I am going to continue to use the Wordfence Falcon Engine instead of the WP Super Cache plugin. Let’s monitor the search engine rankings and see if I seen any increased traffic from Google organic search as a result.
At this point, I haven’t really done anything to the site’s home page content to get the page to load faster. Previously I had a lot more content on the home page and I’ve removed some of it and put it into an archived page, and that made the page size go down. But, there is always an option to not include as many images, or maybe move the photos, or maybe even make those file sizes smaller. But for this test in particular, let’s leave it alone for a period of time and see if page load speed (taking off nearly a second in load time for the home page) and see if that changes the search engine rankings. Look for a follow-up post with the results in about a week.
Now what I don’t get is that Wordfence.com isn’t HTTPS. Hopefully Wordfence, after reading this post, will consider moving their entire site from HTTP to HTTPS.