In 2017, Carson, one of the owner’s of Wealthy Affiliate, announced a new feature in Wealthy Affiliate called SiteSpeed. If you’ve heard of CloudFlare, then it’s pretty similar. The benefit is the configuration is dead simple if your websites are hosted at Wealthy Affiliate. In fact all you have to do is click a button to enable it.
Purpose of SiteSpeed
In the link I provided above, Carson says they implemented SiteSpeed with a goal of making WordPress sites hosted on SiteRubix the fastest websites around. I’m not inclined to go out and test every web host to prove this claim, but it’s pretty heard to argue with the Google PageSpeed tests which Wealthy Affiliate conveniently lets you run within the “Details” page of SiteManager.
How SiteSpeed Works
Basically they render the web pages ahead of time and save(cache) the static pages and posts for when someone reqeusts them. They mentioned that it would be caching website content and serving it. By doing this they avoid the time it takes for PHP to run, for the database to be queried, and the web server to respond to the requests.
They also mentioned it was some type of hardware and that it would help prevent against DDoS attacks. Usually one of the major selling points of CDNs is the ability to defend against DDoS attacks, so that’s why I’m leaning towards it just being some sort of CDN.
Did They Just Implement CloudFlare?
I actually don’t know the answer to this question yet. I’m inclined to say that they are not using CloudFlare’s service and just calling it SiteSpeed because in his post he describes SiteSpeed as being “similar to services like CloudFlare.” If they were using CloudFlare, I don’t think they would have posted that statement.
Final Thoughts
Overall, it’s nice having your website hosted at a place where they do all the heavy lifting for you to make your site fast. You don’t have to worry about integrating your website with CloudFlare or some other CDN which is time you can spend on learning to build and make money with your website. I think it was a great addition to their SiteRubix hosting platform.