Black Friday 2019 my SiteGround hosting plan was up for renewal and with this site being a hobby of mine I was not going to renew at the premium prices so I looked around for another web host for my website. After doing some research I chose Hawk Host due to many great reviews and their pricing fit my budget.
When I was hosting at SiteGround I used their SG Optimizer plugin for optimization and with being at a new host I needed to switch to a new optimization setup. Hawk Host uses LiteSpeed so I installed the LiteSpeed Cache plugin. I found that the plugin had many great reviews and an extensive list of optimization options.
I also enabled Cloudflare which includes Railgun for free due to Hawk Host having a partnership with Cloudflare. More details on this can be found on Cloudflare’s official website.
| Speed | Size | Requests | Page Speed | Yslow | |
| Pingdom | 297 ms | 271.8 KB | 18 | 87% | |
| Gtmetrix | 1.01 s | 252.15 KB | 18 | 97% | 97% |
Settings I enabled:
- CSS Minification
- CSS HTTP/2 Push
- JS minification
- JS Combine
- JS HTTP/2 Push
- Remove Query Strings
- Remove WordPress Emoji
- Optimize Images
- Optimize WebP images
