futtta's blog

Frank Goossens' Twitterless twaddle

Speed up your (WordPress-)site!

with 6 comments

Google likes fast! Visitors like fast! So why don’t you go make your site really fast?

Suppose you just bought yourself hosting and you just installed WordPress for blogging or lightweight-CMS-purposes, how can you improve your site’s performance in that case? Easy!

  1. speed up PHP: use a caching optimizer (I use APC) to significantly speed up PHP performance (don’t bother  signing up for shared hosting with a company that doesn’t offer PHP with acceleration).
  2. cache dynamic output: install the “WP Super Cache” WordPress plugin. Configure and then forget about it; if you create/edit a blogpost, impacted pages are automatically removed from cache.
  3. optimize CSS and JS: install the “CSS JS booster” WordPress plugin, which (amongst other things) grabs all CSS and JS from WordPress and Plugins and outputs it in one CSS- and one JS-file (some plugins, e.g. Sociable and WordPress Mobile Pack, might need tweaking of the css media-attribute though)
  4. avoid calling 3rd party javascript: tracking (e.g. Google Analytics, which I removed), widgets (e.g. Twitter badges) or other 3rd party gadgets (e.g. AddToAny, which I removed) can slow down your site’s performance significantly
  5. optimize images: fire up your favorite photo editor and make that image just a bit smaller, use an acceptable level of compression (I end up between 70 and 80% for JPEG’s, depending on the image) and upload to smushit.com to squeeze out the last optimization-drop (example; I used a 20KB picture from Flickr, resized it to 80%, saved it with 77% compression and smushed it to end up with a mere 6KB).

The impact of a number of these steps can be measured easily; below are the response times of my blog’s homepage (the  html including css, js and images) as measured by Pingdom Tool’s Full Page Test.

  1. default WordPress (on a Linux VPS with 320Mb RAM memory): 6.5 seconds
  2. (1)  with PHP APC activated: 4.1 seconds
  3. (2) with WP Super Cache: 3.1 seconds
  4. (3) with CSS JS Booster: 1.3 seconds

So there you have it, from 6.5 to 1.3 seconds in only 5 easy steps! WordPress specific, but easily applicable to other platforms as well. Now go and make your site fast! And then go and make it even faster!

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

Written by frank

March 11th, 2010 at 9:58 pm

Read more about: blog,lang:en,performance,Web development

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6 Responses to “Speed up your (WordPress-)site!”

  1. Veerle

    12 Mar 10 at 08:01

    Geen flauw idee waar je ‘t over hebt, maar die zelfgemaakte e-card is super! :-)

    Reply

  2. Pieter

    12 Mar 10 at 13:06

    You may be interested in the (beta) GA asynchronous tracking: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncTracking.html which shouldn’t delay content from rendering. You can also serve the GA javascript locally (and compress it), but then you need to update it manually.

    Reply

    • frank

      12 Mar 10 at 13:09

      yeah, had that running for a while, but as i already have wordpress stats and as i’m trying to rely less on google (cfr. my privacy concerns), i decided to remove it entirely.

      Reply

  3. Der „CSS-JS-Booster“: Eine PHP-Bibliothek zur Ladezeitenbeschleunigung • Peter Kröner, Webdesigner & Frontendentwickler

    12 Apr 10 at 15:13

    [...] Funktionieren tut das ganze mit recht ansehnlichen Ergebnissen. [...]

    Reply

  4. Speed up your (WordPress-)site! | futtta's blog | Intenseblog.com

    6 Jun 10 at 05:12

    Speed up your (WordPress-)site! | futtta's blog…

    …s are automatically removed from cache. optimize CSS and JS: install the “CSS JS booster” WordPress plugin, which (amongst other things) grabs all CSS and ……

    Reply

  5. icechen1

    17 Oct 11 at 05:27

    Thanks for the tips there, will take it to heart. I also use WP Widget Cache to cache the widgets.

    Reply

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