Tips for speeding up WordPress
Michael Gray of Graywolf’s SEO Blog has compiled a comprehensive list of tips for optimizing load times with your WordPress site. Since Google has announced that it would include page loading time as a factor in its search results rankings, and launched its Let’s make the web faster microsite, site performance & optimization is now the hottest topic in the SEO world. (If you need something to blow up so everyone else follows suit, trust Google to get things done.)
The trick is to look at all the plugins and widgets you’ve added to your site and figure out which ones you can do without. Do you really need that fancy lightbox zooming script to display your larger images? How about opting for a more compact, all-in-one solution for your social media buttons? Or a lighter theme?
But whether or not you’re on WordPress, website analyzing tools and techniques such as gzipping and caching should come in handy. Yahoo! also has a great resource page on speeding up your website.
It seems this will be the year of optimized page loads, so don’t get left behind!
An “ultimate” WP 2.8 optimization guide
Still on the subject of keeping your WordPress site in tip-top shape, StoreCrowd has compiled the Ultimate WordPress 2.8 Optimization Guide. It’s a long list of code snippets, plugins, tools, and tips to improve the performance of your blog. For example:
Use a CDN or Subdomain for Static Files
Serving all your images from the same domain can means that your browser is waiting to download all the items one after the other. Lets say you have 12 items, if you split these out across 3 subdomains then they can be downloaded concurrently (as there’s 3 sources), instead of the browser waiting to download them from one source.
WordCamp Philippines 2009 talk: WordPress in the Wild
Markku Seguerra just blogged about his talk in this year’s WordCamp Philippines called “WordPress in the Wild”:
WordPress used to simply be a blogging app and not much more. It’s growth in the past few years though has pushed it to adapt a more extensible structure to allow for other uses beyond blogging as well as various other customizations. These changes made it more appealing to a wider range of users, but at the same time it also introduced some performance bottlenecks that become apparent when your blog rises to be just a bit too popular. Ah, the price of success.
His slides on WordPress deployment, performance, optimization, and security are embedded in the post, but scroll down for all the important links and points covered by his presentation. A bit on the technical side, but definitely a must-read for everyone running a WordPress website.
What’s new with WordPress 2.8
Here’s another post that checks out some of the new features in WordPress 2.8. If you’ll go through the comprehensive write-up, you’ll observe that a lot of the improvements lean toward usability, accessibility, and performance optimization, which in turn improve one’s overall experience with WordPress. Example:
JavaScript files properly registered via the appropriate script API can now be placed at the bottom of the page. In most cases this is preferable, because JavaScript blocks parallel downloads (browsers need to evaluate it before proceeding) and can delay the time by which a page is usable and also the time by which the rendering is complete. So, unless a JavaScript file needs to be at the top, it can be moved to the bottom for better performance.
