WordPress Optimization
Just recently I’ve redesigned by blog (or rather, used the free ColdBlue) theme). I put off moving from my own Perl blogging software to WordPress due to performance reasons for a long time but have finally bitten the bullet.
I used to spend a fair amount of time using WebsiteOptimization.com to check for large page objects and load times.
Here are some general tips for improving the speed of your WordPress blog:
- Use theGIMP, Paint.Net or Photoshop to optimize your images (do you really need 256 colours in your gif?);
- Clean up your CSS. This is pretty crucial, and can cut your css file in half in many cases;
- Combine CSS files. If you can, merge your CSS files into one. This will use less connection threads in the browser so will reduce load time;
- Merge multiple small js files into one, again this will save on connection threads in the browser and decrease load time;
- Get apache to handle gzip. If your host supports it, make apache handle the gzip output. Getting wordpress to do this can cause problems with some plugins.
- If you use mod_gzip to do this you’ll also get the added benefit that apache will compress css/js files which are part of your template that WordPress doesn’t seem to do by default;
- Place as much javascript as you can before the tag. This will ensure the content loads before the js file, which will ensure your visitors aren’t waiting on your ads to read the content.
If anyone has any thoughts about speeding up Adsense or Analytics I’d love to hear them!