Got my site to load fast as all hell

Penguin

Penguin

Suave
Aug 3, 2006
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Minnesota, USA
Got my blog to load in 432 ms from New York, New York (my server is located in Ashburn, Virginia): Pingdom Tools

I went a little bit crazy on optimization and I still may do more, can anyone beat that speed? Are any of the 3% of web sites that are faster than mine operated by any of you?
 


There is a lot that can still be done - For instance,

Image Optimization

The current Featured PNG that loads for the first post on your site is 128 KB - It can be further compressed to about 58 KB
3ahtT3W.png


This is applicable to all other images as well.

Unused Elements

- Flexslider CSS files are loading, even though there is no slider onpage.

- You're using the brankick social media widget, but from your footer, it is evident that you're using only four of the whole list of social icons that the widget supports. You can get rid of the extra set of icon calls from the css file, doing this will reduce the size of the css from the current 8.x KB to less than 2 KB.

- Again, I see a file loading for the WP External Link plugin, do you really need it? I don't see any use of it being made in any part of the site.

This is just what I could find from a quick glance at your source code, I am sure this can be further accentuated.
 
I see a lot of sites using PNG files when really a jpg would serve just as good with some clever design & forethought.

Also you might wish to consider using adaptive images in RWD - you don't actually have to create the alternative smaller versions - instead use PHP to create them when the first visitor on a particular viewport visits. Subsequent visitors get redirected (image files only) in the .htaccess according to their UA or viewport. Takes care of that shizzle even if you can't drag yourself into 2010 and go with a RWD 'template' or can't be arsed to hand code the CSS.

Of course, this will only assist in mobile versions, but there's always room for improvement on sites.
 
Another approach which I am experimenting with is static publishing. This makes sub-second loading easy even without doing any optimization. Eliminates the security issues with the CMS, server can be optimized for static serving etc. Of course you give up some dynamic features so there certainly are limitations.
 
I randomly tested one of my sites and scored a 95/100 and was faster.

You are doing pretty good using Wordpress.

The things that stand out are that you are doing 58 requests and loading 1MB of data.

The insanely high traffic / high performance stuff I have worked on in the past would do 4 requests at the most. The HTML, CSS, JS and an image sprite (all the images for the page in one image). You could also inline JS and CSS, but that may not be desirable because of caching and re-use later in the site.

Don't get too caught up in performance if your site is fast enough... there is a diminishing return for that stuff. Make some money and then re-visit later :)
 
Agree with alpaca - don't get too caught up in it and let it become a fixation.

I am guilty of this with RWD at times (the irony is not lost on me).
 
86/100
13 requests
137kb
WordPress publishing -> static serving
(chart includes wordwide testing sites)
 

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CCarter - It was that thread that made me realize how shit my pagespeed was and followed the excellent methods to get it to 98 - couldn't reach max zen as it was a WP theme that I wasn't prepared to waste time edit some of (css sprites etc), but yes - that kicked my arse into gear. :)
 
microphone head said:
CCarter - It was that thread that made me realize how shit my pagespeed was and followed the excellent methods to get it to 98 - couldn't reach max zen as it was a WP theme that I wasn't prepared to waste time edit some of (css sprites etc), but yes - that kicked my arse into gear. :)
Click to expand...

a0ooKrb.png


A wordpress install - the only limitation we have are created by our mind. However it is true, if you are not starting from scratch it's more difficult to re-edit another designer/developer's Wordpress theme to max zen. Not worth the headache, in my opinion. Now as I move forward and populate the blog, I'll make sure to super compress all images, and stay as close as possible to max zen, even though I know eventually something is going to break that due to a special requirement probably in the distant future.

At that point I'll probably use BlogHue's Plugin...​
 
This whole post reads like an ad for this Bloghue plugin. What is it and where can I get it?
 
Holy sheep shit, I'm glad I read this thread. I just removed a slider script from a site which wasn't using the slider and removed another piece of JS that wasn't being used. Went from a 73 to 93. BLAM. That's what I'm talkin bout.
 
Here's a question that I just figure out. My site is trying to load .css files for some of the javascript that I removed. I can't find in the header or functions files where these are being requested. How do I find and remove those requests? These two in particular are the one's that are giving me issues.

Code: 
<link rel='stylesheet' id='nivo-slider-css'  href='/wp-content/themes/Gameleon/css/nivo-slider.css?ver=3.5.1' type='text/css' media='all' />
<link rel='stylesheet' id='news-ticker-css'  href='/wp-content/themes/Gameleon/css/news-ticker.css?ver=3.5.1' type='text/css' media='all' />
 
efeezy said:
Here's a question that I just figure out. My site is trying to load .css files for some of the javascript that I removed. I can't find in the header or functions files where these are being requested. How do I find and remove those requests? These two in particular are the one's that are giving me issues.

Code: 
<link rel='stylesheet' id='nivo-slider-css'  href='/wp-content/themes/Gameleon/css/nivo-slider.css?ver=3.5.1' type='text/css' media='all' />
<link rel='stylesheet' id='news-ticker-css'  href='/wp-content/themes/Gameleon/css/news-ticker.css?ver=3.5.1' type='text/css' media='all' />
Click to expand...

Hard to determine without taking a look at the actual code.

Did you purge the cache after you edited those files?
 
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