Here’s a question for everyone today? How do you handle website performance? Do you tinker with servers, install plugins/modules/etc, optimize content, something else?
Talk about your techniques for increasing the performance of your website in the comments below.
About Chris Wiegman
Chris is the owner of Bit51 where he blogs about web development and works on WordPress plugins such as Better WP Security. In addition Chris is a Senior Developer for Springbox in Austin, TX where he develops a host of solutions for clients large and small.
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I recently spent some time analyzing which items can safely be removed from my website, without sacrificing any significant functionality while increasing speed.
The first step was to remove those default Facebook Like and Google+ buttons from the sidebar.
The second step was to remove some unnecessary WordPress plugins, in case what they do could be done by hand instead. So, I removed a “Popular Posts” plugin and listed those posts myself. I also removed several other cosmetic plugins, and replaced them with simple HTML.
All in all, the loading time improved between one and two seconds with these simple changes,
Once I finish the revisions to the site I usually run tests on it including, spidering the site for 404s, run page speed tests, W3C verification, and browser compatibility tests. Once I start doing that I edit the source code to correct issues found, based on the data received. Basically, it comes down to optimizing content.
These are probably laughably obvious, but my first steps for a WordPress site are usually setting up CloudFlare and W3 Total Cache.
Have you tried this tool for load speed optimizations?
http://unshit.com
It is amazing how much social buttons and ads can slow a site. Unfortunately for a lot of blogs though they seem to be a necessary evil.
Sounds about right. Which speed services do you use? I love webpagetest.org as well as gtmetrix.com and pingdom.
I’m not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination so its easy to become overwhelmed by the amount of data produced by webpagetest.org. I keep going back to Google Developers’ PageSpeed Online because it prioritizes what needs to be fixed and gives information on how to do it.
Good point. Webpagetest is powerful, but not all that helpful in a lot of situations.
I’m with you on the Total Cache but I’ve actually found Cloudflare tends to slow page load times on this site by up to 1/2 a second…. What kinds of numbers have you seen with it?
I’ve never had CloudFlare slow down page load times. I do sometimes see no change when using it, but I generally see improvements of around half a second.
Interesting. Perhaps it’s a host issue then. Hard to say. It’s a great service for security but for performance I will have to do a little more research.
Hmm, Interesting…. I haven’t tried it but the name definitely gets my attention.