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With Google Caffeine being released next year, there is talk among the search engine magazines about how Google may start penalizing websites in the search engine rankings if they have poor pageload times compared to their peers. This means if you were to place a top 5 listing on Google Search you could lose this ranking if your blog has a poor page load performance.
The fact is, even as the internet continues to get more feature rich, bandwidth and broadband can’t keep up fast enough. Mobile devices still average around 1.5 Mbps, and there are still millions of people using dial up. With websites containing often 1mb or more of images this can be up to a minute long pageload for a single website if you are still using dial up modems.
My own blog suffers from pageload performance issues and this is due to many of the social submission plugins, and various external js calls made from my blog. I am in the process of tuning my blog to be more efficient and in doing so I found these three wordpress plug-ins that greatly improve some of your blogs footprint.
The first is WP Super Cache which is one of the most important plug-ins for your wordpress blog. This plug-in will cache your posts as static html pages so that less calls need to be made to the SQL database in order to load your blog posts. Though this plug-in will not cache SQL calls that are made from other plug-ins (like your Wordpress.com stats for example) it will greatly improve the speed of your individual posts when they are cached. By default this will not cache your index.php (homepage) and it is recommended that you set it to flush cache at each new post or else your new posts may not be visible until cache flushes normally (which is usually 10 minutes).
Second is WP Smush.it which is a plug-in that will compress your images to shrink their file size which increases how fast they load in the browser. This plug-in does a remarkable job of compressing image sizes while barely reducing visual quality and is highly recommended if you embed lots of images in your blogs. You can also set WP Smush.it to compress your Theme so it shrinks all of the headers, logo’s and all embeded theme images, which is where it helps your overall blog load times. WP Smush.it when activated will automatically shrink any new post embedded files, but to shrink previous uploaded images you must click on your Media tab and Smush them manually the first time.
CSS Compress is a plug-in that will gzip (compress) your CSS files which are your wordpress “stylesheets” and will reduce the footprint by a few kilobytes. Since these CSS files load on each and every page this improves overall performance and is a recommendation by YSlow for improving page performance.
WP-HTML-Compression is another plugin that compresses your HTML files so they render faster. This plug-in removes all the white spaces and unnecessary tags from your HTML pages which have no effect on how they render in the browser, but reduces their footprint and how quickly they load in the user’s browser.
Summary:
While these plug-ins help overall with image load times they overall improve your blog by a little bit (I gained about 3 second page load time benefit when using these plugins combined on my homepage, though my individual post loads about 50% quicker than my index.php (which has to load 5 posts at the same time).
Another major way to improve your blogs homepage load time is to reduce the number of posts you show at your homepage, reducing it from the default of 10 to 5 will tremendously improve your homepage build time. You can improver your load times even more by reducing from five to three, though I recommend having 5 posts on your homepage (unless you have extremely long articles often, where three would be more appropriate).
If you find your wordpress page load times are still high then it is time to start reducing the number of external calls your website makes, this may include trimming up your plug-ins and sidebar widgets. All widgets which have to make calls to external sources to run javascript (js files) will affect your pageload performance.
I myself and experimenting and hoping to improve my page load times by at least 30% this week.
-Dragon Blogger
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Tags: best wordpress plug-ins, best wp plugins, blog load times, blog pageload, blog performance, blog slow, how to improve wordpress, how to wordpress, improve blog pageload, improve wordpress, make blog faster, make wordpress faster, pageload performance, slow blog times, slow wordpress blog, speed up blog, speed up wordpress, wordpress, wordpress how to, wordpress improve, wordpress load times, wordpress performance, Wordpress Plug-ins, wp plugins
November 30th, 2009 at 7:54 am
Awesome, thank you! I think I’m going to install WP Smush it and CSS-compress on my blog and see how it goes.
Heather Kephart´s last blog ..My Cyber Cabin in the Woods
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November 30th, 2009 at 8:03 am
I have tried Smush.It, but for some strange reason it didn’t work correctly on my blog, but nonetheless some excellent advice, I also believe that sometimes the themes used on a blog can be quick demanding also.
Karen @ Blazing Minds´s last blog ..BlogEngage is Perfect for my Blogging Posts!
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November 30th, 2009 at 11:37 am
I have not tried WP-Cache and have heard an awful lot of positive things about it. Maybe I will install it and see how it works. Meanwhile, good luck with your experiments and hopefully you will be able to achieve your goal of reducing page load time by 30%
DiTesco´s last blog ..Make Money With Google – Increase Your Earning Potential With Ad Planner
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November 30th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Hi – and thanks for this post, I’ll definitely be following your advice to hopefully speed things up a bit.. Best wishes, Will
Will McCulloch´s last blog ..fmsseo.com
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December 1st, 2009 at 8:59 am
Smush.it plug-in looks nice, especially for my blog which is a photoblog. But I am having a second thought that it might ruin the quality of my embedded photos in my blog. What do you think?
Kelvin Servigon´s last blog ..It’s Christmas!
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December 1st, 2009 at 9:20 am
Anything that compresses images will reduce quality slightly to shrink the file size. However, I have looked at images before and after and can barely perceive any image artifacts from the compression. The only thing I could say is try it, and you can manually Smush an image or two and see if you notice any visual degrading of the image, if so, then don’t use it. For me, all of my images are around 530 pixels wide and smaller, so I don’t notice anything with smush’d image.
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December 1st, 2009 at 5:25 pm
I’ve never heard of the SmushIt plugin before – thanks! The rule I try to stick with is never using a plugin for something I could easily code myself.
Keller Hawthorne´s last blog ..Squeeze Page 101: Are You Squeezing Your Email List?
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December 1st, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Glad I can present something new to you, thanks for reading my article.
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December 1st, 2009 at 6:27 pm
I wouldn’t be without Smush.it now. It would certainly be in my top ten plugins of all time.
Thanks for sharing,
Karl
Karl Foxley@SEO Company´s last blog ..10 Wordpress Plugins You Should Be Using!
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December 1st, 2009 at 7:07 pm
I do enjoy using it, one time only I had a problem where it couldn’t contact the Smush.IT server and it wouldn’t let me create posts with images since it couldn’t “Smush” the images. But that hasn’t happened in months.
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