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It was with great hesitation and procrastination but I finally decided to cut DragonBlogger.com over to a new hosting provider last night. The whole process took me about 7 hours start to finish, starting at 6pm AZ time and finishing by about 1AM the following morning. I just had too many outages and too much conflicting information and poor support from my previous hosting provider that I had no choice but to switch.

My wife had been using HostMonster for about 4 months and she has not had a single outage on her sites (all 3 blogs) since cutting over, I cut over my two smaller blogs on MLK day and they haven’t had a single outage in a week and a half. Meanwhile DragonBlogger.com took a 6 hour outage yesterday due to something causing a huge memory leak on my old hosting provider, and this was the last straw for me.

Now all of my blogs are using HostMonster which is a shared hosting provider, I did have a Virtual Private Server (which gives you dedicated RAM and CPU), but I was not happy with the support and issues I was experiencing which necessitated my switch. There were some initial bumps but most of these were due to learning the new hosting provider and how to configure and tune my blog properly.

First off the bat, the WP-HTML-Compression plug-in for wordpress broke my blog on HostMonster, I was getting the following error with this plug-in enabled:
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

Disabling that had my blog working, but I was having performance and pageload issues. It turns out FastCGI was the problem and limited to only 5 simultaneous connections, I switched my blog to using PHP5 without FASTCGI and my blog started performing better right away. One other thing my hosting provider told me was to disable WP-SuperCache as it makes wordpress perform worse in most cases with their hosted accounts. I disabled WP-SuperCache and my blog became noticeably faster, so it seemed to help.

On the weekend I will go through and trim as many non-essential plug-ins as possible to try and improve pageload times again, as well as convert as many png and jpg files to gif’s on my homepage to speed up their load times as well. In the meantime, this site has been completely transitioned to a new database, web server, hosting provider with all files, plugins, themes, uploads (500MB worth of image and file uploads across my almost 900 posts). If you find anything amiss or not working, do me a favor and leave me a comment would ya?

-Dragon Blogger

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I noticed my RealRank for dragonblogger.com plummeted the last few days after holding a steady < 300 rank for months, it dramatically skyrocketed. This happens while my Google Analytics traffic continues to show a 3-8% gain in traffic month after month and my site averaging around 400 unique visits per day from Google Analytics.

Yet my RealRank recently now only reflects around 26 unique visits per day which is 1/20th of what Google Analytics is reporting:

This has greatly hurt my blog rating on SocialSpark and IzeaRanks.com, so I opened a few cases with IZEA to help troubleshoot the issue. They have informed me that my page load times could be affecting the script ability to read traffic to my site, as a result I have taken drastic measures to improve my pageload time by cutting out all external calls I don’t think were essential. By removing my Entrecard Generator (temporary, until I can get it into its own static html page that doesn’t affect my blog), and removing my Digg.js, and other social submit buttons I was able to improve the page load times of this blog by 40%.

There is still some more tweaking, I am wondering if the 1.8 second page load time of the Entrecard badge is worth having anymore at this point, I also notice the Twittley and Tweetmeme plug-ins and buttons add almost 4 seconds pageload time between them.

I am continuing to search for new ways to improve my pageload performance, but it doesn’t help I keep suffering site outages from Dreamhost on top of my pageload issues.

-Dragon Blogger

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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I came across Alex Dunae’s WP Smush.it for wordpress while doing research on how to optimize blog page load times and installed the plug-in the other night and tested it. I can tell bloggers that if you use wordpress and you upload images to your pages, this plug-in will improve your page load times and reduce the footprint of images on your blog.

You install the plug-in and click on your “Media Library” section and you can see a new column called “Smush.it” this uses the Yahoo service to compress images while losing very little image quality, I can’t even notice the difference in image by looking at it, even though this plug-in reduces the image footprint by 33.6% in some cases.

My page load times on pages with large images was improved greatly from 5 seconds to 3.5 seconds just after Smushing the images on that post. This performance gain is outstanding and this plug-in is one of my highest recommended ones for WordPress bloggers who upload photos and images to their blogs.

-Dragon Blogger

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