Thoughts on how to speed up my site? (Other site ideas.)

[NoahsDad]

I was wondering if someone had a few minutes to talk a look at our site and see how to speed it up. I've ran some of the speed tests and I get different results, so I'm not sure if my site would be considered "slow" or not.

Also if there any other things that jump out at you (usability, side bar, things I should change / add / take away to make a users experience better, etc.) please let me know. Any feedback is good feedback to me.

I'm using WP Super Cache as well.

Thanks!

[NoahsDad]

Paul,

Thank you very much for all the feedback. Such great info.

I've been working on improving many of these items over the weekend. I'm only using total cache, I set up a CDN, i took off on of the tabs on the activity widget and just let the popular posts. I'm trying to figure out how to resize the images better on the sidebar tab as you're right they are using css to rescale the images.

I'm actually saving up to have the site designed by a designer instad of my non-design self. But that's down the road as having something designed professionally isn't cheap (although it is worth it.)

I'm going to be working on your suggestions for the rest of the site. Thanks again for the feedback and for the kind words about our site. I'm really trying to help people through this site, and from the feedback we are getting it looks like it's been doing that.

Now I'm on the journey to make it an even better experience for people.

[ThompsonPaul]

Be careful with WP Smushit. As mentioned it relies on Yahoo api that has been very unreliable, but it also uses memory mapping. If you exceed memory mapping (very easy to do on shared hosting) the plugin fails and can bring down the site with it.

[ThompsonPaul]

Yea, I figured from some of the commentary and what I saw in his code he must have been acting on some of the suggestions right away. Just didn't want to assume, just in case

And yea, getting to the next level of performance may mean bigger changes like removing some items from the page altogether.

Paul

[Klarke]

Looks like he's already implemented many changes since this question was posted.  At the time, he was running just Supercache, now he's got W3TC, MaxCDN and he seems to have optimized some of the images.

Definitely agree with aiming for 1Mb or less per page, though.

[ThompsonPaul]

First of all, just wanted to wish Noah a happy birthday!

You're right to be asking about speeding up your website, as there are a number of opportunities to improve page load times. I notice you also have questions posted asking about VPSs, and CDNs.The thing is, there is definitely an order in which these things should be tackled.

The first thing you must do is get your on page code as efficient as possible. The reality is that an inefficiently coded website can bring even the strongest of servers to its knees with just a little extra surge in traffic. It's never a good idea to try to make up for inefficient code by throwing additional hardware resources at the problem.

By default, WordPress is fairly easy to use and build, but that front-end simplicity comes at the cost of complexity and inefficiency of code on the back end. Every bit of functionality you add using plug-ins and widgets comes at the cost of additional files to load, more database calls to process, and more opportunities for someone else's inefficient code to get in the way.

In your case, your homepage is approx 2 MB in size, and some of your internal pages are over 4.5 MB. This translates into page load times anywhere from 10 to 25 seconds at typical cable Internet speeds. In practical terms, anything over 1 MB is awfully big.

Site speed optimization can be a fairly complex process, and needs an overall plan, rather than trying to implement one-off tactics and hoping for the best. I'd be happy to help you off-line to build up a plan, but in the meantime these are the kinds of things you should be taking into account:

• reduce the number of plug-ins and widgets adding content to your page to the bare minimum.
• Make sure the plug-ins/widgets you have chosen are the most efficient available in their class
• make certain photos are as efficiently compressed as possible, are being rescaled as opposed to resized in html, and be careful of using too many photos on any one page
• Ensure your caching plug-in is tweaked and tuned to be as efficient as possible for your server configuration.

Some specifics for you to think about:

• the Recommended sidebar widget (and to a lesser extent the Popular widget) are extremely inefficient in their use of images. Even though they're only showing 50x50px thumbnails, they're loading full-size images up to 550kb in the background.
• is there enough difference between Recommended and Popular for both to be of benefit to visitors?
• you're obviously using W3 Total Cache - hope you don't also have SuperCache enabled as well? If so, they'll compromise each other's performance. Only one caching plugin - ever.
• you have several different advertising networks providing ads to the page. Each one loads it's own set of backend scripts, many of which are VERY inefficient. Could you consolidate?
• you currently have over 1 megabyte of just Javascript loading on each page when target should be less than 1 MB for the whole page including content
• sidebar titles like "Like Us on FaceBook" have so little contrast from the background they're very hard to read (& likely disappear on dark monitors)
• you get so many comments on each post (a nice problem to have!) that it may be time to consider paginating the comments so that each page doesn't have hundreds of comments to load each time it displays

Overall, you're doing an absolutely kick-ass job with your website, from everything I can see. You're rocking the engagement and interest of your visitors, and you've tuned most of the things that are readily tuneable. The next level up in performance will require some tough decisions and perhaps even killing a few sacred cows. That's why I recommend you make a plan before randomly changing things.

With the way you're going, you may very well find that even the highly tuned site is going to outgrow shared hosting as a result of increasing traffic. If/when this does happen, you'll still benefit from having leaned out the website so it can take better advantage of whatever server hardware it's hosted on.

I'll close with a couple of really useful tools for visualizing exactly what's happening in the performance of your site.

First is webpagetest.org  (if you haven't already found it) which allows you to run tests that directly mimic the experience a user and their browser would have. You can even have it test from different areas of the country, and using different typical Internet speeds. I usually test with the two lowest speeds, as they will cover the widest range of typical users including mobile.

The second is a plug-in called P3 Performance Profiler. It may seem counterintuitive to be adding another plug-in when what you're trying to do is reduce the complexity, but what P3 does is give you an actual readout of how much of your server's resources are being used by each of your site's plug-ins. You you can enable it for testing purposes, then turn it off again for normal running of your website.

No doubt this has created as many questions as it may have answered, so by all means fire away if you need additional clarification.

Paul

[Klarke]

Pingdom says your page is 5.5mb big.  But it loads pretty quick for me.

You can do alot better.  Here's my recommendations.

1.  Optimize your images before uploading.  I would recommend the WP-Smushit plugin which does it on the fly, but lately the yahoo api hasn't been working.

2.  Switch the W3 Total Cache.  It does the same thing as Super cache, but there's some additional goodies.

3.  Using W3TC, you should enable minify and combine for all the css and js.   The plugin allows you to combine all your css and js in two files (from both your theme and other plugins).

4.  Consider using a CDN.  Again W3TC makes it easy.  I use amazon cloudfront, and it's amazingly cheap.  Essentially, you keep your current hosting, but actually serve all css, js, and images from the CDN.  It makes an enormous difference.

[NoahsDad]

Thanks. The host I'm using is really good, so I'm not sure switching hosts would be that different.

In regard to number of posts on home page, how many would you suggest?

[Copstead]

After taking a quick look I would just utilize Cloud Flare (http://www.cloudflare.com).  It is a free tool where they not only optimize your site with an increase of speed around 60%, but they also provide a CDN.

I tested this out a few weeks ago with a blog of mine and it took it down from 8 - 10 seconds to load, down to 1.8 seconds.  Very impressive.

They also provide a Wordpress plugin.

No need to change hosting companies.

Two tools to help you as well.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

http://www.webpagetest.org/

[plasma800]

Consider

• Moving to WPengine.com for hosting.
• Less posts on the home page.
• Compressing your CSS.
• Better optimization of images.

It was pretty quick for me.  The slowest load was the externals, videos from you tube as it calls out for each one to "load" then in the browser.