One of the best things you can do to improve your blog is to optimize the page load speed. Optimizing your website will help to make it load faster. Web pages that load faster give a better user experience, and will improve your search engine rankings.
You can measure how long it takes your WordPress blog to load in a browser, by using the YSlow Firefox plugin.
YSlow will tell you how long it takes a page to load. It will also grade your site and give it an overall performance sore.
The YSlow report reminds me of a report card, like I used to bring home from school. It is similar because it divides the report into 14 different categories or subjects, and tell you how you can make your WordPress blog load faster.
- Make fewer HTTP requests
- Compress components with gzip
- Put CSS at top
- Put JavaScript at bottom
- Avoid CSS expressions
- Reduce DNS lookups
- Minify JavaScript and CSS
- Avoid URL redirects
- Remove duplicate JavaScript and CSS
- Reduce the number of DOM elements
- Avoid HTTP 404 (Not Found) error
- Avoid AlphaImageLoader filter
- Do not scale images in HTML
- Make favicon small and cacheable
YSlow will grade your page on each subject individually, and will also give you suggestions on what you can do to help your WordPress Blog load faster.
If your site takes to long to load there are several WordPress cache plugins you can use that will improve your blogs performance, and optimize it’s page load speed.
Optimize Your WordPress Blog
I now use WP Super Cache to optimize my WordPress blog. My YSlow report card has improved from a “C” grade to an “A” with an overall performance score in the high 90’s. WP Super Cache will improve your blogs performance, and provide a better user experience by caching your site, compressing the css and java-script files.
I have also started using a CDN service called CloudFlare to speed up and protect my site. It is absolutely free to use and I highly recommend it.
Optimize The Images Of Your WordPress Blog
The amount of graphics, images and photos that you add to your WordPress blog will also affect your sites page load speed.
I use a WordPress plugin called WP Smush.it to optimize the images I use in my posts, it operates in the background and automatically optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality.
Matthew Horne says
September 16, 2012 at 10:28 amHi Larry, to answer your question on my blog, basically W3 can add query strings to your site, there is an option in the browser cache settings called. (prevent caching of object change) if selected it will add a query sting, which is an id to differentiate between different versions of cache, it will then use the 304 status to check for that change.
Underneath that checkbox it says:
Whenever settings are changed, a new query string will be generated and appended to objects allowing the new policy to be applied.
Hope this answers your question.
Regards
Larry James says
September 16, 2012 at 10:56 amThanks for answering my question Matthew. I checked my W3 browser cache settings, and the setting you mentioned is un-ticked. I will leave it that way to avoid having the query added. And thanks for the great article and the code to remove the query strings for the CSS and Javascript URL’s. You have a great blog, and I have subscribed to your list.
Lorenzo says
March 9, 2013 at 9:02 amThese are some great suggestions. Also consider the GTMetrix tool as it provides a bit more recommendations on the site.
Another tip for speeding up WordPress is to deactivate and delete and plugins that are not mission-critical. This will “lighten” the resources load for the site and also reduce the chance of a plugin or theme conflict.
Larry James says
March 9, 2013 at 9:21 amHi Lorenzo. I think I am a plugin junkie. I just love some of the plugins that are available for WordPress. I have been trying to reduce and remove some of the unnecessary ones, but I find it hard to do. I was able to quit smoking more than 2 years ago, but this is harder. LOL!
Thanks for the tip about GTMetrix tool. I tried it and it and I got a grade of 74%. It seems that the area I need improvement on is to combine my images into CSS Sprites, that is something I am going to try and do.
Thanks for leaving your comment.
Larry James says
May 25, 2013 at 1:59 pmHi Pranjal,
Thank you for stopping by and leaving your comment. Since publishing this post I no longer us WP Total Cache, I have updated the article 😉
I now use WP Super Cache to cache my database, I find it so much easier to set up and configure.