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We all need to understand the need to optimize your websites and WordPress for better speed or your ranking in the search engine will be affected.

I realized that my own websites were in need of me taking some time to research this area.

I’m not alone either !

Google have announced that they consider website speed when determining search engine rankings so determining what I had to do was paramount.

A slow website can literally kill your revenue stream and affect  your visitors numbers.

Here’s what the experts at Website Optimization.com have to say about the topic:

Google found that moving from a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20% (Linden 2006).

When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70-80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks (Farber 2006).

Tests at Amazon revealed similar results: every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1%. (Kohavi and Longbotham 2007)

(source)

It’s very clear that everyone hates slow websites but the question is, how can you make your WordPress website faster?

Read on and I’ll show you how you can take some proactive steps towards speeding up your site.

So what Determines your Website Page Speed ?

The  Yahoo! YSlow and Google Page Speed Mozilla Firefox plugins evaluate your site against the widely accepted rules of website performance.

The only problem is they don’t actually tell you what to do with the information they provide you ?

So I will break down the top performance recommendations and show you you can apply them to your website.

• Minimize the number of HTTP requests

• Optimize and correctly display images

• Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript

• Use a Content Delivery Network

• Gzip and compress components

• Choose <link> over @import

• Put stylesheets at the top

• Put scripts at the bottom

• Utilize browser caching

• Use CSS Sprites

Here some detail on what exactly to do:

1.     Minimize the number of HTTP requests

• Quick Translation: Limit the number of files required to display your website

When someone visits your website, those corresponding files must be sent to that person’s browser.

This includes CSS files, Javascript library references, and images.

As expected, every file you use to enhance your design detracts from its performance and loading.

You may not realize it but WordPress plugins are notorious for injecting extraneous CSS code in the head of your site without giving you the option to manually add the required styles to your style sheet.

The key take away point to this is :

Eliminate everything that’s unnecessary. If you’re using a plugin because you like, take a look at how it impacts your code. The extra page-load time may not be worth it so minimize the amount of plugins that you use.

2.    Optimize and correctly display images

• Quick Translation: Make images as small as possible and don’t require the browser to re-size them

Depending on the format, many images contain a ton of extraneous metadata that can drastically increase the size of the file.

Many designers fail to compress their images before uploading them to the web, and the overall impact of this can be dramatic with image-intensive designs.

Also another cardinal sin of inexperienced webmasters is to upload and serve an image far larger than what is required for the design.

WordPress is an unfortunate enabler of this, as many novice website owners upload large images directly off of their digital cameras and utilize WordPress’s image resizing functionality to display a smaller version.

With free applications like Picnik and Image Optimizer at our disposal, there is simply no excuse not to re-size and optimize! Visitors (and your server) will thank you.

3. Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript

• Quick Translation: Remove all white space from code when possible before serving it to visitors

The spaces, tabs, and orderly structure used in code is to make it more human-readable.

Servers and browsers don’t care about what the code looks like as long as it’s valid and executes without error.

If you want your files to download faster, you can remove all this white space before serving your code.

Since it would be impractical to remove white space from files that are constantly edited (unlike Javascript libraries like jQuery, which are almost always served minified), we’ll want to leverage a plugin like WP-Minify (good) or W3 Total Cache (best) to handle this at run time without affecting the files we need to edit.

White space is great for website posts and article design but not in our code.

4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

• Quick Translation: Use a CDN to lighten the load on your server and turbocharge its performance

A CDN is a high-performance network of servers across the globe that replicate the static assets of your website and serve them to visitors from the closest POP.

What’s this mean ?

I know not everybody understands using this when a beginner.

The good news is that we don’t have to understand the mechanics behind Content Delivery Networks in order to understand their power.

It means you have a team of servers distributing your static assets to visitors across the globe from a number of servers. So instead of everything coming from your hosting server when someone visits your website, it comes from a server closer to them.

Amazon S3 is one such system you can use and it actually was developed for Amazon to present it’s content faster around the globe.

So by utilizing Amazon S3 you are actually getting very good content distribution.

CDNs are among the most effective ways to absolutely turbocharge the speed of our sites.

But we cannot neglect the other important areas of optimization in the process, so this should be treated as the crowning jewel for your beautifully optimized website.

 5. Gzip and compress components

• Quick Translation: Compress files at the server level before sending them to browsers

Think of it like this,  if you were instructed to hurl a piece of paper across the room as far as it can go

Would you lightly crumple it or squeeze it with all your might?

That’s right, you’d take all your effort and squeeze it down as tight as possible.

The sample principle applies here: we want to allow our web-server to compress our files before sending them to visitors.

We can drop a few lines of code in our .htaccess file to accomplish this:

#Begin gzip and deflate
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/plain text/xml image/x-icon
</IfModule>!

This code might look a little bit intimidating, but it’s actually in affect pretty simple.

We’re just checking to see if the Apache mod_deflate module exists and if so, electing to serve HTML, CSS, Javascript, plain text, and favicon files using gzip compression.

Note: this requires the Apache web-server and the mod_deflate module. To enable gzip compression with NGINX, ensure that the following lines exist inside of the appropriate directive:

server {
gzip on;
gzip_types text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/plain text/xml image/x-icon;
}

Voila Easy !

6. Choose <link> over @import

• Quick Translation: Beware the suck of IE!

When including your stylesheets, always link to the files instead of using the @import reference.

IE handles them differently by loading them as if the reference was at the bottom of the document.

7. Put stylesheets at the top

• Quick Translation: All interface-related style sheet references should be included in the <head> of your document

We never, ever, ever want to display un-styled content to visitors—not even for a split second.

Files responsible for the appearance of our site should be loaded first so they can be applied to the HTML as it loads.

Makes sense, right?

Nothing more to it as it’s that simple.

8. Put scripts at the bottom

• Quick Translation: All functionality-related files can be loaded after our content is loaded

As we think through how to deliver our content to visitors as fast as possible and the subsequent steps that users will take, we will use the following priorities:

• Get content to visitors as fast as possible

• Don’t allow un-styled content to appear in the browser (put CSS in the <head>)

• Load the files required for interaction (tabbed widgets, certain external API calls, etc.) last

The thinking behind this is very simple: users aren’t going to interact with the content before they can see it!

9. Utilize browser caching

• Quick Translation: Do not require browsers to pull down another copy of static files every time

With browser caching, we’re explicitly instructing browsers to hang onto particular files for a specified period of time.

When the file is needed again, the browser is to pull from its local cache instead of requesting it from the server again.

Running a website without caching in place makes as much sense as driving to the store for a glass of water every time you’re thirsty.

Not only is in impractical and short-sighted, it takes more work!

The ExpiresByType directive is used to tell browsers which files to cache and how long to hang onto them.

The example below would tell our visitors’ browsers to hang onto HTML, CSS, Javascript, and images, and favicon for an hour (3600 seconds):

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html M3600
ExpiresByType text/css M3600
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript M3600
ExpiresByType image/bmp M3600
ExpiresByType image/gif M3600
ExpiresByType image/x-icon M3600
ExpiresByType image/jpeg M3600
</IfModule>

Again, the code above is for your .htaccess file on an Apache server. The corresponding settings in NGINX would look something like this:

location ~* \.(jpg|png|gif|jpeg|css|js)$ {
expires 1h;
}

Voila done again!

10. Use CSS Sprites

• Quick Translation: Serve one highly optimized image for your design to minimize the performance impact

A CSS sprite is an an image comprised of other images used by your design as something of a map containing the coordinates of all the images.

Some clever CSS is used to show the proper section of the sprite when your design is loaded.

There are fantastic articles on the topic available across the web that dive into the mechanics of CSS sprites and wonderful resources for creating them.

SpriteMe is a utility that generates the sprite and code required to make it work. If you inspect the code for the nav menu on Pearsonified.com, you’ll see a great example of how to implement a CSS sprite.

Still reading if so, great! You’re well on your way to a much faster website.

If you implement even a handful of the techniques outlined in this post, you will see an immediate and dramatic improvement in your site’s performance. It’s not important that we know how everything works from database calls to HTTP requests—I surely don’t—it’s important that we’re familiar enough with the concepts to work towards them on our sites.

Work smarter, not harder

You could spend a few months learning the ins and outs of web server architecture, how different browsers implement caching, and how to tie it all together…or you could simply install and configure the W3 Total Cache plugin by Frederick Townes (CTO of Mashable).

I can give no higher recommendation for a performance-related plugin than this one.

W3 Total Cache  helps you thoroughly address 80% of the recommendations outlined in this post. There are other solid options for caching plugins, but W3 Total Cache stands head and shoulders above the rest.

I use this plugin for this website and my others and have found a drastic improvement in my load speeds so do highly recommend it.

Reference article:
by Willie Jackson:  Improve Website Page Speed

Plus he can also be found at  Willie Jackson.com

Handy resources

In your quest for website speed, you might find these resources helpful:

• Pingdom—test how fast your site is before and after making changes
• WordPress Caching—an in-depth comparison of WordPress caching plugins
• Working backwards—Mashable CTO Frederick Townes delivers the keynote at WordCamp Denmark
• Screaming Fast WPMU—Dan Collis-Puro shows how Harvard dramatically increased the performance of their websites
• SpriteMe
• Pearsonified.com- website design

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