We examined a wordpress site as part of the Building High Performance Web sites workshop at Web Directions North 09. The site we examined was the vancouvertwins.com site that I'm the online guy for.
We ran YSlow and the IBM tool. I also found a few WordPress specific optimization sites:
http://maketecheasier.com/8-ways-to-improve-your-wordpresss-loading-time/2009/01/21
http://buzzdroid.com/wordpress/yslow-and-wordpress-plugins-kill-your-score/
http://www.breakitdownblog.com/speeding-up-your-wordpress-site-php-speedy-and-yslow/
We tried 3 different things:
CSS In separate files
The comments page introduced some CSS in the header. It would be good to remove that to just the pages that needed it, or into a separate file. Because the wp_comments plugin uses only a single file for the css, I can't split it out. I could fork the plug-in, or update the plugin myself. I decided to live with the system as it is.
Expires Headers
I added expires headers to every gif, jpeg, jpg, png, etc. file by modifying the .htaccess file.
Gzip, minify, Caching
I first added WP-cache, but then I added php-speedy. This allowed specifying minify of various files, gzipping files, and even does caching. A really great utility.
Results
The results were interesting. The difference between php-speedy and WP-Cache turned out to be very minimal. The browser cache turns out to be the biggest contributor to the performance by decreasing load time from from roughly 2.5 seconds to 1 second. We couldn't really get it faster than that.
We ran YSlow and the IBM tool. I also found a few WordPress specific optimization sites:
http://maketecheasier.com/8-ways-to-improve-your-wordpresss-loading-time/2009/01/21
http://buzzdroid.com/wordpress/yslow-and-wordpress-plugins-kill-your-score/
http://www.breakitdownblog.com/speeding-up-your-wordpress-site-php-speedy-and-yslow/
We tried 3 different things:
CSS In separate files
The comments page introduced some CSS in the header. It would be good to remove that to just the pages that needed it, or into a separate file. Because the wp_comments plugin uses only a single file for the css, I can't split it out. I could fork the plug-in, or update the plugin myself. I decided to live with the system as it is.
Expires Headers
I added expires headers to every gif, jpeg, jpg, png, etc. file by modifying the .htaccess file.
Gzip, minify, Caching
I first added WP-cache, but then I added php-speedy. This allowed specifying minify of various files, gzipping files, and even does caching. A really great utility.
Results
The results were interesting. The difference between php-speedy and WP-Cache turned out to be very minimal. The browser cache turns out to be the biggest contributor to the performance by decreasing load time from from roughly 2.5 seconds to 1 second. We couldn't really get it faster than that.
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