Speedier WordPress in 30 minutes or less
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I was making my way home on the daily commute from work last week by train, as I do several times a week. To pass the time I will do what most do, catch up on various social networking sites, email etc. This is quite a painful experience, as like many the route my commute takes, the mobile Internet speed is something that not even a mobile user of 5 years ago would be happy with.
On this particular commute I decided to check one of my own blogs to see how it would load on a slower Internet connection, I was quite appalled by the result, I expected it to be slow but it was slower than most other sites I was accessing over the same connection. A colleague was quick to blame my web host, he said something along the lines of “that’s what you get with cheap web hosting” however I did not think this was the case as I had not noticed there issue so much on a quicker connection.
I came to the conclusion that my site could obviously do with some “tuning up” to make it load quicker in general, not just for slow connections on mobiles. I started having a read about, and came across this article. They’re a web hosting company, I do not use them myself, although I am with a similar cheap web hosting company, e.g. shared, little to no control over the server setup etc.
The post covers the basics of optimizing a website to load quicker using several techniques, it doesn’t cover each point in great detail but it does say it’s “part 1”, so I assume more detailed parts are to come. I picked out the techniques I thought I could apply to my WordPress blog and therefore, anyone who has a WordPress blog on standard shared web hosting could do the same.
It turns out, that most, if not all the suggestions in the article can be implemented on a WordpPess blog by simply installing a plugin or two. Your first port of call should be a caching plugin, there are many options available, have a Google and pick your favorite, they all do a job so it’s down to personal preference to which one you want to work with.
If we’re talking about specific techniques from the article I mentioned earlier, they talk about something called “assets minifying”, which basically means compressing all your javascript and css files to remove all spaces, line breaks etc so the physical size of the files are smaller, which means they download quicker, sounds simple but it’s effective. There are plenty of online tools that you can use to minify your assets but, wouldn’t you know there’s also plugins for this too! A quick Google will give you several options.
A CDN, or content delivery network is another option for speeding up any website, not just WordPress based ones. A CDN is a large network of systems and servers designed to serve content to users with high availability and high performance. There are companies out there who provide free CDNs that you can setup and use pretty quickly.
Implementing these three optimisation techniques took me around 30 minutes and did have a noticeable affect, using Google’s own tool to benchmark the website speed. I went from a score of 44/100 to 65/100 for mobiles and from 68 to 84 for desktops.
