How to Make a WordPress Blog Run Faster

FASTER! FASTER, dammit!

Optimizing WordPress using a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

My blog had been running, if that’s what you could call it, at speeds approximating a gimpy turtle walking in mud uphill… you get the idea. So I started investigating the technical methods used by pro web developers to make their blogs load fast.

Tools for Blog Development

Every construction project / art project / whatever project requires the use of the right tool for the right job. For some time, I’ve been using shared hosting on Network Solutions, and it has done a pretty good job. Working from large to small, I have had success (limited by my lack of knowledge, thus the “experiments” in the blog title) with the following development setup:

• My trusty old iMac G5 17″ 1.8Ghz single processor w/ 2Gig RAM OSX 10.5.8
• nsHosting (Network Solutions)
• WordPress, now at v. 2.8
• Firefox w/ Firebug and PageSpeed (Google‘s entry into the optimization analysis competition) AND YSlow (from Yahoo!, which I just discovered and like better for a slacker like me)
• Cyberduck
• Adobe CS3 (mostly Photoshop, but some CSS testing with Dreamweaver)
• Smultron, the absolute best text editor for web work I’ve ever come across

Blog optimization 2.0

I have some time on my hands, and one of my goals with this blog is experimenting, so I started looking at the analysis from PageSpeed. I learned several things, some of which can be applied easily to the blog and others, not so much.

For instance, gzip compression on the server side would supposedly decrease load times for all the JS and CSS contained on this page, which comprise a total of about 150K. But, since this is running on shared hosting, no dice.

I like images in my articles. A LOT. Maybe too much. I write content as an excuse to attach images, I think. It’s fun, plus I’m a prepress/graphics guy and I am a huge fan of Zemanta. I gotta have pictures in here. Unfortunately, the images in the blog were weighing it down.

I had a dynamic script from Google Insights for Search about print on demand and marketing, which ended up loading a script and an image every time the page loaded, so I had to get rid of it. It felt good, reeeeal good! So I started hacking out other worthless html lookups/scripts from other sources.

Eventually, I got the thing to load about three times faster. Just getting rid of the Google stuff (I deleted an entire post that it didn’t look like anyone was reading, so no biggie) saved abunch of load time. But I was just getting started, I had become like a man possessed, unable to stop myself on a quest to make this stupid blog load as instantaneously as I possibly could!

A Google search and looking for performance optimization plug-ins on WordPress led me to several false starts with caching plug-ins and various other code tweakers and rough hax with limited success. Then I found a plug-in called W3 Total Cache.

W3 Total Cache and the CDN

W3 Total Cache solves several problems for me, except one. The analysis from PageSpeed and YSlow recommend the webmaster use gzip compression on the server side. Using a shared hosting environment like mine doesn’t allow this, I’d have to pay extra. Since this is my hobby not an income producing exercise I’m not doing that (yet).

BUT, W3 Total Cache allows something really useful in addition to cleaning and optimizing the code that WordPress generates: importing your Media Library to a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Setting the CDN up is a different post, but it was very simple even for me. I’m not a developer. Basically, now all of the images are pulled off of the server hosting WP and distributed across an array of servers and networks that will deliver images and other files to your browser in parallel, spreading the load out and dumping the bandwidth off on someone besides Network Solutions.

Load times decrease massively

Overall, I’ve made the main blog load almost 8x faster. And I have more to do, and more posts about optimization, especially setting up the CDN. Let me know in a comment if you have some optimization tips!

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• 5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast (problogger.net)
• Plugin: WordPress Caching with CDN Integration (blogperfume.com)