I’m using Wordpress as the blogging software of choice for Ghacks and all of my other blogs. After reading Paul Stamatious article on optimizing CSS for Wordpress I decided to give it a try and see if page loading times would benefit at all from it. I also had to check if the optimization would change the way my blog would be displayed or would throw up errors. I began by analyzing the page loading times of my blog without any optimization. The result for the frontpage was that my blog used 166K and that users with ISDN (128 Kbit) would have to wait 18.55 seconds before my site was fully loaded.
Users with T1 connections, that is 1.44 Mbps would have to wait 9.28 seconds. The figures are of course only valid if they do not use part of their download speed for other transfers at the same time. The first thing that I decided to do was to enable gzip compression in the Wordpress options in the reading tab. Before I enabled it I did a quick check that my server was actually able to gzip by using the simple phpinfo() command.
I tested the result and the page size went down almost 35%! It went down 58K to 108K total. The time users with ISDN had to wait before the full page is loaded was reduced by almost 4 seconds from 18.55 seconds to 14.80 seconds. The loading time for T1 users was reduced by 0.51 seconds to 8.77 seconds in total.
I still did not apply the optimization that Paul suggested and that is what I intended to do next. His suggestion was to gzip compress the css file as well to reduce loading time even further. I found a reference to a nice Wordpress plugin in the comments of his post. The plugin is called css-compress. It just has to be activated in the plugin tab in Wordpress. The advantage of using css-compress over Paul’s method is that css compress compresses all css files even those of third parties such as those from advertisers or other plugins.
Another check reported that the total size of my blogs frontpage was again reduced by almost 10k from 108K to 98K. Loading time was again reduced by 1.17 seconds for ISDN users and 0.65 seconds for users with a T1 connection.
I was not able to witness any negative effects on my blogs design, the functions or server load. Sure it uses a little bit processing power but this should only be a problem for weak shared hosts.
You can check the loading speed of websites using the nice script available at website optimization.
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39 Responses to “Optimize Wordpress loading times”
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[...] got a bit slower this month as I’ve added a few more plugins and images, so this post from Martin came at a good time. It gave some good tips for making WordPress pages load faster including using [...]
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Some optimizing to thesh17 downloading time
I followed the advice from gHacks and started optimizing thesh17 a little bit better.
I installed the css-compress wordpress plugin that automatically gzips .css files, and it reduced the (~)download time from 28.85 seconds on a 56k modem to 23 seconds… -
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[...] fine, aş mai dori să evidenţiez un articol mult mai vechi, din martie 2007, dar interesant: Optimize WordPress loading times. Dacă WordPress nativ merge repede, în curând el poate să fie mult mai lent adăugând teme şi [...]
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[...] I never really gave it much thought. Until, that is, I came across a post on gHacks.net titled Optimize Wordpress loading times. Martin used the Free Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed Analysis over at [...]
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Take a look at the following article if you use the Wordpress plugin wp-cache
http://www.techiecorner.com/25/wordpress-wp-cache-with-gzip-compression-enable/
On the server side, you can also use a PHP Cache like Zend Accelerator or TurckMMCache.
Those modules keeps the frequent php calculations in a compiled state, providing an impressive performance boost on all dynamic content.
This will not help for pages already cached in html state trough wp cache system, but can be helpful on leaving comments, calculating categories total number of articles and so on…
On the highly dynamic dating site I work for, we had a 70% drop on the servers load :-)
Wow.. Just realized that my site load is significantly longer than yours. I guess I have to do something about it, after the above.
My site loa is significantly higher – where the first indicated that 28.8k viewers would have to wait more than 3 minutes (208 seconds to be precise) . After gZipping (thanks for the article linking wp-cache and gZip) … load time is down to 179 seconds for 28.8; ISDN: 22.94.
CSScompress-> 28.8k = 160.59 seconds and ISDN is 20.19.
I have noticed that the load time seems to have increased with the upgrade of the UTW (Ultimate Tag Warriors) plugin on my site… hmm…
p/s: Thanks to Martin for posting this article – its very useful! :D For some reason the plugins I use insert quite a bit of their own javascript, so it would be great if someone could recommend a gzip equivalent for javascript files? :D Thanks!
Thanks martin I’ll have a go at this tonight. You should also install APC – that had the biggest impact on my site
APC?
One thing – I don’t think wp-cache works with the gzip compression option. :(
If you are using wp-cache you won’t be able to use css compress either.
Are you sure about css-compress compressing all CSS files?
I’ve been seeing the code and the only option I saw was for the the style.css file
Ajay you are right. I checked again and they are not compressed at all.
Unfortunately, each and every file needs to be compressed individually. You can do that with Paul’s method.
I believe that the plugin can be modified to accept other parameters and work on the compression. Interesting… let me see what I can do, but I’m no expert :(
Is there a compression plugin for javascripts as well? :) Thanks!
@Mosey, you could use the same method as the CSS.
@Martin, the avatars out here seem to be messed about.
Ajay messed up in what way ?
There is some kind of bug, I should have taken a screenshot!
The avatars were all pushed down one comment, basically my name was showing the avatar of the person above and so now. Now it is fine… are you using some custom plugin?
i’m using the myavatars plugin, simply changed the default location for it.
I got them handcoded on my blog.
Cool article. Thanks! I’m gonna give this technique a shot tonight.
@Ajay: thanks :)
I made the changes for wp-cache/gzip, but on the wp-cache options, it says its disabled until gzip is disabled.
Ah… ignore me… it seems the changes means you can leave gzip disabled.
Very useful and descriptive article, thanks.
Another thanks from me – very interesting post on how to speed up a Wordpress driven site.
hi..
tnx for the info the man.. let me try it….
regards,
Mokka Mohan
Htto://www.dandanakka.com
What app or script can I use to check time loading of my site?
thanks you a lot
I would also recommend to use this online free tool – http://Site-Perf.com/
It measure loading speed of page and it’s requisites (images/js/css) like browsers do and shows nice detailed chart – so you can easily spot bottlenecks.
It’s very detailed and accurate, supports a lot of features like Keep-Alive and HTTP-compression.
Also useful feature is that this tool can measure quality of internet link of your server.
SEO is very good to get best rank in search engine but need to spend long time to best result. Patient also is important thing and must do more study about the SEO optimizing. If you are really master on SEO its like you can easy success on what ever blog platform you create beside the wordpress
3 more important tips from here
http://www.earth-org.com/blogs/2009/08/want-to-speed-up-wordpress/