I also noticed that articles with hundreds of comments were loading significantly slower than pages with less comments. This made me reduce the number of comments per page to 50 root comments (plus their answers).

Today I noticed that WordPress added another JavaScript to ever page. The script in wp-inlcudes/l10n.js that is related to the admin bar that the WordPress developers added to one of the recent versions of the blogging platform.

While it is a small file with a size of 233 bytes it is still a script that is loaded by anyone, not just the admin of the blog. This somehow does not make a lot of sense. The important thing here is that the blog needs to make the request to load the element, not the time it takes to load the 223 bytes.

WordPress administrators may want to remove the JavaScript element from being loaded by every blog visitor to speed up the blog’s page loading times. The easiest way to remove the l10n.js from being loaded with WordPress is to unload it in the functions.php file in the WordPress theme folder.

All you need to do for that is to add the following line of code to the end of the functions.php file.

wp_deregister_script('l10n');

Please note that this may disable part of the admin bars toolbar functionality. Users over at Stack Exchange have found a way to keep the JavaScript loaded for administrators of the blog.

if ( !is_admin() ) {
function my_init_method() {
wp_deregister_script( ‘l10n’ );
}
add_action(‘init’, ‘my_init_method’);
}

Just add this code instead to the functions.php file.

Every new button on the other hand increases the page loading time of a website. Most buttons make use of JavaScript. The three buttons here on Ghacks, that link to Facebook, Twitter and Google, all have their own JavaScript file that needs to be loaded during page loading time.

One of the things that webmasters can do to speed up the loading time is to combine JavaScripts, another to load scripts asynchronously.

Google recently announced that they have made their +1 button load faster on websites. The search giant enabled asynchronous loading for +1 buttons. This basically means that the JavaScript of the button gets loaded without interrupting the loading and rendering of the website it is embedded on.

Webmasters who would like to integrate the new button need to visit the Google +1 button generator at Google to generate the code for the new button.

The code for the old +1 button was placed in two locations. First at the location on the page where the button should show up and second in the site’s footer just before the closing body tag.

The new Google +1 button changes this slightly. You still add the tags to the location where you want the +1 button to appear on your site. The JavaScript code on the other hand needs to be placed after the last +1 tag on the page.

Just copy and paste the generated code into your site. You need to remove the old JavaScript from the footer of your website before you place the new JavaScript code into the site.

Webmasters who do not want or cannot integrate the new code into their website will benefit from rendering optimizations which can speed up the rendering of the button on a website by a factor of 3. This is automatic and independent of the button code that is implemented on the site. Additional information about the speed improvements are available on the Google Webmaster Central blog.

I used the free Web Page Analyzer script to test four settings and compare the results that were shown on the website. I did test the following settings:

• WP-Cache enabled, Google Analytics off
• WP-Cache enabled, Google Analytics on
• WP-Cache off, Google Analytics on
• WP-Cache off, Google Analytics off

Let me give you a few instructions about the images below:

Object Type refers to all files that belong to a certain type such as HTML or CSS files.
Size is the total size of all files that belong to a certain type.
Download T1 the total loading time for a T1 connection (1.54 Mbps) in seconds.

WP-Cache enabled, Google Analytics off:

WP-Cache enabled, Google Analytics on:

WP-Cache disabled, Google Analytics on:

WP-Cache disabled, Google Analytics off:

The results are quite obvious. Loading time is reduced quite a bit when I turn off WP-Cache and Google Analytics. The total loading time for a T1 connection is 1.86 seconds while it is 2.25 seconds if both options are turned on.

Users with slower connections will see a hugh decrease in total loading time in seconds which is absolutely what I wanted to achieve. There are however two aspects that I have to consider.

Turning off wp-cache reduces the loading time but increases the load on the server because mysql requests are not cached anymore. This could lead to troubles for sites that face lots of visitors, e.g. if your site makes it on the digg frontpage. I would suggest to turn on wp-cache again if that happens to be able to handle the load.

Turning of Google Analytics does not have any negative impact on your site but webmasters with no other statistics script have the problem that they do not have access to their statistics anymore. I’m using awstats instead of Google Analytics on my server. If you are unsure contact your webhost and ask which script they are offering.