Webmasters have lots of options to reduce the page loading time of their websites. This includes removing unnecessary scripts, using compression, minifying HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, merging files where possible but also to optimize images that are hosted on the server.

The difference between an optimized image and an unoptimized image can make a big difference in page loading times. Think of it this way: If you can halve the size of each image hosted on your web server, without reducing the visible image quality, then you have cut the image loading time by halve as well (well halve is not entirely correct but lets use that figure for the sake of the argument).

The two main image formats used on the web are png and jpg. Jpg images are usually well compressed and there is little to gain by reducing their quality further. The image quality drops significantly at a point.

Png images on the other hand offer lots of room for improvement, if they have been saved as true color png images. Lets take a look at the following two images for the sake of this argument.

Do you see a difference in image quality? The second image’s size is 64 Kilobytes, that is 102 Kilobytes less than the size of the first image.

Using Riot to optimize images

You can use lots of different programs to optimize images. They all come with the capabilities but differ highly in their batch optimization capabilities. Riot is a free portable software that can process images in batch. (see Image Resizer And Optimizer Riot)

The program interface looks like this on startup. I have already made the relevant changes to the lower half. In particular, you need to switch to the PNG tab, select Optimal 256 Colors Palette, best compression (slow), NeuQuant neural-net (slow) and PNGout Xtreme (very slow) for the output files.

You then click the Batch icon at the top which opens an overlay window. Click on Add Images (or the small arrow next to it) to load images directly or by folder. Please note that you should only load png images. It does not help to convert jpg images to png, considering that they are still linked as jpg images on the web.

Make sure you select a second folder for the output images. A click on start optimizes all images loaded in the window.

Webmasters can then upload the optimized images to their web server.

Please note that the reduction to 256 colors may not work for all image types. It works well for screenshots and other images that we publish here at Ghacks.

The best option for WordPress based websites was to process one image folder at a time. WordPress saves image uploads in monthly folders. The whole process per folder was to copy all png images from a folder to the local system, add those images to Riot, process them in Riot and reupload them to the server in the same directory after comparing some of the input and output images.

The first part of this tutorial describes how to use a content delivery network in WordPress. It will detail the requirements needed to install the CDN properly. The second part will cover the configuration of the CDN in WordPress.

WordPress does not have options to enable a CDN, however plugins and third party tools can be used to enable that functionality. Here are the scripts and services needed to configure the content delivery network as we did here at ghacks.net:

• Install the WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache. This plugin is probably the best caching plugin available for WordPress, with lots of options that other caching solutions – such as WP Super Cache – do not offer. This plugin adds CDN support to the WordPress blog. The support is disabled by default but can be activated and configured relatively easily.
• W3 Total Cache supports Amazon S3, Amazon Cloudfront, self hosted and other CDN distributions such as VPS.net, Akamai, MaxCDN and Rackspace. These solutions cost money, and the price can range from $0,10 to $0,25 per gigabyte of traffic served. The cost per gigabyte usually goes down if the website has lots of traffic. Amazon Cloudfront users, for instance, pay $0,15 per gigabyte for the first 10 TB but only $0,03 per gigabyte for every gigabyte over 1000 TB.

We have selected Amazon Cloudfront as our content delivery network. It may not be the cheapest available, especially for webmasters with low traffic websites, but it is easy to configure and maintain with the help of the W3 Total Cache plugin.

The first thing that system administrators need to do is to create an Amazon S3 account. It can take several hours before the account becomes activated. In the meantime, the system admin can install the WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache and verify that the blog is working as it should be. Although we only concentrate on the CDN configuration in this article and not the caching configuration, you may want to configure the caching as best as you can. Retrieve the access key and secret key from the Security Credentials page once it has been activated. Make sure the status is set to active there.

WordPress Configuration

Open the WordPress settings, switch to the W3 Total Cache configuration and change the CDN network to Amazon Cloudfront. Do not enable the CDN yet. Now switch to CDN settings and enter the access key and secret key in the settings. A bucket needs to be created in the next step, which is basically a folder on the Amazon Cloudfront network. As this did not work for us from within WordPress, instead we used the Firefox add-on Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer to create the bucket. If you had used a third party tool to create the bucket then enter it’s name in the bucket field now.

AWS Management Console

Now switch to the AWS Management Console and create a new distribution. Select the bucket that had been created earlier as the origin and enter a CNAME that you plan to us for the CDN. This is necessary if you want your users to see a URL such as cdn.yourdomain.com instead of dx7ffewrewr.cloudfront.com when connecting to your website. You can pick any CNAME you want at this stage. Keep all the other parameters in their original state.

The new distribution should appear in the listing. It is ready when the status reads enabled and the state deployed.

Web server or host

Switch to your web host or server now. We need to create the new CNAME for the CDN. We are going to show you how it is done if the domain is hosted at Godaddy.

Log into your Godaddy account and click on Domain Manager once the overview page has loaded. This is the page that is displayed after login. Click on the D icon next to the domain name that you want to configure the CDN for. This opens the dashboard for that domain. Select More Settings and click on the Manage button next to the Total DNS / MX entry. Select to Add a new CNAME and enter the same name that you selected during the distribution creation in the AWS Management Console. If you followed our example it would be cdn.

Enter the domain name shown in the distribution console in the Points To Host Name field. This will basically redirect requests to cdn.domainname.com to the Cloudfront url.

It takes some time before the redirection becomes active. You can use this tool to check if the CNAME is active.

Enter the cloudfront domain name and the CNAME in the CDN configuration in the WordPress blog. Save the settings before continuing.

Recap

So far we have performed the following steps:

• Created an Amazon S3 account
• Installed the W3 Total Cache plugin
• Copied the access and secret key and entered it into the CDN configuration screen of the W3 Total Cache plugin
• Created a bucket
• Created an Amazon Cloudfront distribution
• Configured a new CNAME pointing to the domain name of the new distribution

Once this has been done it is time to test the configuration by clicking on the Test S3 Upload button. If this returns that everything is running fine then you are ready for the final step. If not, then you need to retrace the steps done so far to find the problem.

Transferring files to the CDN

If the upload test was successful then you are ready to transfer data to the CDN. Now transfer your media library, include files, theme files, minify files and custom files to the CDN. This is done in the WordPress admin interface. Depending on the amount of data that needs to be transferred, this can take some time.

Activate the CDN

Switch to the General Settings tab once all the data has been transferred to the CDN. Place a checkmark in the Enable CDN box to activate the content delivery network. You should now test the blog to see if everything is up and running as it should be. This includes accessing various blog pages, leaving comments and using proxies to connect from other locations around the world.

Conclusion

It takes between one and six hours to configure and activate a CDN on the WordPress blog. Most of the time is spent waiting for the DNS to propagate, the account to become active and the data to be transferred. Webmasters should check the speed of their website in Google Webmaster Tools (or other tool) to see if the changes have decreased the load time for the users of the site. They should also monitor the costs over at Amazon.

1. Comment moderation and spam

Comment moderation and spam are two of the most time consuming aspects of a webmaster’s workday. A high profile blog can get thousands of spam comments a day which are then queued up in a spam folder somewhere. Even the best antispam tools do not offer a 100% protection against spam. Another trade-off is that false positives tend to increase with every new antispam plugin and script installed which can frustrate visitors so that they either stop posting comments or leave the site to never come back.

2. Email Support

Most websites have a contact form or other means of contacting the webmaster or a person responsible by email. These emails can contain tech support topics, requests (either for new articles, help, guest blogging or advertising), comments, spam or rude remarks. Tech support questions are usually the most time consuming to answer especially if it is not possible to test the problem locally. Webmasters obviously do not have to answer emails but it is good behavior if they do in a timely manner (except for spam and the rude remark emails). It is still a time consuming process especially on high traffic websites.

3. Updates and Security

It is of uttermost importance to run the latest version of scripts and software on a website. Old versions can contain security or memory holes, incompatibilities or missing features. Many hackers wait for security releases and start searching for websites that still run an older version on the day the new releases get announced. Updates on the other hand are only one part of the security concept. Scripts on the server side can improve security by preventing brute force attacks or notifying tech support. Webmasters do not necessarily have access to these features especially on shared hosting but some security add-ons and features can be installed by them as well. This includes setting the right access rights for directories, making sure to use non-standard usernames, directories and database prefixes or installing scripts and plugins that increase a website’s security.

4. Features and Plugins

Webmasters have to keep an eye on the development of new plugins and features. WordPress webmasters for example have thousands of plugins at their disposal that get constantly updated. Additions are posted in the dozens daily and it can be quite hard to keep up with them. There is however always the possibility to find a plugin or script that adds a new interesting feature to a website or is able to replace an existing script by providing an increase in performance or functionality. One of the main reasons why many webmasters stick with one content management system is that it is easier to keep an overview of the advancements (and other things including security) that are made.

5. Design

Not all webmasters have to be design-aces. It is perfectly possible to download templates and themes for many different types of content management systems or websites and use these with little modification. Another option is to order a custom theme from a designer. Small changes on the other hand are usually performed by the webmaster. This includes changing a logo, adding a graphic or other elements.

6. Performance

A slow loading website does not necessarily mean that the server the website is hosted is not capable of delivering the performance the website needs. Other things can play a role here including scripts and plugins installed. External scripts, like advertisement or third party widgets, can slow down a website tremendously. Even more so if the domain the data is loaded from is experiencing technical problems as well. A webmaster needs to make sure that the website can be loaded as fast as possible. While third party scripts are usually in the top list of elements that slow down a website the problems can also be caused by large multimedia contents like unoptimized images, broken scripts, not optimized loading sequences or not making use of compression techniques or image concatenation.

Many tools can help in the analysis including the XHTML Validator over at W3C, Firebug or YSLOW.

7. Testing and Compatibility

A website has to be tested with various web browsers to ensure that the user experience is similar in all cases and that it is possible to connect to the website with all popular web browsers. Webmasters also do a lot of testing that include testing advertisement, plugins, scripts or element positions on their website. A classical example is to test various advertisement positions on a website to find the one that is yielding the highest earnings for the webmaster. Other possibilities include testing various positions for content to increase pageviews or decrease the number of visitors who leave a website on the first page without visiting a second one.

8. Advertising

Not all websites and blogs run advertisements. Webmasters who do place ads on their websites open a new can of worms. Statistics have to be checked regularly to make sure that the ads perform well. Ads need to be tested (if possible) in various ways including different positions, color schemes and even different advertisers. Monitoring various webmaster forums and blogs for new advertising opportunities and tips is a must do.

9. Hosting, Domain and Billing

Webmasters using free webhosts do not have to worry about these. But webmasters with their own domain name and web hosting account need to keep an eye on a few things including expiration dates and paying subscriptions in time. This is usually not a big issue and not that time consuming unless hundreds or thousands of domains are hosted at dozens of different web hosters or web servers.

10. Networking

Networking is probably the most important aspect of being a webmaster. You tend to get the best tips from a network of webmasters who work in the same niche. I consider the day I met Everton from Connected Internet one of my luckiest days in my life. Not only have we exchanged information that helped us get rich (haha) and improve our websites; No, we also decided to run a joint project which turned out to be very profitable.

Not everything is about being profitable of course. Some tips are only passed around in close circles because many webmasters do not post their findings and experiences on forums or websites. This can be a better way of placing ads on a blog, a new plugin or script that a website benefits from or general tips.

Verdict:

I’m not sure if this article covered all the aspects. There are probably more including tax reports, law suites and the like. Please post a comment if you have something to add or would like to voice your opinion on the subject. Being a webmaster is more than meets the eye.

Opinions about those sites differ from letting them do what they want with your content to contacting lawyers and suing them. Clever webmasters can use content copying websites to their advantage if they play their cards right. Since most of those websites use RSS feeds to automatically post the copied contents they include links in those posts automatically. Some even post tags or related posts of the original site as well.

This means that every link that you post in the original article will be posted by them as well if they have automated the process which in turn means free inbound links to your website. It gets better. If they do link back to your site as they should they usually use the title of the article to do so. This means free targeted inbound links to the article on your website.

There are some sites that copy your content but do not post links at all. Experience has shown that contacting the site owners directly asking them to either remove the content or add a link using the article titles will be successful in most cases. There is not an easier way to get free targeted links than this way.

Here is one of the emails that we send out usually to offenders who do not link back to our site although they use our content on theirs:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I’m writing on behalf of the technology blog ghacks.net. It has come to our attention that a blog located at http://***/ is publishing articles without authorization.

We are asking that the person responsible either

a) gives credit where credit is due by linking to the articles properly and visible using the title of the article as the link anchor or
b) removes all content that has been taken from ghacks.net

best regards

This is usually enough to receive a response in less than 48 hours. All that have been contacted so far have added title links to the original articles.

How To Find Content Copying Websites:

There are several ways to find websites that copy your content. You can copy a passage of one of your articles in a search engine or use services that will list most of the sites that copy the content. Some of the services are Fair Share or Copy Gator.

Fair Share does offer an RSS feed that lists all the websites that have been using at least 20% of the words of an original article on their website displaying if the copycats link back to the original post or not. This makes it easy to identify those sites that do not link back and contact them.

Options if the site owners do not comply

Webmasters have a few choices if site owners do not react at all to the request. They could contact the hoster of the domain, lawyers who take matters from there or even advertisement companies who display their ads on those websites.

Final Thoughts

While some webmasters do not want to see their content at all on other websites others can take advantage of the fact that content copying websites exist by getting free, valid links from those sites. These sites might also send in traffic to the original site. The number one site that is using our contents is sending more than 3000 unique visitors per month our way.

Webmasters should not worry to much about search engine positions as search engines usually do a very good job of identifying the original site and the copycats. Duplicate content penalties will hit them and not the original site.