Comments on: 5 ways to give your site a speed boost in less than 30 minutes.

By: Omer Greenwald

Omer Greenwald — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:02:47 +0000

These techniques are definitely useful to speed up your site. I’d add a few more:
1. Many WordPress plugins need some tweaking to make sure they don’t load themselves (and their js and css files) when not needed. In general I recommend doing small tasks (like getting the most popular posts) manually in the function.php file without plugins.
2. WP super cache is indeed a great plugin. I would also recommend the WP-Minify to auto compress and consolidate the js and css file (the only down side is that the js remains in the header.
3. Minimize database and PHP queries by replacing some of the dynamic code with a static one (whatever you can replace that makes sense).

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:10:11 +0000

I recently wrote a mod_perl output filter which sits inside Apache. It intercepts requests for .css files and then “compresses” them on the fly before sending. It’s not gzip compression, what it does is strip whitespace, comments, newlines etc. Check it out here: https://secure.grepular.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/28/compressing-css-on-the-fly/

By: Blair Nichols

Blair Nichols — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:39:55 +0000

Great article as always! We have just started to redo our company website and have noticed even though we had "optimised" our images first time round they can be made so much smaller! Time to download Y-Slow and see what it thinks.

By: Pete Williams

Pete Williams — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:56:55 +0000

There's lots of other quick and simple ways to speed up your site. I wrote a blog post recently that showed how to get a Grade A in Y-Slow.

By: Chris Ward

Chris Ward — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:48:34 +0000

Paul (and readers),

Have a look at Minify – http://code.google.com/p/minify/ – a PHP setup for combining & compressing JS & CSS code on the fly:

Combines and minifies multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single download

Caches server-side (files/apc/memcache) to avoid doing unnecessary work

Most modules are lazy-loaded as needed (304 responses use minimal code)

Content-Encoding: gzip, based on request headers. Caching allows it so serve gzipped files faster than Apache’s mod_deflate option!

Also look at setting up proper caching via .htaccess:
http://codeigniter.com/forums/viewthread/85429/#431187
http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/speed-up-sites-with-htaccess-caching.html

Cheers,
Chris

By: Seba

Seba — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:13:02 +0000

There are a WordPress plugin that auto minifies all JS/CSS files... Google 'WP Minify'

By: Mike Nolan

Mike Nolan — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:50:55 +0000

Remember to combine JavaScript and CSS files where appropriate. We do this by managing number-prefixed files which get combined prior to compression:

0010.jquery.history.js 0020.jquery.thickbox.js 0300.common.js [our code]

Caching files can also speed up your site - set expires headers for things that won't change. The problem then is that when you do change the contents of a file you need to force the browser to get it. We do this by versioning requests, for example requesting common.js?1256114860 (where the number is the unix timestamp of the last modified date of the file)

Someone's already mentioned it, but enabling gzip compression for certain files helps a LOT.

By: Doug Fentiman

Doug Fentiman — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:47:04 +0000

Great post. Best results for the effort are CSS and JS compression, and image compression. One of the biggest designer sins I see on the auto repair shop websites I work with is poor (or no) image optimization. SmushIt works great - easy & quick use. David Griffin asked about image quality. I haven't noticed any noticeable differences for web use.

By: Jim Moran

Jim Moran — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:25:08 +0000

Always surprised how few people do #4 here. Of course, you should probably use the minified versions.

By: Seba

Seba — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:12:08 +0000

I've wrote a similar post for my blog some days ago (in Spanish)! CSS Sprites are definitely a great technique to reduce server petitions. Active GZIP on your server is a good tip but you have to configure properly and DON'T compress images (JPG, GIF or PNG).