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My analytical brain is always looking at different ways I can improve the conversions on my websites. From changing page titles, graphics used to entice people to give away email addresses and even the “Buy Now” buttons on sales pages, I know that small changes can have a big impact. There has been one thing though that in all honesty, I’ve really overlooked in my last few years online, and only now am I doing something about it.
It’s something that has dramatically increased revenues for online retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Shopzilla, and even greatly affected how many people use Google Maps. Fortunately it’s not something ubiquitous that only those with multi-million dollar budgets can implement, but a tactic that every single person reading this can benefit from: speeding up your website.
Before you dismiss the idea as boring or potentially irrelevant to your own marketing efforts, here are some quotes that might just convince you how important your website speed can be to your online success:
- Sales at Amazon increased by 1% for every 100 milliseconds it shaves off download times according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. For a company pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter, that’s a huge 1%.
- When Google tested showing 30 search results per page instead of 10 – changing their average load time from 0.4 seconds to 0.9 seconds – traffic and revenue decreased by 20%.
- A Compuware study found that if a page load takes more than two seconds, 40% of people are likely to abandon the page. “For a $100,000 per day ecommerce site, a one-second delay means $2.5 million in lost revenues in a year.”
- When eCommerce site Shopzilla improved their average page load by four seconds, their pageviews went up by 25% and their conversion rate went up around 7-12%.
- When Google reduced the average size of their Google Maps page from 100kb to 70-80kb, traffic to the service went up 10% in its first week and 25% in the following three weeks.
And if that’s not enough to convince you, the 2010 announcement by Google that website speed is now a factor in search rankings – even if it’s a small factor – should give you more reason to prioritise right action in this area.
On that note, I found it interesting that Google’s Eric Schmidt once stressed the importance of Google’s speed in regards to real-life issues. He commented on how increasing query results by just a fraction of a second can save lives when it comes to people searching for things like “signs of a stroke” or “signs of a heart attack”.
Why I Knew I Had to Leave Shared Hosting
For the majority of webmasters online, shared hosting is more than enough to handle the traffic levels they receive and the page load speeds you can achieve are generally good enough. One of the main reasons I’ve kept ViperChill on shared hosting with Hostgator (non-aff) for all of this time is because I recommend them. I’ve happily used their services for years now, and despite the odd glitch in that time, I’ve had nothing but good things to say about them and their exceptionally low price point.
Since ViperChill handles far more traffic these days than it used to, I have wanted to upgrade my server options for quite a long time, but with many things on my to do list, it’s just something I’ve never really gotten around to. However, this year I’ve increasingly had problems with my site going down after I send an email to my list. The first 10 minutes after unveiling the Blog Tyrant for example, the whole of ViperChill was inaccessible, and it’s my experience that if it a site is down for someone once, they aren’t going to make much effort to come back to the email (and the link) later in the day.
Add to the fact that Hostgator disabled my account, and then later disabled my entire database for overusing resources, and I knew it was time to make a Twitter plea for dedicated server recommendations. The rest of this post is a guide on exactly what I’ve done to increase the load times of this website, with a step-by-step guide on how you can massively speed up your own website as well.
Choosing a Dedicated Host
Though I’m sure for the traffic I receive that the differences between a VPS (Virtual Private Server) and Dedicated server are fairly minimal, I decided to go with the latter. I’ll be moving OptinSkin and a few other sites over to my new server in the next few days, so I want to have a good solution in place for when things go a little viral.
Thanks to some savvy ViperChill followers on Twitter, I quickly received a number of recommendations. They typically recommended popular services like Rackspace, Softlayer and LiquidWeb. LiquidWeb (non-aff) had been recommended to me the most, and an email from Ramsay recommending them pushed me over the edge and helped me choose them in a sea of options. I had no prior experience with LiquidWeb, but their prices seemed fair and they have live chat which is a requirement of mine, so I took the plunge.
My first question was which dedicated server to pick up, since they have two different Linux configurations for the same price point. I quickly hopped on live chat and didn’t really get an answer I was looking for.
I decided to go with the following configuration:
- Intel E3:1240 Quad Core
- RAM: 2GB DDR SDRAM
- HD1: 500 GB SATA Drive (7,200 rpm)
- HD2: 500 GB SATA Backup Drive
- OS: Linux OS CentOs 6 – 64Bit
- ControlPanel: CentOS 6 – WHM/Cpanel (Fully Managed)
I’m really not proficient in server management at all, so opted to pay a little extra each month in order to get full WHM/Cpanel access which I’m already familiar with.
It took just 48 hours to get everything going, and I received this email shortly after.
“I had to upgrade your processor, because we are temporarily out of the one you ordered, there will not be any extra charge for this. I will update you periodically throughout this process to keep you informed of your order status. If you have any questions, concerns, or the stated order is incorrect please feel free to respond to this ticket and I will address it for you.”
This came after a personal welcome phone call from them. So far, so good.
The actual data center where ViperChill is located. LiquidWeb have three which they fully own
The positive first impression did diminish a little after that. I woke up to find my inbox flooded with literally hundreds of emails from my server, telling me about various errors. Emails to support claimed to have fixed the problem, but then a few hours later I would once again receive hundreds of emails about different errors. This was obviously frustrating, especially after having paid so much money to the company.
Fortunately the next day my problems were solved, and they even took $50 off my first bill as an apology for the issues. Any issues I’ve had have always been responded to within 15-20 minutes. It doesn’t matter what time of day it is, I’ve never had to wait more than 30 minutes, which is really impressive to me, and makes me think I’ve made the right decision.
After moving my site across and following a number of different strategies to speed up the website, I’ve essentially doubled or tripled (depending on which service you look at) the speed at which ViperChill loads. Every tool I’ve used ranks the site faster than any of the other big marketing blogs I know you all read (in some cases twice or three times as fast) so I’m really happy with the results. There are actually still some more things I can do which I’ll be implementing in the following days, but there’s more than enough information in this guide to help you get similar results.
To give you some actual data, here is how two tools viewed the site on two separate runs, before and after the server move:
| Speed Checker | Before: Test #1 | Before: Test #2 | After: Test #1 | After: Test #2 |
| GTMetrix.com | 4.45s | 2.43s | 1.51s | 2.3s |
| Tools.pingdom | 2.13s | 2.15s | 1.00s | 1.07s |
You can see from the screenshot below that I managed to get page load speeds to around the 1-second mark.
While I won’t claim to be an expert on this topic, I’ve researched it enough to have a decent understanding of what I’m talking about, and my own speed improvement results really speak for themselves.
Use a CDN
There are a number of CDN (Content Delivery Network) solutions online, and the uptake in bloggers using them appears to be growing. A CDN is basically a collection of servers deployed in different areas around the world, with the idea being that you will download content from a server which is geographically closest to you, decreasing load times.
Though the difference is quite minimal when you look at say, downloading a single 40KB image, it increases exponentially the more files that you are loading from one of these CDN set-ups.
I know my friend Yoast is a fan of MaxCDN, but my personal CDN of choice is the popular Amazon Cloudfront. Amazon has 16 of these ‘edge’ configurations set-up in America alone, so someone from New York will be downloading ViperChill data from a different server to someone in California or Texas.
Other server locations include:
- Amsterdam (2)
- Dublin
- Frankfurt (2)
- London (2)
- Milan
- Paris (2)
- Hong Kong
- Osaka
- Singapore (2)
- Sydney
- Tokyo
- Sao Paulo
You can see how thorough they are in getting their deployment out around the world. Even more impressive is that 75% of these weren’t even available when I signed up last year, so they’re actively growing the service.
Using a CDN is incredibly scalable since you’re essentially paying simply for the bandwidth you use. If you’re wondering about the cost, then I haven’t had a single month where my bill has been over $2.
I expect this to increase quite a bit now that I’m going to be putting substantially more data on their network, but the average blogger will find their prices more than reasonable.
Of course, if you’re using their services to help you with crawling the entire internet, then your bill is going to be substantially larger. Rand Fishkin had this to say about his costs over at SEOmoz: “We’ll probably stick to a hybrid cloud model for some time. We don’t quite have the need for an entirely in-house solution like Google or Bing yet. In terms of costs, April was, I believe, close to $650K with Amazon.”
For a guide on how to set-up your account, I recommend this in-depth post over at Hongkiat.
You may notice that I’ve re-routed the typical Amazon URL’s to ‘load’ on ViperChill, using the CNAME turbo (you can call this anything you like). So instead of a typical file URL being:
http://cdn-vc.s3.amazonaws.com/comment.jpg
It now routes to:
http://turbo.viperchill.com/comment.jpg
Though there’s a free plugin for Firefox called S3Fox which allows you to manage your Amazon S3 ‘buckets’, I’ve had problems using it when trying to set file permissions so instead purchased 3Hub (Mac only) from the App Store for $2.99.
You can see the simple 3Hub interface above. The files I tend to store on Amazon are graphics, javascript files and my CSS files. Leaving the rest (PHP & MySQL queries) to the dedicated server to handle.
Install a Caching Plugin
One of the things most likely to have the biggest impact on your site speed efforts is to utilise a caching plugin. The two most popular ones for WordPress are W3 Total Cache and WP Supercache. Caching plugins essentially store your pages / posts as HTML on your server, and load these when someone accesses your site.
This is considerably faster than dynamically loading your content from a database and utilising the various PHP files that are necessary to get your pages to show. With Hostgator I used W3 cache, and found that it had a great affect on the performance of my site.
However, at one time when I was using a large number of resources, a member of their technical team – and I’m not exactly sure why – recommended that I use WPSupercache instead. I didn’t, but I do now on my dedicated server. Hostgator have a great guide on how users of their service should configure WP Supercache found over here.
I don’t see why these settings wouldn’t apply to pretty much any shared host. This tweak alone can, in many cases, double the speed of a website.
My personal settings that are turned on in WPSupercache are:
- Cache hits to this website for quick access
- Use mod_rewrite to serve cached files
- Compress pages so they’re served more quickly to visitors
- Cache rebuild. Serve a supercache file to anonymous users
- Mobile device support
If you use the mod_rewrite option to serve your cached files, don’t forget to scroll down the page to update your .htaccess mod rewrite rules. If you’ve found other configurations of WPSupercache to be more beneficial, I’d love to hear them in the comments.
Run Screaming Frog on Your Website
I’ve wanted to try out this tool for a really long time, but always came up with errors when installing it on my Mac (I never heard problems about Windows). Fortunately, the latest version of ScreamingFrog runs with no issues for me, and it’s a great little tool to learn more about your website.
Their “SEO Spider” crawls your website and gives you information on a large number of page criterion. Though it’s aimed primarily at people doing SEO and looking for things like duplicate description tags, no-followed links and so on, it definitely has usability benefits.
One of the main things I looked at when running the tool was broken links. You shouldn’t only care about how quick a page loads, but if you’re actually sending people to pages that exist. Slow loading times and poor navigation can both have the negative affect of people leaving your website.
The free version only allows you to crawl through 500 URL’s – and the tool gets a little bit trapped on comment links – but if you run it on individual pages independently then you should get a good view of any errors.
Allow Gravatars? You Need This
Another caching plugin that I recommend you install is the FV Gravatar cache plugin, found here. I didn’t just want to increase the speed of my homepage of course, but individual blog posts as well. Since my posts tend to get hundreds of comments, one of the largest bottlenecks I found was that of Gravatar images loading.
Gravatars, for those of you who don’t know, are the little pictures that show next to a users comments. For blog posts with just a few comments the additional load isn’t too bad, but when you get a lot like me, showing avatars next to comment dramatically slows the loading time of a page.
This cache plugin essentially ‘saves’ a users avatar on your server, in cache, so that you aren’t constantly requesting the images from the Gravatar servers when comment pages load. The plugin has currently cached 4,449 separate images right now for my own comments.
Minify your CSS and Javascript
One great tool I’ve used in my own efforts to reduce page load time has been Refresh SF. It basically allows you to compress your CSS and Javascript files, reducing their size and thus increasing the speed of your load times. As you can see from the example below, a typical compression of my CSS file reduced it by 5KB. It may not sound much, but that is a 20% decrease in file size.
You are also given the option to download a GZIP’d version of the file, which most modern browsers can handle. You can see this takes my CSS file down to 4KB. An 83% reduction.
I did say in the introduction to the post that there are more things I could be doing with my own optimisation efforts, and this is one of them. I have compressed most of my files, but I have had some issues when using GZIP with files on Amazon S3, and will be looking into this more in the next few days.
Don’t forget to try minifying your Javascript files as well, as these are typically far bigger than your average CSS file and is likely to have a bigger positive effect on your load times.
Set Image Dimensions
Though this tactic adds to your load time slightly in the fact it will put a few extra bytes onto your file sizes, I still recommend it. Setting image dimensions basically means that you tell your browser how big an image is, instead of just pasting in the code with something like:
<img src="imagelink.jpg">
Make sure you add in the specific dimensions, like:
<img src="imagelink.jpg" width="400px" height="48px">
WordPress will do this for you automatically when using their publishing tools, but if you’ve added graphics to your theme manually – like I had – then there may be some tweaks necessary.
The reason this is beneficial is because it allows a browser to ‘map out’ the dimensions of a page and where graphics fit, without having to load the page and reshuffle it later. This gives the impression that a page is being rendered much faster.
Don’t Resize Graphics via CSS
A small point, but relevant, is to make sure your images are the actual size that you are displaying them at on your website, especially if you’re making them smaller. I was a culprit of this where I have a few 64 x 64px images, but just decided to reduce their size in HTML rather than editing the actual file.
Changing the file will dminish its load size, and thus speed up your website. So, open up Photoshop or whatever you have on your computer, and get things to the size they should be.
Compress the Size of your Images
Speaking of image sizes, large graphics can be one of the biggest detriments to the performance of your website. If you’re a Photoshop user, one of the options I recommend is their ‘Save for Web’ feature, when saving a file. This essentially removes the images EXIF data (information about the actual photo, like where it was taken, and with what camera) to reduce the overall file size.
If you have a lot of graphics, this can have a dramatic affect. Another option would be to upload your images to a site like IMGUR, which does this automatically, and then download them again before putting them on your server.
Here’s what the Google Page Speed website has to say about images:
“The type of an image can have a drastic impact on the file size. Use these guidelines:
- PNGs are almost always superior to GIFs and are usually the best choice. IE 4.0b1+, Mac IE 5.0+, Opera 3.51+ and Netscape 4.04+ as well as all versions of Safari and Firefox fully support PNG, including transparency.
- Use GIFs for very small or simple graphics (e.g. less than 10×10 pixels, or a color palette of less than 3 colors) and for images which contain animation. If you think an image might compress better as a GIF, try it as a PNG and a GIF and pick the smaller.
- Use JPGs for all photographic-style images.
- Do not use BMPs or TIFFs.”
One final option is to install the WP Smush.it plugin, which is recommended by Yahoo!. What this does is run all your uploaded images to WordPress through various stages of lossless compression (meaning you don’t lose image quality) to reduce the size of your files.
Utilise These Three Tools to Identify Problem Areas
I used a number of tools while optimising my site in order to test my speed increases as I went along. The one I checked the most was Pingdom, since I like the interface and it keeps a history of the changes on your site.
There is also a page grading option which gives you advice on things to change based on your specific situation. For example, when checking if I had properly GZIP’d a file I could look at Pingdom to see if it was recognising the changes.
Me testing various changes in relation to page speed, with Pingdom
Two other tools that allow you to do something similar are the Google Pagespeed tool and GTMatrix. Both looking at your particular situation and giving you feedback based on the things they want you to change. One of those recommendations is to…
Remove Unused CSS
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably hacked away a lot at your WordPress theme in order to change its design to be something less ‘out of the box’. This theme I’m using originally came with a number of sliders and optional navigation menus, which I’ve never used. However, though I removed the code for them in the template files, I didn’t remove any references to those functions in CSS.
Though the speed impact of a few KB is often minimal, if you really want to go all the way in your optimisation process, then this is another thing you can look at implementing.
Don’t Become Speed Obsessed
Though I think it’s important to give importance to the speed of your website, I think it’s also important not to go overboard with your changes. Sometimes there are things you need, usability or otherwise, that are going to slow down your site. I see speed optimisation as something you can do over a weekend for your WordPress blog, rather than a fortnight.
For example, one of the biggest drains on page speed for ViperChill is the Facebook like box in my sidebar. It is almost 50% of the filesize of my homepage. I could remove it, and speed up the site even further, but it’s something that I think is beneficial to growing my Facebook audience, so it’s more important to have it than not.
There are alternatives, as it’s clear after a quick Google search that a number of bloggers have had this issue, but they require the site visitor to perform two clicks to become a Facebook fan. In this case I would rather have a slightly slower site than the usability issues which come with extra clicks.
Do the necessary changes that are going to have a big impact, but don’t sweat the small stuff too much.
Advanced Speed Optimisation Guide
One of the greatest things about being involved in marketing for so long is that I have a large network of contacts who are far more knowledgeable about different subjects than me. One of the people I’ve worked with is David Steven-Jennings, a server admin who’s currently working in England, helping to keep a certain sporting website online which is very popular at the moment.
I reached out to him to see if he could give me some advice on the server side of things, for people who are more technically inclined and are looking for more advanced information on how to boost their website speeds.
Here’s what he had to say..
“Optimising a website at the server level can be a rather technical topic to discuss as there are so many things to consider. After giving it much thought, I decided on simply talking about 3 straightforward things you (or your server admin) can do to speed up your site. The cool part is that they don’t require lots of changes and will help any site.
Install a PHP accelerator
While PHP is a pretty fast scripting language, it suffers from the same problem as all scripting languages — each time a file is requested it has to be read, analyzed, compiled and then executed. This becomes a major issue when there is lots of traffic coming in. To solve this, install a PHP accelerator such as APC, eAccelerator or XCache. My personal preference is XCache as it’s still actively maintained. For those with access to the root WHM/cPanel account of their server, I believe that you can compile eAccelerator or XCache into PHP via EasyApache. For the rest of you, you’ll either need to get it from your distribution repositories or compile it (both of which which are out of the scope of this guide).
As mentioned above, PHP has to do quite a bit before it can generate any output. How PHP accelerators work is by caching the compiled version in memory for later use. This allows for some good speed gains. I’ve seen XCache speed up execution times by as much as 5 or 6 times. It addition, by removing the need to compile, each PHP request will use less memory (sometimes as much as it 50%), which is always a bonus – the less memory used, the more requests that can be handled.
Mount caching directories into memory
I’m surprised this one doesn’t come up more often. While creating static cache files really lowers CPU usage, hard drive speeds are still slow. Should the server get hit with a lot of traffic, the site will begin to slow down, as Apache has to wait for the drives to find and return the file contents. Imagine a person having to always sift through a stack of papers to find something versus someone always remembering it. Everyone will love the dude with the good memory, no?
Using Linux’s tmpfs feature, directories can be mounted into memory in temporary filesystems. This removes disk speeds as a bottleneck and allows the contents to be accessed really, really quickly. How quickly? Well, as it often takes longer for the browser to download the file than for the server to find it in memory, it’s sometimes only noticeable when the site’s under load. For example, for a large WordPress site using WP Super Cache I managed to drop request times from averaging at 2 seconds per request at 180 reqs/second to about 0.9 secs just by mounting wp-content/cache. When the traffic levels idled and we continued testing, we were getting times of around 0.2 seconds a transaction but the customer couldn’t beat 0.6 as their interweb tubes weren’t as large as ours.
I’ve also used tmpfs to speed up MySQL (mounting the temporary table files) and even speed up the whole system by mounting system temporary directories (eg /tmp). As the filesystem is in memory, you don’t want to put ‘permanent’ files into it (they don’t survive reboots or unmountings), however a neat little trick I’ve used before is to store static template files like CSS and Javascript elsewhere and then copy them to a tmpfs directoy for faster access.
Turn on database query caching
Holy cow, some CMSes love to make MySQL queries. WordPress is a culprit of this — after you add a lot of the more popular plugins you’ve got a site that likes to bully MySQL servers. As the majority of queries involve selecting stuff, database self-defence 101 starts with caching (I’m sure you’ve noticed the trend by now). The first thing to do on any MySQL server is make sure query caching is enabled. This is as simple as adding the ‘query_cache_size’ setting to your my.cnf file or setting it inside MySQL. The trade-off is, once again, that you need to use a RAM for the caching, however it can be rather small (less than 128 MB) and the benefits are well-worth it.”
Thanks again to David for his advice, and I hope you all got a lot out of this guide overall. As I stated earlier, I don’t claim to be an expert on this topic, but my own changes have had a massive affect on the load times of my website. Anything you can do to improve load times (and thus pageviews and conversions) is always recommend, so definitely set aside some time to implement a number of these when you can.
The next ViperChill post is going live on Monday, where we have Ramsay sharing an epic post. If you have other recommendations for how to improve a websites speed, I would love to hear them in the comments…
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You got a great sense of timing Glen.. I just spend some time searching for a good Mac tool to configure my S3. Seems like 3Hub is the way to go – thanks!
Hey bud,
Thanks for the heads up on my ‘effed up’ Facebook update. Tried to @ you but couldn’t find your account somehow.
No problem Glen.
Btw, it seems you’re going a bit strong on caching yourself.. No matter how many “hard-refreshes” I do on Viperchill.com – this new post doesn’t show up on the main page. When I load http://www.viperchill.com (note the www) it’s working fine.
FYI
Technically, caching only works as well as the system for checking and loading the cache, so it looks like Glen might have a wonky .htaccess directive somewhere
I ‘fixed’ it by deleting the cache, but I see there’s an option for this in Supercache settings
Thanks for the heads up
Great post Glen as always. This was very informative. I really think shared hosting is better and using CDN service can do a lot good to the blog speed. And yes, using a good caching plugin works great as well.
Thanks Avi,
Good to see you here
I always love to read your blog and check your works. It’s great to get a reply from you. Really wanted to interact with you bro.
Great post Glen. Refresh SF and the caching plugin for Gravatars were totally new to me, as were all of Dave’s comments, heh. I’ll throw in a +1 for MaxCDN, great service. Would also recommend cleaning up the backend with something like WP-Optimize (small tweak) and taking precautions for hotlinking. Have you ever tried replacing PHP with static HTML in any instances? Saw an article on that here: http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/09/22/the-3-easiest-ways-to-speed-up-wordpress/
>as were all of Dave’s comments
Glad you found it interesting
Thanks for the post, Glen.
I may have to stop doing shared hosting soon as I’m starting to notice more delays on my multiple websites.
I used W3 Total Cache but when it conflicted with a WordPress & Thesis upgrade, I switched to a plugin called “Quick Cache”. I’ll Try WP Super Cache or may even try switching back to W3. Does anyone have anymore caching plugin recommendations?
In the past, I had a my photographs on my site saved as .png’s instead of .jpg’s but then realized that was making my site slower. So I redid all of the photos to make them .jpg format to decrease the overall file size as well as speed up the site.
Another thing that can be done to speed up websites when saving .jpg’s is to reduce the quality of the image. Depending on your editor, look for the ability to reduce a total % (i.e. 100% at full quality, a level (i.e. level 12 out of 12), or a lower DPI.
Hey Kevin,
First of all, damn good to see you here, it has been a while.
If you’re content is mostly photos then there are quite a few things you can do to increase your page speed. Changing the file format is definitely one of them, as you’ve found out.
Looking forward to more comments to see if people have had good success with other caching plugins. Thanks for stopping by as always!
Hey mate, thanks for this awesome post! Will certainly help speed up our sites
BTW, on my site I’ve noticed a huge discrepancy between the results I got from GTMetrix and PingDom tools.
Although GTMetrix gave me a ‘A’ page speed grade and a ‘C’ YSlow grade, my page load time there was 6.09s.
Meanwhile, I scored 95/100 on PingDom with a load time of 861ms oO
Huge difference haha … Go figure
Anyhow, thanks again. Will be surely taking a look at that CDN solution on Amazon
Gotta love amazon, specially now that they are coming to Brazil! Yeah baby!
Cheers!
The difference in the times is most likely because of network differences. Different latency on the hops, different number of hops, etc. Hell, the crawler may of been having a bad day. It’s normally a good idea to run multiple tests to get averages.
I thought this was the case, so mentioned it in a comment below. Thanks for confirming
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120816_30_JC2/
Here is another great site that gives a picture no so rosey for the site with a 6+ second load time.
Cheers
Jonathan
ps
I like http://www.cloudflare.com and a few others that will speed up and keep it up even if your server were to go offline. I would personally spend the money with them instead of a dedicated server in most instances. thoughts?
As I mentioned in the post, different sites tend to have massively different load times.
If you’ve looked at the launch of Google Fiber at all, you can see this video which shows it takes a few seconds for a site to load, yet they’re running on a supposed 1GB/second connection (Gigabit). There are so many variables involved, so different speed tools are going to show different results. Hence sticking to one, Pingdom, and seeing how my changes affected load times.
Hey Glen,
Speeding up your website has been all the rage for the past 3 months, but as usual your post went three and four layers deeper than the others I’ve read (Sean Davis also wrote a good one) Including the tools and the thought process you use(d) along the way was also very helpful. Thanks
You’re very welcome, Ray!
Thanks for the comment
Thanks for the reference, Ray! I sure did write a post much like this one about a month ago. I’m glad to see that we are all focusing on such an important issue. The more people that understand this, the better!
Great write up, Glen!
Hey Glen,
Great post and this would basically be useful for Hardcore bloggers who gets tons of traffic to their websites.
It’s definitely an advance course, but I do have a quick question…
Because the cost of Dedicated hosting is more than 10x the costs of shared hosting, when should someone consider using a dedicated hosting?
Is it when you hit 100 visits, 1000 visits or 10,000 per day?
Any ideas?
Thanks!
Hey Ryan,
First of all, thanks for the comment!
I wouldn’t say there’s a specific number you need to reach before making the switch. With ViperChill, for example, when a post goes live the site may receive around 15,000 visitors that day. Not a huge amount, and something that shared hosting can generally handle. The ‘problem’ is that 3-4,000 of those tend to come at one time – when a post goes live – and that’s when problems set in.
At least with shared hosting.
I would say the time to switch is when you’re noticing notable lag, especially due to your marketing efforts. For example I wouldn’t really have an issue unless I sent out emails when a post goes live (which I do). That contributes to a large portion of traffic arriving on my site at one time.
That being said, I strongly believe that page speed has a huge affect on conversions, and since selling software and affiliate products is a large part of my income, I want to do all I can to make sure that the sites which generate a good income for me are loading quickly. I will be hosting quite a few sites on my dedicated server, so for me it makes more sense to go with this option.
I hope that answers your question
>Because the cost of Dedicated hosting is more than 10x the costs of shared hosting
Luckily, you don’t have to get a dedi server these days
VPSs (Virtual Private Servers) offer far more resources than shared hosting and they behave like a dedicated server. It’s like having a dedicated server for a fraction of the cost..
Really appreciate this post Glenn.
It is amazing at how the small little metric of improving site speed can lead to an increase in revenue, pageviews and traffic.
I never even thought it was a big issue until reading your post, so thank you for bringing it to my attention!
-Scott
You’re welcome, bud.
Good to see you here
Hi Glen,
Did something similar at my site
http://www.davewooding.com/the-need-for-speed/
though not as extensive as you are showing here and improved load times by ~10% for first view and ~40% for repeat view.
Webpagetest.org http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120816_YK_JNH/1/details/ shows you are serving some of images from your server (www.vierpchill) and some from the CDN (turbo.viperchill) … or am I missing something?
Thanks.
Dave
Nope, that is correct.
The images I use in my theme (loading on every single page) come from Amazon, whereas post specific images are coming from my server / WordPress. I know there is a plugin that allows you to upload images from WordPress and have them show on Amazon S3, but I’m not totally sure of the best configuration right now.
Any thoughts? I’m always open to suggestions
The CDN Sync Tool plugin (requires WP Super Cache) http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cdn-sync-tool/ runs images through the smushit.com service before uploading to Amazon S3/ Cloudfront. That’s what I am using.
I’ll be honest … I haven’t made a new post since installing those plugins so I can’t provide feedback on the smushit service.
However I just tested an image from my site and http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ reported a ~30% savings – knocked a 40KB images down to 28KB.
Dave
Amazing post.
These ways are amazing, I should try them all. I think the most valuable way is guest blogging.
However, I will give it a try to these tips.
Thanks Ahmed!
Good post
I’ve just recently done the seo caching on my site. It feels a lot better by hardly doing anything.
It seems sometimes odd not to optimize your blog pages. After all it is HTML as well.
So now were on two seconds, wow what happed to be previous of 5-7 seconds. Where next?
PS big posts from you are great. I am an avid believer in giving more to read. It still gives people the options to read all or scan.
Nice.
Thanks Nigel,
Congrats on the improvements. a 5-7 second decrease is huge
Hi Glen,
As always, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post. This comes at a perfect time for me since I just launched this new site of mine, which in future I expect to have similar traffic volumes than what you mentioned that ended up creating noticeable lag when you have that amount trying to access your site at once.
I found your reply on an earlier comment regarding when to move from shared to dedicated hosting very useful as I know at some given point in time I will need to make the same decision.
In the meantime I am going to get cracking on all the tasks you laid out int the post. First thing I’d like to do is to get one of those testing software apps installed so I can track the improvement while I go along making the changes. Would love to even work my results into a post on my own site.
As always Glen, you over-delivered which inspires me and I’m sure many others do do exactly the same. From a fellow South African, thanks for that!
Hey Ruan,
Thanks for the comment!
Let me know how the changes go
P.S. I’m actually English, just spent a lot of time in SA
Ahhh, I remember just reading something about you and Cape Town, oh and something that gave me much pleasure and laughter which Jon Morrow said in the lines of “are the internet and Google rankings being taken over by a South African???”
Epic s%#@!!!!
Thanks for so many fresh and excellent ideas. Luckily, I have a couple of these already going on my WP site. A couple of these I’ll need to get an SEO to handle though. Hey, anything to remove barriers / speed-up the load time on CopyClique!
Hey Viqi,
Not totally sure why you’ll need an SEO, but best of luck with your optimisation efforts.
Thanks for leaving your feedback!
Two things you may or may not be missing.
#1 getting an SSD on your server vs a HDD. With php and database caching you can potentially store the bulk of your database and queries ‘in memory’ meaning on the SSD. When i used to run a massive number of sites off a single server… this was one of the biggest leaps forward in terms of page load times and serving up the content. You can still get a cheaper HDD for the secondary to do backups on as well.
#2 help with eliminating unused CSS, there are plugins for firefox which will help you…
addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/dust-me-selectors/
As well as other sites that will crawl your site, most of them being paid services.
>#1 getting an SSD on your server vs a HDD
SSDs rock when it comes to disk seeks! The only drawbacks (besides the horrendous dollar-per-gigabyte ratio) is that they aren’t as stable as HDDs as they have limited write lifespans. My experience with them tells me that they aren’t ready to be used for heavy I/O loads yet, but I’d definitely recommend them for disk-based caching!
Thanks for the Firefox recommendation. That looks interesting
Glen,
Just a quick heads-up…your link to GTMetrix is broken and contains an error, check it out buddy
Fixed!
Great!
Well done on making a post on the specifics of this subject interesting and very readable! Optimisation is something that a lot of webmasters are looking to improve on at the moment – a comprehensive resource like this post is invaluable. Thanks!!
Glad you thought so,
Thanks Patrick!
Timely post,
I switched to CDN a few months ago and while I’m still not getting speed results that I wanted I was even more annoyed at certain money keywords with 100% bounce rate and no clicks. My first thought was speed. So I’m switching to Wpengine this weekend. One thing I love about them, they don’t allow caching plugins since their server does all of that. I also love the list of banned plugins they have because they slow down your website. Nice to have that information somewhere
Take care Glen
Thanks Lee!
I’ve heard some good things about WPEngine, and I know Rand from SEOmoz uses them on Inbound.org, so I’m sure you’ll have good results
hi glen,
very informative post. i am reading every post carefuuly and learned more.
Thank for sharing such a valuable post.
cheers
yogesh
Glen, brilliant article about making WP better & faster. If 10 people refer just one person each to this article & those 10 do the same etc. imagine what a massive improvement that would make to the entire internet!!!
More WP sites would load faster, use less server resources, allowing more WP sites to be born on same servers, less bandwidth being consumed, less energy being used to produce etc. Basically you should get carbon credits and a green badge for writing articles like this
Hope you get plenty of subscribers to your site – you rock!
Hah, thank you Keeper!
That made me laugh
Glen –
Great post… I’ve been using a HostGator VPS for years, and very happy with it.
I was very thrilled to learn about the EasyApache configuration to add XCache (and Memcache which you didn’t mention, and can be run with XCache, because they cache different things) — so THANK YOU for that!
I was curious as to how you are using CDN (plugin, etc) , because I’ve been using W3Total Cache, and they have CDN and minify options built in (among 100 million other options).
And I’d also like to mention an image resizing plugin called Simple Image Sizes that I use that allows me to create a new image size besides the default (thumb, med, large), so that I can use the size that makes sense for my blog… ie, I have a 570 px wide blog, so I have an image that is automatically generated to that size at upload time… you can read more about it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-image-sizes/
Great post, you were recommended by Michel Fortin, and love your style.
Matt
Xcache caches most (if not all) PHP you throw at it. Memcache, unfortunately, is a more complex solution which is probably why Glen didn’t put it in the guide. You need to have a memcached server set up and then the application needs to be coded to use it. Luckily, there are several WP plugins to handle this, so it’s a case of getting an additional server (if you don’t put memcache on its own server, you deserve whatever happens to your data)
I took down a few notes from this article and that’s saying something since I manage nearly 100 active wordpress websites. I am also not a server whiz and would never claim to be an expert on the topic, but I know far more than I should and just enough to get myself in trouble with the codes behind the scenes.
My favorite part of the article is after you have spent time talking about shaving kb’s from files and then you follow up with a section about not getting obsessed. Some people might call 1kb a bit OCD, but I say, “why not? if it helps and only takes a few minutes/hours, give it a shot.”
The only issue I have with this article is your opening section discussing the facts about large sites like Google, Amazon, and Shopzilla saving time/money/etc. by optimizing their sites. Well of course those site stats are going to look impressive (in the millions of dollars), but how would a small mom-and-pop blog benefit from these suggestions? You hint about the SEO benefit of optimizing your site, but I think that many smaller sites will do just like you said you did… delay looking into this as it seems to be complicated, could require an investment into new servers/professional admin, and it doesn’t have a large ROI (at least not an apparent ROI).
Hey Marcus,
Thanks for the comment. 100 websites must keep you busy
They were used as examples as they are results that people can really connect with. Seeing those results on a larger scale can help you see how changes may affect your own results. The aim purely being: If you make changes in this area, you can see big results.
I don’t see why it wouldn’t convince people to not further delay this, since simple things like installing the two caching plugins alone – which anyone can do, tech savvy or not – literally takes a few minutes. Those few minutes can result in a huge reduction of load times.
100 sites is the precise reason why I use WordPress. With so many plugins and active support/upgrades, they are practically on auto-run.
I certainly don’t want to criticize you in any way for such an awesome article. But it has been my experience with the typical stay-at-home, small business, mom-and-pop type of website owners that they are “scared” of anything that doesn’t lead to more money in their pocket. Something with quick, measurable results. They like traditional things that are “proven” to get results… newspaper ads, tv ads, radio ads, etc. etc. My point in my comment was simply that I would like to find some good case studies out there that I could show these people how someone small like them reaped rewards from their time and efforts. They would think it’s cool that Google and Amazon made more money by speeding up their site by a nanosecond, but it takes me a good deal of convincing sometimes to tell these people that speed really does matter. I could tell them all day long that speed is a factor in SEO results (albeit a relatively small one compared to other marketing efforts) which directly results in more visitors, but their mindset is that they’ve already spent money on building a site, they pay for hosting (some even complain at the measly $6 per month price tag), and they pay for support when the site needs fixing or improvements. So why should they pay for more work to speed up their site?
Long story short, it was a WONDERFUL article and I have already researched a couple of the plugins mentioned in your article and comments. I think the article is actually too well written for its own good in some cases. I probably wouldn’t share this article with a typical client because of its length and technical nature. That could be overwhelming for someone that just entered the Internet world. But I would definitely have them install caching plugins and explain the benefits of speeding up their site.
Hi Glen,
In one of your previous posts you mentioned increasing the number of homepage posts in order to increase pageviews. How does this fit in with the work you have done on load speeds; would you now consider reducing the number of homepage posts again in order to increase it’s loading speed?
Hey Chris,
Yep, that was in my future of blogging post. I’m actually testing this again, now that my site is much faster (currently showing less posts on the homepage) so I’ll come back here and update once I have more knowledge.
Thanks Glen,
Great content as always.
Proof is in the pudding Glen. Smoking fast now!
Glad you noticed. Thanks Pierre!
Hi Glen,
Another fantastic post as usual. Even we like amazon cloudfront servers over maxcdn. We use amazon cloudfront services for all our websites. Recently amazon web services have launched newest edge location in Sydney, Australia to serve end users of Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53. Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 now have a total of 33 edge locations worldwide. Each new edge location helps lower latency and improves performance for your end users. Amazon web services have launched 8 new edge locations in 2012 and they plan to continue to add new edge locations worldwide. Also Glen we recommend you to increase leverage browser caching. It is also recommended by google and this will help viperchill to increase overall google page speed score.
Hey WPFix
That is another thing I need to implement, along with the GZipping
Thanks for the comment
Varnish is another caching option I have been in talks with me server admin about.
They tested it after recommendations from my developers and were impressed.
I have only looked into this for magento though I am sure wordpress would benefit just as much
I haven’t heard of that, Justin. I’ll look into it.
Thanks!
Varnish rocks, and you don’t need an amazingly power server to get the most out of it. I’ve protected sites from celebrity tweets and links from major newspapers just with a smallish VPS. As you mentioned Magento (which is a resource hog), here are two tips to speed it up:
* Mount it’s cache directory into memory
* If you store session info on the disk, mount that into memory as well.
I’ve seen large performance gains in the past just by doing that. And also consider replacing Apache with Nginx, as it’s very resource-efficient in comparison and can handle higher traffic volumes as well.
I seriously have no idea what this all means
Haha… will have to read it a few times methinks…
Really?
Yeah.. I just use a caching plugin and that is pretty much as far as it goes.
Tried to set up Amazon once but didn’t go that well.
Also cloudflare didn’t work and crashed my sites everytime I turned it on.
God Damn that’s a post ans a bit geezer… I’ve only read it once so haven’t implemented anything yet…. but I;ll be trying it fro sure.I need a speed up
Nice one Greg, Top post …. again
Hey Glen,
Thanks for this awesome post, I’ve been following you for a while but i think this might be the first time I’ve left a comment. (i have been using optin skin for a couple of weeks and love it btw).
I have just one question about the css/js file compression… What exactly do we do with the compressed files once we’ve run them through the site you linked to? Do we upload them next to the originals on our server, replace the originals, or something else?
Thanks again
Steve
Nice post here Glen,
i use Wp Supercache on my blog and it really works well for me.
Thanks for the great post. Made my head spin a bit.. I have heard great things about Liquid Web, they are located right down the road from me..
That’s cool! I would love to check out their offices in person.
You’re very welcome!
Hello Viperchill, I always enjoy each of your posts (your site is the only one I get blog posts as emails), but this one was particularly useful for me as a Web Developer – your technical team is excellent and they are making all the right recommendations for you. Kudos!
Awesome post, Glen.
I have just one question for you. What about hostgator dedicated servers, is that service any good? You make it look like it isn’t…
Hi Ricardo,
A year or so ago I went to sign-up with Hostgators VPS option. One of their support staff told me there would be little to no speed increase when using that service with them. So I kind of skipped over them for dedicated servers after that.
Another fantastic post as always.
As I have just started out I don’t think I will have speed issues for quite some time yet. Although I did take your advice and activated a cache plugin to get a head start.
Is the speed aspect of a website more to do with the type of host or more to do with the speed of the users broadband? Would someone with super fast bb accessing a shared hosted website have a better experience than someone with slower bb accessing a website on a dedicated host?
Thanks Jamie!
There’s no clear answer on that, but it is my understanding it is more to do with the speed of a website – unless there are huge differences in internet speed (dial-up vs. broadband). Looking at the test video of Google’s new 1GB fiber connection that I posted a few comments above, you can see it still takes a few seconds for a website to load. Simply because the server of that site can’t match the speed of the internet connection.
Either way, it’s good to look at making your site as fast as possible
very useful, bookmarked + evernote, hopefully I will need it in the future. Thanks!
Excellent overview of the factors involved and the available options! Did you, by chance, evaluate Windows Azure as a hosting platform and what were your conclusions?
I didn’t, Matt. It’s my understanding that Linux is a much better option for running PHP / MYSQL scripts?
It is, hands down.
Big blogs need dedicated hosting definitely. Because if a visitor will face the down blog then it is going to leave a very negative impact on him..
Glen, I can’t find your contact info on your site, so am posting this here in hopes that you moderate your comments:
Have you seen your WOT (Web of Trust) warning? I love your blog, and when I clicked on your newsletter link today, I was shocked to see a warning popup from http://www.mywot.com/. I added my 2 cents to the ratings comments after several of your supporters had already posted in your defense. I also blasted the guy in the forum who added you as a scammer. You might want to take this up with the WOT site owner. He can review the ratings and correct them, and a lot of people do use the tool and will be warned away from your site unfairly. It’s crazy for anyone to say your site is dangerous, spammy, or scammy. Quite typical for a wanna-be competitor to do something like this.
As a web developer, I do some reputation management, and I think it’s a good idea for every site owner to install the WOT browser add-on and check their own sites from time to time to be sure they are not losing traffic because of false negative WOT ratings.
I may post about this myself—I hope you won’t mind, and I hope this helps you out in some small way for all of your great posts.
Hi Kim,
Thanks a lot for the heads up on this. Someone had mentioned it to me a few months ago, but I was totally overloaded at the time and didn’t get round to look into it.
I’ve made a post on the same forum thread, and hope I can get this rectified. Thanks again for letting me know
Glen,
Great post. Appreciate the detail you took. I am currently looking into CND myself so the post was good timing. I agree that speed is a major concern for conversion rates, and a contributor to SEO also. We do alot of work with Joomla, so any specific times with Joomla would be interesting also. I understand the code is heavier than WP and a number of our sites are slow with java scripts and such.
Thanks!
Hey Kelly,
You’re very welcome, thanks for the comment.
I haven’t used Joomla in years so I don’t really know too much about it speed wise. I know a number of these things could be applied there though (like image sizes, Minifying Javascript, etc).
Hey Glen,
First off, wow, that small difference in loading speed makes a huge difference. That also shows you how impatient we are as a society. If something doesn’t load in half a second, we bounce. Wow.
Thanks for the advice, I downloaded 2 of the plugins that you recommended
That’s a good point Ryan. I’ve actually read quite a few things about how we’re now a society with really short attention spans.
Awesome. I’ve been receiving some good feedback on Twitter so far
Go easy on the plugins though. More plugins = slower load time.
Hi Glenn!
As always, an awesome post. This post is a prime example of how, in some instances, the little things do make a big difference. I can’t wait to try some of these suggestions.
Thanks Leigh,
Glad you liked it
I love reading your blog posts. I have recently started to blog after a year of being idle and I think Viperchill will be a lot of help. But I already read it for all the learning. Thanks!
Thanks Roland!
This IS fast! I feel rushed, I can’t even take a sip of coffee while a page loads
Hah!
Man, I am obsessed with those things. I guess it’s in my nature to optimize to the max.
It’s sometimes ridiculous, as for example, my blog hasn’t yet launched and I already optimize.
This will be bookmarked and used when there is some sort of traffic to measure.
- I got a comment though. Some of the optimizations are taking place only on the backside. Users don’t actually see those immediately.
For example catching gravatars don’t actually stop people from reading your content. I mean, they load while we read. My guess is those actually apply only in engine rankings based on load times.
Cheers
I have used Host Gator for years and like you I have never had a complaint. We recently moved our content into a Word Press system and have been debating about this as well.
Host Gator also offers dedicated hosting why didn’t you choose them?
Hello Glen,
I would like to notify that the WP Smush.It plugin has either stopped their service or its acting weird. It throws a time out error instead of reducing image size
Isn’t anyone else here facing tht problem ?
Did you go to ‘night school’ to study all this? I’m wondering what were the certificates you had before you could write this all out or its just from online learning?
I’ll surely need you to contribute to my up-coming book. I sent you an email but never received a reply.
You’re a ghost!
Sheyi
There is no school for this stuff
I generally receive 2 interview requests each day and sorry, but I simply don’t have time to answer them all / contribute something I’ve never said before.
This information is awesome Glen! I recently revamped my entire site so it’s a perfect time to do the cleanup.
I used W3 Total Cache but ran into issues with that plugin crashing. I’m going to try SuperCache and see how that goes.
I also used WP Smush it, but often received errors that it couldn’t process the image. So again, don’t have too much confidence in that plugin. I will look for alternatives.
I knew it was better to include images dimensions, but wasn’t aware that resizing them via CSS slowed things down.
Thanks again for this comprehensive post. It will take me some time but I’m determined to implement all the changes I can. Every little bit of love we can get from Google goes a long way!
I heard your interview on the Smart Passive Income podcast (from a couple years ago) and thought I’d check your site out! Thanks for the info about upload speed. I’m planning on converting to the WordPress Thesis Theme for this reason as soon as I get more content up. Very helpful! I’ll be stopping by office.
Quite an overwhelming post some of which has passed over my old head. I am a one man band and probably most of what you propose is for the big boys (and girls), but the stats do not lie so I would like to maximise my speed and will implement some of your suggestions.
How do we measure the loading speed of our site, this would be useful to check on progress.
Thanks again
Regards
Russ
Just answered my previous question GTMetrix
Great post Glen. I hope that you get some commission from Amazon because you have just convinced me to move the images of our 10 websites to Amazon S3/CDN.
A curiosity. Do you upload the image manually ( for instance: add image > link > http://turbo.viperchill.com/images/comment.jpg ) or do you suggest to use any Sync Tool?
Thanks
Stefano
I am still on hostgator right now. I think I still have quite a while before I need an upgrade. I can only hope that I actually do need the upgrade one of these days. That would mean I am doing something right. :]
Waoo!!! Awesome post, but how long did this take you to come up with such a great write up like this. to me you are really blogger professor and thanks for sharing this, it really help.
Your articles are the best out there! Thanks for sharing.
Hey Glen,
For a long time had this idea in mind to shift all my websites to a dedicated one. Seems, Liquidweb is best among them. I think will go with liquidweb. Also wonderful article covered almost every part to supercharge the site. Great going buddy, you rock!
W3 Cache does really speed up your website. This is important as our site as interviews, photos of singers and songs like Jay Sean. So the songs and videos need to load fast. This blog has lots of information to streamline your wordpress site and make it better. I appreciate your help in making our website faster.
Hey Glen,
First off, thanks for all the great stuff you put online. I really like your work and, AFAIKY, your overall “mental attitude”.
What I like a bit less is that:
LiquidWeb (non-aff) —>
http://www.liquidweb.com/?utm_content=viperchill&utm_campaign=AffiliateProgram&utm_source=AffiliateProgram&utm_medium=Banner&RID=viperchill
I’m sure I’m not the only one.
It’s the first time you disappoint me, Sir. And who likes being disappointed? So, I’m going to stretch myself a bit and think that it’s just a typo that you will edit shortly.
Take care,
Pierre
I don’t understand. (Non-aff) is a non-affiliate link. Clearly indicating the link before it is an affiliate link.
No typo’s…
Hey Glen,
Thx for answering, Man!
Now it’s my turn not to understand: “Non-aff” means “non-affiliate”, okay. So far so good.
But “NON-affiliate” is supposed to mean that you ARE indeed an affiliate??? I’m sorry, but I don’t get it!
To my defence, I’m French… so perhaps I’m missing some subtleties?
Pierre
PS: please note, if needed, that I have absolutely nothing against affiliation and I can prove it by using your affiliate link if you’re kind enough to educate me a little.
No. Typically bloggers – at least in this field – just put affiliate links to products they recommend. That’s what I did here.
For people who don’t want to use my affiliate links (doesn’t change the price, just gives me credit for the recommendation) they can click the link which is labelled non-aff (not an affiliate link, and will not give me any credit).
F….. hell!
Now I feel bad!
I didn’t notice that the “non-aff” text was linked… and a direct link. And yet, that’s pretty obvious!
What is pretty obvious too, is that I do need some more sleep! I’ve been working anywhere between 16 and 18 hours / day, mainly on my Mac, mainly coding, and I must have killed my eyes! To the point when I don’t even see a linked piece of text.
Glen, I’m both sincerely sorry and relieved! That looked so… well… not how I see you –although I don’t have a photograph of you on my wall, pardon me!
Anyway, I didn’t expect you publish my post: I know your posts are moderated, so my intention was to speak my mind, but only to you. You decided to publish it and respond publically and that honours you. Plus I hope it will remove any doubts, in the event that you have other knackered readers.
Thanks for your work and attitude, Glen, it’s not that widespread…
Kind regards,
Pierre
Hey Glen,
Been following your posts for a while now and I must say you are a wealth of information. Thanks for all the tips tricks and ideas. Just started with blogging myself and will be a repeat visitor for more advice.
Thanks again,
Jac
Great advice on speeding the blog up. There are so many plugins you mentioned. I did not know about the gravatar caching plugin, quite interesting. Dedicated hosting is the way to go for blogs like yours.
Yes, websites should load fast other wise it will have a negative effect on visitors. I’m using cache plugin along with CDN and CloudFlare. My blog’s loading speed is not that bad.