With the latest word from Google, that they MIGHT consider to include loading speed into their algorithm, I decided to have a look what I could do to improve the performance of my WordPress blog.
It turned out that there is a lot you can do, without involving your host’s tech department, to speed up your blog, considerably.
However, before you start fine tuning your blog, you must first know how it performs right now, in its current state. It might just happen that you’re so fortunate that your blog loads at the speed of lightning, but how would you know, if you not test it first?
I have found two great and free services that you can use to test your speed and that shows your blog’s bottlenecks, if any.
Vertain – Provides a quick and straightforward test result, using a 10 mbps connection. They also give you the average test result, for all the test conducted the last week, which you can compare against your own result.
When I tested my blog, the average loading time where 5.1 seconds, which I passed. However, that was after I tweaked it a little, with a few easy and simple tricks, which I will give you in my next posts.
Chew The Web's speed result
Now, if your blog take more than 3-4 seconds to load, then you should start to investigate your blog further and indentify what is causing it to load so slowly. Remember, Vertain use a 10 mbps connection for their test, which means that 3-4 seconds equals 20-60 seconds on a DSL or dial-up connection!
Let’s say that your blog got a result over 3 seconds, mine did when I first run the test, what should you do next?
Well, you would like to find your blog’s bottlenecks and eliminate them, one by one, with another great and free service.
WebPageTest – Works just like Vertain, but gives you more options and detailed results. For example, you can choose different locations and connection speeds, browser, etc. for your test.
The results are rather impressive and give you everything you’ll need to find what is dragging your blog down. You’ll get a waterfall display of your blog’s load performance as well as a detailed connection view, together with an optimization checklist.
Here are some of the results from my blog, using a connection speed of 1.5Mbps from Dulles, VA.
Waterfall View
Optimization View
Now, with the websites above, you should be able to identify what type of objects (css, scripts, images, etc.) that are causing your blog to load slowly and see what you can do to fix it.
For example, you could compress your images a bit further, optimize your css files or remove JavaScript that you don’t use from your blog.
However, tomorrow I will write a post that shows you some neat and simple tricks, which you can use to speed up WordPress.
I hope that I’ll see you back then!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I added your blog to bookmarks. And i’ll read your articles more often!