I Want to Speed Up My Blog

silvine

Hi,

I am trying to speed up the load on my website workreadplay.com. I have two questions.

1) My domain is registered at feachinteractive.com and my site is on a subdomain at workreadplay.com. Does this increase the load?

2) I ran a test a tools.pingdom.com and it reported a 404 error on an old image file.

This is the link: http://feachinteractive.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Logo62-e1363392635606.jpg

I don't know what part of my site is linking to this file. How do I track the link down and remove it?

I am using Wordpress and I have checked my widgets and they don't contain a link to this file.

Thanks

devildriver

Hi Silvine,

Pingdom is a good tool for identifying load problems with your site. I ran another Speed Test on your site and there's a few things I would look at to speed up the page load:

- Load jquery from Google or the jquery site itself. Use the minified version
http://code.jquery.com/

Personally I prefer the jquery CDN as it seems to be faster than Google in a lot of cases.

- Reduce the size of the headshot image
http://workreadplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Headshot.jpg

It's currently 240kb which is much much bigger than it needs to be

- Install Jetpack in Wordpress and take advantage of the Wordpress CDN
http://jetpack.me/support/photon/

- Consider dumping the localtimes plugin. It's taking quite a long time to load

- Sign up to Cloudflare and run your DNS through their service. This will speed up your site considerably.

https://www.cloudflare.com/

http://wordpress.org/plugins/cloudflare/

- For even more CDN goodness consider spending a few quid signing up with MaxCDN. It might seem like overkill but combining this with Cloudflare really works in giving your site a big speed boost.

Hope this helps.

silvine

That's really helpful. It will take me sometime to work through the above but thanks.

silvine

PS Can you recommend another way to display the local time quickly? Is this necessary from a design point of view?

silvine

I signed up for the free version of Cloudflare but it says

SSL was detected for your site. CloudFlare Free does not support SSL

I don't have any secure login sections to my site beyond the admin side, which I only have access to. Will install CloudFlare create problems for readers or for me?

Also, I already have an image cache plugin (WP Smush It). Should I use the Jetpack Photon add on also?
Thanks

devildriver

Hi Silvine,

Personally I find clocks on websites rather redundant, everybody has a clock on their computer anyway so it seems pointless.

You will need to check with your host as to why SSL is enabled and what purpose it serves.

Cloudflare shouldn't affect your setup at all. You may need to play with the settings to ge the best results - their js compression can throw some errors depending on the scripts used on your site so you will need to experiment with that.

AFAIK WP Smush IT just compresses local images on your server. Photon actually copies your images to Wordpress's own CDN thus speeding up delivery. There shouldn't be any conflict between the two but with Wordpress you never know.