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7:19 am
April 3, 2014
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Financial Samurai
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Post edited 7:50 am – April 3, 2014 by Financial Samurai
Howdy Folks,
This month I'm going to work on trying to optimize my sites to be as fast as possible and I was wondering if anybody would like to join me.
I've read a number of good tips already (CDN, reduce plugins, compress images, W3 total cache, WP optimize, CW Image Optimizer (needs littleutil) etc) and I'd like to get some discussion going in case anybody knows the following:
1) I'd like my Sharethis social buttons to only show up on the bottom of posts, not show up at the end of each post snippet on the homepage. Anybody know how this can be done?
2) How many posts do you currently have on your homepage? (Less is better for load time). I used to have 7, then I kept sticking some posts and it ballooned to about 27. Now I'm back down to 11. I've read a good range is 5-7. What do you think? I've seen just one, which seems fine too.
3) What are your slowest, most offending plugins and widgets on your side bar?
Regards,
Sam
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Regards,
Sam
Financial Samurai - Helping you achieve financial freedom sooner, rather than later.
Yakezie Network Founder
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2:16 pm
April 3, 2014
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getrichwithme
| | Manchester UK | |
| Member | posts 47 |
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I know Mike Little, one of the Co-Founders of Wordpress (cant beat a bit of name dropping)
His main two pieces of advice for speeding up your site are
1. COMPRESS YOUR IMAGES
2. Move your site to a dedicated rather than shared server
compress your images
compress your images
compress your images
…………….. it cant be stressed enough
He reckons that number of plugins you run has very little effect on the loading speed of your site.
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2:38 pm
April 3, 2014
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Financial Samurai
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Thanks gettichwithme.
What about the solution of NO IMAGES? Will the benefits of no images and faster speed outweigh the negatives of a stripped personality?
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Regards,
Sam
Financial Samurai - Helping you achieve financial freedom sooner, rather than later.
Yakezie Network Founder
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11:04 pm
April 3, 2014
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retireby40
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Do you use a plugin to compress the images? Which plugin is good?
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4:28 am
April 4, 2014
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Edward Antrobus
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I use WP SmushIt! for image compression. Of course, I also compress my images ("Save for Web" feature in Photoshop or "Save for Web" plugin for GIMP) before I ever upload them, but it's good for the random weblinked image that winds up in there.
The biggest resource hog on my site, according to the Plugin Performance Profiler plugin is EasyRecipe Plus, which I use for adding rich snippets to my recipes (which makes them searchable by Google and Pinterest). It's also the single most important plugin I have on my blog, so I'm okay with it being nearly a third of the load time for my site. After that, roughly tied for second place at just over a tenth of a second each are Wordpress SEO and WP Touch.
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I'm looking for editors, beta-readers, and some demographic research for my upcoming novel, Once Upon a Saturn Moon. If you like reading soft sci-fi thrillers, maybe with a touch of romance thrown in, you can find more information at http://seampublishing.com/once…..aturn-moon
If You Can Read, You Can Cook – http://www.ifyoucanread.com | Think you can't cook? If you can read this sentence, then you can.
SEAM Publishing – http://www.seampublishing.com | eBook formatting and publishing service
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12:01 pm
April 4, 2014
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colormefrugal
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I'm so glad you posted this because I've been wondering about the act same thing! I'll have to give the WP SmushIt or CW image optimizer a try. Thanks for the great suggestions everyone!
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12:27 pm
April 4, 2014
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Mr. Utopia
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I installed SmushIt a few weeks ago. It was pretty seamless although I can't say I've noticed any difference in the speed of my site.
I also started using the free version of Cloudflare as a CDN at about the same time as I installed SmushIt. Once again, I haven't noticed any site speed improvements, but the stats provided by Cloudflare say that I have saved bandwidth.
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9:31 am
April 5, 2014
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frugaling
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Anybody know if there are performance differences to worry about between CDNs?
I've been using Wordpress' free CDN through the Jetpack plugin, and I sincerely appreciate the reliability. Especially since I lost everything on my website once, and having those images backed up saved hours of time. Not sure if I notice a huge page speed difference.
What are people using to test their page speeds?
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2:52 pm
April 5, 2014
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Edward Antrobus
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I use GTMetrix. You can use their site, or there is a plugin.
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I'm looking for editors, beta-readers, and some demographic research for my upcoming novel, Once Upon a Saturn Moon. If you like reading soft sci-fi thrillers, maybe with a touch of romance thrown in, you can find more information at http://seampublishing.com/once…..aturn-moon
If You Can Read, You Can Cook – http://www.ifyoucanread.com | Think you can't cook? If you can read this sentence, then you can.
SEAM Publishing – http://www.seampublishing.com | eBook formatting and publishing service
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4:16 pm
April 5, 2014
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Eliza Cross
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Great topic! My number of posts showing has been set on 8 forever, and I couldn't even tell you why!I just changed it to 6 posts showing on the page, and probably should have done this a long time ago. For plugins that speed things up, I use WP Minify and WP Super Cache.
May all of your page loads be super speedy,
Eliza
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12:47 am
April 6, 2014
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getrichwithme
| | Manchester UK | |
| Member | posts 47 |
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Financial Samurai said:
Thanks gettichwithme.
What about the solution of NO IMAGES? Will the benefits of no images and faster speed outweigh the negatives of a stripped personality?
But no images will make your site less interesting to the browsing reader, and also reduce visibility in search engines
I suppose its all about getting the right balance
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9:19 am
April 7, 2014
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AverageJoe
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Interesting. I took Corbett Barr's course when launching Stacking Benjamins and he recommended no images. He said that most images don't add anything and get in the way of quality content (paraphrasing, and I'm sure he said it more eloquently).
So, I tried it and for SB using No Images wasn't great. The site looks better with big, splashy images. I just try to keep them relevant (which is tough if you're writing about using a Roth IRA….).
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9:24 am
April 7, 2014
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Financial Samurai
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Joe,
Images actually bring decent search traffic with their alt text. Then there is Pinterest and FB traffic with good images. Tough to say.
Sam
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Regards,
Sam
Financial Samurai - Helping you achieve financial freedom sooner, rather than later.
Yakezie Network Founder
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12:38 pm
April 9, 2014
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frugaling
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Post edited 4:57 pm – April 9, 2014 by frugaling
Sam,
Really appreciate this discussion, as I've made some significant changes based on everyone's feedback. Here's what I did:
1. Installed W3 Total Cache and followed a basic guide to setting it up
-I had really struggled with this plugin until I realized I didn't need all the settings
-Just turning on a few of the key parts helps immensely (i.e., browser cache, minify)
2. Installed Smush.it and smushed all previous images
-This took about 30+ minutes to reduce all my images
-Well worth it, as most everything could be reduced
-Everything new will automatically be reduced
3. Ran GTMetrix and PageSpeed analysis like a boss
-After every step I had new changes that reduced the speed and met Google's suggestions
After all these changes, I've reduced about a second of load time. That's pretty shocking, and I went from meeting two of Google's pagespeed suggestions to 6-7. On my own computer, the site seems to load rapidly, but I'm wondering what everyone else is noticing. Would you mind taking a look? Anything else I should consider?
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9:34 am
April 12, 2014
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The Passive Income Earner
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I did a lot of work over the past few months and I was able to assess the performance differences over time with Google Webmaster and tools.pingdom.com
> You want Caching.
> You want Minify for css and JS. For some reasons, none of the plugins really worked well for me so I use a web tool to minify my css and upload it.
> You want to turn on the browser side caching by specifying an EXPIRE header in your .htaccess (this means browsers will cache the data otherwise it's not … by default all WP installs on providers do not do that)
> Compressing your images and displaying them in the original size is what Google likes according to Page Speed. Also, not all png are compressed the same … Google has a couple of tools recommended for compression. I use ImageOptim on a mac.
> You want to minify your html, css and js as much as you can. I go my html download to go from 1 MB to under 500KB. I also reduced my number of posts on the main page.
> Twitter / Facebook / Linked In / What Not buttons REALLY slow down everything. It's cool to be social, but every instance takes time for external servers and they have js script. I swapped all of mine to use the iframe version if possible. Just look at my source if you want it or ping me. My take is that if you are not active on the social platform, drop it. I keep Facebook, Twitter and G+
> I have removed most plugins needed for publishing data on my site. Often time, they are convenient but they don't change often and I hardcoded the data in my widget or the likes.
> I have switched my Aweber to use HTML and I customize the look with CSS (Similar to what OptinSkin does but without all the bells and whistle)
>>>>>>> THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE was to get a new hosting provider.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-ucSR6Asn-fM/U0lcTHVqemI/AAAAAAAACAI/b0b2–2f1cA/s800/optimization.png
Use Google Page Speed to understand the requirements.
tools.pingdom.com shows you how your site is access milliseconds at a time and can show you the bottleneck. All recommendations are based on Google Page Speed.
I could write a post … Not applicable to my site though from a content perspective.
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10:26 am
April 15, 2014
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Barbara Friedberg
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getrichwithme said:
I know Mike Little, one of the Co-Founders of Wordpress (cant beat a bit of name dropping)
His main two pieces of advice for speeding up your site are
1. COMPRESS YOUR IMAGES
2. Move your site to a dedicated rather than shared server
compress your images
compress your images
compress your images
…………….. it cant be stressed enough
He reckons that number of plugins you run has very little effect on the loading speed of your site.
Any ideas on how much a dedicated server costs?
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7:51 am
April 16, 2014
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The Passive Income Earner
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It all depends who you are with.
I did not get a dedicated server but by switching to Liquid Web, it made a huge difference as the graph in my previous post shows. It's the download speed graph over time from Webmaster Tools.
I went from $6 per month with HostGator to $12 per month with Liquid Web.
Also, not all CDN are created equal … the best charge by bandwidth. I am not using one yet and I don't think I need one. My images are well compressed and I have the browser cache setup with EXPIRES tag in my .htaccess file.
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7:56 am
April 16, 2014
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Financial Samurai
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One thing to note if you are experiencing slowness on your dashboard, but quickness on your webpage, W3 Total Cache has an update. Their Object Caching.php really bogged my site down by 10X. Once I updated it and removed the object caching, everything went back to normal.
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Regards,
Sam
Financial Samurai - Helping you achieve financial freedom sooner, rather than later.
Yakezie Network Founder
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10:56 am
April 18, 2014
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Eric – PersonalProfitability.com
| | Portland, OR | |
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What a coincidence, I just happened to write a post on this very topic at the end of March. Speed Up Your WordPress Site for Free in 5 Easy Steps
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9:55 am
April 19, 2014
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The Passive Income Earner
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Looks like you went through the same process I did and concluded that your server change improved performance the most!
Did you compare the compression on your files with the tools Google Recommend? I am curious if the Smush.It plugin actually compresses by trying the multiple compressions available just like Google does with the tools. If you need to optimize your images at once, you can also FTP on your site, get the images, run them through a tool such as ImageOptim and then upload them.
The size of your images is just another decision point, you want to make sure the images on your page are at the original source. Google Page Speed looks at that. I make all my images so I control that easily.
I did not know about the Autoptimize plugin. I'll give it a try as I was doing the minify manually on my CSS using a WebSite tools. Many plugins fail to minify my CSS.
*** Note on the .htaccess changes. If you set it up to use caching as recommended. You cannot just update a file anymore to refresh it and clearing the cache on your server won't solve that either. The file name is used for browser caching and you need a new name (or append a version) to update the files. I went as far as caching my CSS using a version "?v=2014.4.18".
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