How do I make my site faster? | Help Desk | Yakezie Forums

How do I improve my blog speed?

I've done the WebPage Test and I get F's in most categories.

I have installed the Wordpress Gzip Compression plugin as well as Quick Cache, but nothing seems to work. I plan on getting rid of some of the ads on the side which I think may help, but does anyone have any concrete tips for this non-savvy blogger? 

Thanks!

Hmm I'm not sure. But your site is just as fast as any other website for me.

Another good one is Revision Control. It allows you to clear up all the individual saved revisions of each post.

There is a lot that goes into making a blog quicker.  You need to optimize images, limit the number of plugins, use appropriate plugins to speed everything up and use reliable web hosting.

Right now I'm just getting a white page for your blog too.  So you should disable whichever plugin you just activated.

I checked out your blog again now that it's back up.  It seems the major area that you can improve in is optimizing images.  I suspect that big header graphic is fairly large file.  Most of your other images could be optimized for file size too.  Ideally you would have adobe photoshop installed so that you can save all images 'for web'. 

You also don't want to be resizing images with html.  For example, the image in the top post is taking up more download time than necessary since it is loading the original image that is twice as large.

If you don't have photoshop there are websites or other software that will specifically help you with optimizing images for the web.

I'm going to bookmark this thread and try some of these things when I have some time.  I tried installing SuperCache a couple months back and immediately started getting tweets that my site was coming up as just a bunch of random gibberish.  Since then I've been a little gun shy but this is something I know I need to improve upon as well. 

Also try to get a good all-in-one plug-in like W3 Total Cache.  If you have 5 different plug-ins aimed at speeding up your site, that may negate any performance benefits since each one will add a little bit to the load time.  Getting a good all-in-one will give you the benefit of optimizing the site speed without the bulk.

Jeff mentioned cloudflare, but I found that it can be very wonky working with some images, especially in feeds.  

Some things you just cannot help.  I have a bunch of redirects from an old site pointing to my new one which as unfortunate as it may be, is fairly necessary to make sure that when some links out there are followed they don't lead to a dead end.  

Also, sometimes you just cannot get a super fast site and still provide the content you want and other features you want all at the same time.

I came to this side to ask a completely unrelated question, and here, forty five minutes later, I've made drastic changes and improvements! Thanks!

Try Google's Page Speed Online  It will give you specific prioritized recommendations on how to improve your site's load time.