Oct 21, 2011 - Development    7 Comments

Go Faster Stripes For Websites

Toolbox Go Faster Stripes For WebsitesOver the past 4 months, I’ve been tinkering aroundwith my websites in an attempt to improve performance, reduce load times & bandwidth, without impacting the layout.

During the course, I’ve stumbled across a few little tools & websites, that I’ve found invaluable and thought I post them here to share with others;

  • CloudFlare – Distribute your content around the world so it’s closer to your visitors (speeding up your site).
  • WP-Smush.it – Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Yahoo’s Smush.it API (WordPress plugin)
  • WP-Optimize – Cleanup and optimisation tool tackling database tables, post revisions, drafts and comments. (WordPress plugin)
  • Pingdom – Uptime and performance monitoring made easy. Be the first to know when your website is down.
  • Google PageSpeed – Get hints and tips from Google on how to improve your webpage speed.
  • Leverage Browser Caching – Set expiry times on files such as CSS, Java so that they aren’t downloaded every single time.

There are plenty more tools and website out there to tap into, some offering great tips and tools, but beware some can cause conflicts depending on how you’re setup (WP-Super Cache and CloudFlare being one of them).

Everyones setup is different so the best thing is to try something, and run it through Google PageSpeed test to see if you can get a score in the high 80′s or 90′s.

  • http://www.facebook.com/neil.mcdermott Neil McDermott

    Nice post. Does CloudFlare actually work?

    Have you seen decent page speed improvements?

  • http://twitter.com/ChrisEFrost Chris E Frost

    Thanks mate. I’ve seen all round improvements to be honest, many of which I can say are most probably down to CloudFlare.

    They’ve cut my bandwidth down by 48% and therefore reduced server load, meaning increased speed and during an outage, my sites remained “online”. I’m still using the free service with about 15 website covered at the moment, and its real simple to switch back if you need to for whatever reason.

  • http://www.facebook.com/neil.mcdermott Neil McDermott

    Nice one cheers. Will take a look.

  • http://twitter.com/DeepakTailor1 Deepak Tailor

    Great article, thanks for the sites

  • http://twitter.com/chrispking Chris King

    Hi

    I thought I’d share what I’ve done to improve my site performance..I seem to have fluked a 90′s score on Google PageSpeed. I should really give myself a pat on the back as this is a whole new world.

    Start with a question for Chris F – have you tried using CloudFlare with the latest W3 Total Cache v 0.9.2.4?  Within W3 TC there is an option to integrate CloudFlare into it..have you tried with this version? I’m interested in getting more improvements and the security features of CloudFlare, but don’t want to rock the boat with the improvements so far.

    So I’ve been having challenges for a while with page speed. My web hosts Tagadab (very helpful and great support) recommended I implemented W3 Total Cache.

    1. W3 Total Cache – implemented and got some immediate improvements.

    2. WP Smush it – implemented on the back of suggestion (cheers Chris F) and got approx. 15% image weight savings. This was good considering I’ve been careful with image size.

    A few days ago I noticed that my improvements were going backwards. Today, I checked back on this post and found the Google Page Speed – and got 72%. The issue was that I had not implemented the ‘Browser Caching’  W3 Total Cache settings properly.

    So I’ve done that and now in the 90′s on Google Page Speed. I’ve also used websiteoptimization .com which still shows loads of Reds..but I don’t really understand what it’s on about..so I’ll ignore it for now.

    As well as Cloudflare, has anyone here implemented WP-Optimize with W3 Total Cache? Again would like to do more improvements but don’t want to ruin any of the good work so far.

    Being non-technical I’m amazed at the amount of support out there, including this post from Chris F – Cheers.

  • http://twitter.com/ChrisEFrost Chris E Frost

    Chris

    I still see odd fluctuations every now and then when getting my Google score, but one in the 90′s is pretty good in my opinion.

    As for the WP-Optimize plugin, all this does is tidy up your databases – removes old revisions of posts and drafts, so it probably wont have a huge impact, just means your database backend is a bit leaner & meaner. It shouldn’t have any impact on W3TC or any other plugins.

    I’ve not yet tried the latest W3TC with Cloudflare options yet. May get round to it one day… just not yet. I will probably wait until March/April before I slip it on to http://www.XmasElves.co.uk

    Good to know some of these have helped anyway :D

  • http://twitter.com/trevoredw1 Trevor Edwards

    css sprites, get your designer to make the sprite him sself and safe it as a transparent png and a psd incase you ever need to mess about.
    tell him to use spritecow.com to figure out the position of the images. this will reduce the queries. eh what else oh yeh, if you have a mac use the following free programs to optimise your images. I personally think are much better then smush it -  http://pngmini.com/ & http://imageoptim.pornel.net/