WordPress 1 Minute Wonder – Quick Performance Boosts

This latest WordPress 1 Minute Wonder installation covers a couple of quick alternative steps that can be taken to dramatically increase your site performance… and yes I’ll be honest and say that actually to cover all 3 steps here it takes more like 10 minutes.

In the below investigation I based “performance” on Google’s PageSpeed rating and Yahoo’s YSlow and this was run against a newly launched online craft store site called Designs and Such.

Step 1 – Optimise Images

Using the PageSpeed tool (in Chrome) it was possible to  see that I had several un-optimised images on my site. I processed these with the free optipng tool and instantly saw an increase in 6 PageSpeed points and  2 YSlow points. Not bad for something which anyone can do.

Step 2 – W3-Total-Cache Plugin

Now there is some stigma around having lots of plugins on your WordPress site and the detrimental affect it can have on performance… now whether you back this line of thought or not* sometimes plugins can really benefit your site in this context. Now please be sure to backup your DB (or entire site) before using any plugins which might modify you’re .htaccess and potentially other files in your installation.

For my investigation I installed the W3-Total-Cache plugin and configured it just to cache and minify my HTML, JS and CSS. The results were staggering… I saw an overall increase of 11 Google PageSpeeed points and 12 YSlow points

Step 3 – .htaccess Tweaks

Another step, this time plugin-free, should immediately give some good results. Simply by adding the following lines to one of my site’s .htaccess file I saw a further 4 point increase in my PageSpeed score and a 1 point increase in Yahoo’s YSLow rating.

The following lines do 2 things, add expire headers to static files such as CSS, javascript and images and also removing ETags. Of course please backup your .htaccess before doing any of this.

#Expire Header
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
ExpiresByType image/ico A2592000
ExpiresByType text/css A2592000
ExpiresByType text/javascript A2592000

FileETag none

This is defining a 1 month expiry for all content covered by the files types listed above. Note if you do this there’ll be implications if you want to modify any of the files, like CSS, and have the changes to affect immediately.

This technique (and more info on it) was found over at Tips & Tricks HQ

The overall results

So in total by carrying out the above steps I saw the following performance increase. Of course the results will vary site by site but I believe that with Search Engines using site performance as a factor when ranking your site that 10 minutes spent here will be of value.

Google PageSpeed Increase = 21

Yahoo YSlow Increase = 15

[jbox color=”blue” vgradient=”#fdfeff|#bae3ff” title=”Found this useful?”]If you’ve used this technique on your site for performance reasons and have some results then please leave them in the comments.[/jbox]

* When speaking to @westi at WordCamp UK (or WordCamp Manchester) in 2010 he said that putting code in plugins rather than the core should result in no performance hit… of course it depends on the quality of code