WordPress — How To Have Your Own Web Site – Tweaks for Speed – Part II

Speed– that is the singular thing for which we all strive. It doesn’t matter if you are a casual user of computers or a power geek. Speed is the ultimate destination.

When you point your mouse at something and click, you want it to respond NOW… not 5 seconds later. We are a greedy lot. The same holds true for the webmasters of this world. We want our sites to respond in a blazing fast manner– just to keep the greedy people happy, of course. The truth is that I want instant results, too. And that’s what this article is all about.

Catch Up

For those who would like to catch up with previous articles in this series, here they are:

1. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Introduction
2. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – What You’ll Need
3. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Installation
4. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Dashboard & cPanel
5. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Plug-Ins, Widgets, Themes and Headers
6. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Security
7. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – SEO
8. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Tweaks for Speed – Part I

Plugins – The Pros and Cons

Probably the worst thing you can do is add 20 or 30 plugins to your WordPress site. Each one will add some overhead and cause your site to be slower. That said, I’m going to suggest that you add some plugins to make your site faster. That doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense at first glance, but please bear with me for a moment.

Pros

Adding plugins can give your web site a new face. It can give your site everything from newsletters, to image galleries, to eCommerce abilities, to anything-you-can-think-of capabilities.

Cons

Keep in mind that each one you add also contributes some “weight”. That is, it takes time to process all that great stuff. That in turn translates to more time for your page to be rendered and we all know by now that people don’t like to wait. Period. Mere seconds cost dollars. That page must render immediately, if not sooner.

Pros (again)

It is sometimes justified to add a plugin if it in fact speeds up your web site. I’m about to share some methods and plugins that work for me. I also recommend you give them a try. If you don’t like them, and/or they don’t seem to work well for you, then delete them. It’s that simple.

Note: Most plugins are free of charge. Some authors request donations and will provide you with a handy nag from time to time. Others are strictly commercial and you must dole out some cash to use them. The choice is yours, of course, but be warned that some of the free ones may contain malware.  My strong suggestion is that you only use the plugins that are verified on the official WordPress site.

Speed Tips

Number One – Remove Slow Plugins

P3 Performance Profiler

There are a number of ways to identify slow plugins. We here at DCT use a plugin called P3-Plugin Performance Profiler

Normally, this plugin is kept disabled, But, once in a while, it is run to simply check up on things. When run, it  will provide you with a nice report showing how much time and memory your various plugins are using. The lower the numbers, the better. Here’s an example:

By clicking the various tabs P3 Profiler will show results in various ways. This pie chart is the default view. The larger the pie slice, the more overhead that particular plugin is consuming.

There are other profilers you can use. One I have no experience with but am certainly curious about:

NewRelic

They have both a commercial (read “pay cash for”) and a free Lite version. For curiosity’s sake, I will have to try them out.

The Galumph Option

There is also this ponderous method you may lumber along with:

• Disable all your plugins and measure the site speed
• Enable half your plugins and measure the site speed
• If the site is still slow, then disable half the enabled plugins and measure again
• If the site is still fast, then add half the disabled plugins and measure again.
• Rinse and repeat until you are either satisfied or exhausted– whichever comes first.

It is not quick, but it does work effectively and allows you to narrow down the offending, slow plugins.

Number Two – Write Your Own Plugins

In this limited article, I am not about to tutor you on how to write and insert your own code. Besides, I am not qualified to do so. But I must point out that you can in many situations do better than install a plugin. Consider learning a bit of PHP and insert your own code into WordPress to make things faster and/or add features to your site.

I would be less than honest if I didn’t mention I have yet to try this. From what I’ve read on the subject a classic example of a plugin that could be eliminated and self-written would be one of those social network bars you see all over the place today. Apparently they take up a lot of memory and time and by injecting the code yourself it will improve things considerably.

That’s a key step towards running a successful web site. If you are not inclined towards stressing the old gray matter once in a while, then perhaps running a web site may not be for you.

Number Three – Caching

In a previous article I briefly touched upon the concept of caching. There are several levels of caching and some are as follows:

Database Caching

Don’t presume your server is optimizing database caching. Talk to them about “key_cache” and “query_cache”. Read about them and learn all you can.

PHP OpCode

If your server supports PHP OpCode caching, use it. DCT uses it and I’m sure you have noticed the fast page load speeds it provides. Every time I have checked, DCT loads in under five seconds and usually quite a bit faster than that. Two to three seconds is a time worth striving for, though it can be difficult to achieve.

Browser Caching

I briefly mentioned browser caching in Part I of this article. It is vitally important and setting it up properly is imperative. By using the speed testing tools in the previous article you will be able to see if your settings are optimal.

Minification

Most scripts such as JavaScript files and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) contain a lot of remarks and white space. This is helpful for human readers but browsers find all that stuff cumbersome. They still must parse through it all, gaining nothing and losing much in the process.

Minifiers are basic tools that will strip these files of all the unnecessary bloat. This gives your browser less stuff to sift through and thereby makes its job easier. The result is that you will see small performance gains. Every little bit counts in your struggle to trim down those all-important page load times.

Page Caching

There are two tools that  I think work well: WP SuperCache and W3TotalCache.

WP SuperCache –

PHP is an interpretive language. That is, it will read the instructions provided to it and interpret those instructions each and every time. Basically, a slow process. If you reload the same page over and over again, PHP will render that same page again and again without “learning” anything from its previous attempts. On the positive side, this is partly what gives PHP its wonderful flexibility.

Note: For the curious among you, PHP is an abbreviation for “Hypertext PreProcessor”. It also stands for Philippine Peso, Personal Home Page, Parents Helping Parents, Please Have Patience, and Partial Hospitalization Program (whatever that might be and it sounds scary– perhaps they only provide half the necessary attention?). There are many others but I shall refrain from boring you with the entire list.

Page caching tries to overcome this debilitating weakness by remembering the state of the finished page and storing it as an HTML document. HTML is something your browser knows like a mother knows her child. Rendering HTML is native to browsers and that is what they do. Why not provide it with HTML instead of processing PHP scripts in the background each and every time?

WP SuperCache does just that. It first checks the validity of the page. By that I mean that it makes certain the age of a page hasn’t expired. If the page is the same, or within its expiration date range, it delivers an already processed base HTML page for the browser to devour. Very fast.

W3 TotalCache –

W3 TotalCache is most likely the ultimate caching plugin you can employ on a WordPress site.

Given how powerful it is, I must point out that it also requires a pretty hefty learning curve. It may be worth the effort if you are so inclined. It will handle nearly every caching requirement you can think of including everything discussed above. The exception is the PHP OpCode caching which must be enabled on your server if they support it.

Use a CDN

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are another way to provide quick load times to your web site.

By far, images take the most time to load. Other static, not-often-changing items should also be considered. A CDN will store these items on their servers. Next, when a person asks to render a page on your site, instead of asking your server for the static properties, the CDN will kick in and provide them instead. Yes, this involves yet another HTTP call, but the benefit is that large CDNs like CloudFlare have servers all over the world. Ideally, the CDN server nearest you will provide the content. This means faster delivery of items that normally take the most amount of time. It doesn’t matter if you live in Chicago or Hong Kong, provided they have a server geographically near you.

Note: I feel obliged to point out this downside to using any CDN. CloudFlare went “down” a while back. Because of its huge footprint on the Internet, that meant a lot of web sites went “down” with it. Millions of them. Mine included. Oh, the pages loaded OK, but none of the static content was there. It looked pretty bare. In some cases the websites wouldn’t load at all and delivered an error instead. That was me.

That is not to say CloudFlare is weak by any stretch of the imagination. I simply point it out so you have an understanding of what can happen when you depend on someone else when they get attacked by the scum of the earth. It can happen to anybody and usually happens to those who are biggest and most prominent. CloudFlare happens to be one of those.

Another reason to mention CloudFlare is that they offer a free service. A sweet deal for the common man, I’d say.

If you’d like to try out CloudFlare, it involves some very basic steps:

• Set up an account (of course)
• Get a “key” and place it in your WordPress root directory (this proves you are who you say you are and that you have access to your site’s internal workings)
• Change the DNS addresses at your server (this is probably the trickiest part but not beyond reason and your Host should be able to help you if you stumble)
• If your Hosting provider denies you help, or simply ignores you, then find a different Host (you are giving them hard-earned cash, after all– finding a good Host is at the top of the list and good support is a top-priority)

Plans for future articles:

• Anything else that comes to mind along the way – if you would like me to cover something you feel I missed in this simple WordPress series, then please let us know. I will do my best to include it.
• Conclusion – a short reminder of what has been covered and perhaps a few personal thoughts as well. There are a bounty of those. “Doctor, you must learn to control your emotions. They will be your undoing.” ~ Mr. Spock in “Wrath of Khan”

Links to articles in this series:

1. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Introduction
2. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – What You’ll Need
3. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Installation
4. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Dashboard & cPanel
5. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Plug-Ins, Widgets, Themes and Headers
6. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Security
7. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – SEO
8. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Tweaks for Speed – Part I
9. WordPress – How To Have Your Own Web Site – Tweaks for Speed – Part II

Conclusions

Speed is the very thing we all strive for in a computing world. It doesn’t matter if we are running Windows XP with Internet Explorer 6. We just want it to be fast. Even if that means a million errors per second – which XP users should have come to expect by now. Sorry, but it’s time to catch up folks…

I have barely touched upon the possible methods and means to speed up WordPress. The variations are boundless. The convolutions are limitless. And the positive results gained by your efforts may be the titillating reward– not to mention the clear gains in Search Engine rankings.

Don’t strive for perfect grades but do try to get your site running the best it can. Concentrate on its weakest properties first, then work your way up and do your best to “fix” the next thing on the list.

The end results will be directly proportional to your on-going efforts and sheer strength of will,

Richard

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