4 Tips for a faster website

Increase Page Rendering Speed

No one likes a slow loading website.  At least I don’t think anyone makes their website slow on purpose. Good site and blog administration not only means developing a website that’s pleasing to the eye (site design) and pleasing to the brain (content), but it also means taking a proactive stance in the reduction of page loading and rendering times (programming). Luckily, information about this particular area is something that most people have considered and have made available.

Download and install Yslow.

YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.

Read about the techniques that others have used.

At some point in time, every serious blogger been investigated and tackled the problem of slow web page rendering. The problem of slow page rendering might be due to several factors including, but not limited to: using a resource-limited shared hosting environment, receiving a sudden increase in traffic, or enabling inefficient plugins. In addition, slow page rendering might reflect a strain on the database, an error in the programming or coding of a page, or failure to tweak out the software that runs the webserver.

1. Diggproof & Speed up Your Wordpress Blog
2. 13 Great WordPress Speed Tips & Tricks for MAX Performance
3. How Fast is your Wordpress Blog
4. How To Make Your Website Or Blog Faster
5. Quick Tips For Wordpress Speed Up
6. Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours
7. Reducing Your Website’s Bandwidth Usage

Reduce the number and size of images; reduce the size of coding.

Even though in all likelihood YSlow will make these recommendations, their strong influence on the overall rendering speed cannot be denied. Creating a clean website that loads up fast decreases the chance that visitors will leave based upon slow loading times (Response Time: Eight Seconds, Plus or Minus Two).

Filling up a page with dozens of large images, javascript, flash, and other nonessential garbage reminds me of cluttered and amateurish myspace pages (16 Reasons Why MySpace Sucks). In essence, having fewer items for a visitor to download and having smaller items that a visitor must download will lead to snappier loading times for the point of view of your visitors.

Optimize mySQL and Apache

Earlier, I mentioned that reading the techniques that other have used would provide suggestions for optimization. It should be mentioned that there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” approach to optimizing mySQL and Apache. In other words, values that work on one website might further impair another.

mySQL

1. Tuning / Optimizing my.cnf file for MySQL
2. The Shop Network’s my.cnf.
3. Reducing mySQL queries in Wordpress

Apache

1. The Shop Network’s httpd.conf.
2. vBulletin’s forum on Server Configuration.
3. Optimize a Website for Speed, Security, and Easy Management

Tagged as: httpd performance, mySQL performance, server performace, wordpress tricks