How can I cache my sidebar?

The sidebar should be cached as well. It’s the entire pageload. Note that anything NOT client-side JS, or php-as-image subloads, etc., will be static-ized and not dynamic.

Your main page is 100K. Your images are 323K. That’s a lot of data.

Then, add to the main page having to be reprocessed by a few javascript enhancements.

I’m not altogether sure why the sidebar takes so long to load — I don’t know when the JS code executes. But yes, it takes a while even on a refresh. Something’s not quite right. Definitely stop ‘stealing’ images from outside sites, run them locally, and compress them more. And of course it all depends on the server load/speed at some level.

Something’s amiss, as it looks like my browser is slow to reload images. Maybe something in cache settings somewhere is forcing more to be reloaded and not cached as it should (that’s outside of wp-cache).

If you open up the html/source view in FF, and refresh it, it refreshes near-instantly. So it MUST be JS, images, flash, etc. slowing things down. Try turning off a bunch of the extra junk, plugins, flash, on the page, see if that helps. If it does, turn things back on one by one until it starts getting really slow again.

-d

Thanks for the reply.

“Something’s amiss, as it looks like my browser is slow to reload images. Maybe something in cache settings somewhere is forcing more to be reloaded and not cached as it should (that’s outside of wp-cache).”

So do I need to tweak some settings in WP-Cache do you think?

Also, how did you tell the size of my page/images. What’s the easiest way to check this?

One more thing. Is there a way to resize/optimize images in the WordPress editor? (make the file size smaller)

In order:

– I don’t know.. I just loaded your site up again, and now the wp-cache info is in the source. again, I’d recommend turning off plugins and commenting out extra JS crap, then see how it loads. from there, turn stuff on one by one until it starts to slow down..

– Firefox developer toolbar. Information->view document size, or Tools->view speed report, or images->view image information. If you’re not using the developer toolbar, you’re missing a key tool. ??

– no clue. I’ve never used WP internal functions for images. And the sites I’ve helped tune, I’ve just told them to make sure to recompress stuff before uploading, bring it down as low as you can stand before it loses quality. But you’re also linking to external sites/images, which could affect your load speed as well.

-d

If you go to itscales.com (former webperf.org) you can request their site download your page and it will give you a graph showing the dns lookup time, the first byte received, the time till the last byte received, and the total size of every element on the page. And you’ll also see how long it takes their fast connection to download your page. A well-optimized page should load here in under 5-6 seconds, 3-5 being ideal. Less than that is excellent.

Your site loaded on my test at 18 seconds.

https://tools.itscales.com/cgi-bin/pma-dl?url=https://gamenation.neareverything.com/

WebsiteOptimization.com will also give you further assistance.

https://www.websiteoptimization.com/cgi-bin/wso/wso.pl?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgamenation.neareverything.com%2F

Be sure to use gzip on your site, it helps speed delivery of content. There’s a hack to implement gzip with wp-cache:

https://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2006/01/31/wp-cache2-and-gzip/

Rich.
BlogRodent

Thank you guys for your responses/help.

Thanks for the links, rtatum. I will check them out, and try to optimize my blog.

gzip can be helpful, but actually looking at your page’s html source, and seeing all the junk that’s there, might be a better starting place to eliminating content you don’t need, tweaking things to be ‘tighter’.

on an uncached site, I wouldn’t use gzip at all due to performance overhead on the server. on a cached site, you can get away with it.

that itscales.com site is really useful! definitely a great tool.

Thank you all for the responses. Would you mind helping me out, by showing me some things that I can eliminate from the code? That would be great! Thanks!

EDIT: I have just changed the template on my blog. This new one seems to load MUCH faster. I really liked the other one, but the filesize was just too big. ??

yep. loads incredibly faster. don’t know what it is, would assume it might have to do with either CSS or JS or both… also dropped 1/3 off html and image sizes.