Site speed

  • This is just an attempt to get some feedback and ideas please.

    I have been using WordPress for a few years now. I purchased a magazine style theme that used graphics quite a lot, re-sizing them quite often to put them in a slider and in smaller thumbnails for links. I found back then that this use of graphics made page speeds too slow for what I wanted, so I closed down some of the features.

    I am thinking of upgrading to a new theme, and notice that themes these days have many features, for example generating automatic links to similar posts, re-sizing graphics, sliders, fancy visual effects etc.

    I’d be interested to hear if anyone has any views, please, on whether these slow page load speeds too much, especially on mobile devices, or whether improved coding and faster computers and hand held devices make things OK.

    Thanks for any thoughts.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Lot of things can factor into how fast a page loads. Can run it through a speed test to see where things can be improved or take the longest. https://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ is a good spot.

    Every single image, feature, widget, line of code, and so on will increase the time for any device.

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    Thanks. Have you had an issue with page speed that led to you not using some features?

    Well, I’ve never let my blog get too crazy. I’ve always been wary of “feature creep”. For the longest time my parents were still on dial-up so I didn’t want my sites being very bloaty.

    Another thing to take into consideration is things loading from 3rd party sites. Twitter and Facebook widgets and so on.

    I suppose I did remove a couple features. I got rid of the emoji support because I’ll never use it and I disabled the loading of external Google fonts.

    Hi unklee,

    There are few things you can do with images.

    Images : Compress images to reduce file size. Many lossless options available. I like WPsmushit.
    Image css sprites : To reduce the number of image requests you should
    combine all your theme images with images sprites.

    You can improve page speed by applying performance optimization steps.

    -> Configure PHP options
    -> Session storage – File System
    -> Use a PHP accelerator
    -> 404 errors
    -> MySQL table optimization
    -> Merge CSS and JavaScript
    -> Install Memcached
    -> Install Total cache.
    -> HTML code optimization
    -> Theme’s query optimization.

    Minify code (CSS, JS, HTML):By minifying code you eliminate unnecessary bytes like spaces, breaks and indentation. This can be done with W3 Total Cache and other plugins.

    Combine CSS & JS files:By combining your CSS files into one and JS files into one you will significantly save HTTP requests. This can be done with W3 Total Cache and other plugins.

    Remove unused code:This saves bytes and minimizes bandwidth use.

    Minimizing DNS lookups will reduce the number of DNS lookups the browser has to make.

    You can test you webpage speed at below.
    https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
    https://gtmetrix.com/

    Based on the result you can follow performance optimiation.

    It might be hard for you to follow if you are not technical person.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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