I’m researching cache options for WordPress, which is not easy. The latest WordPress uses “object caching” whatever that is. But that’s another tangent for another day.
Google says I’m slow:
Performance overview
On average, pages in your site take 6.7 seconds to load (updated on Feb 22, 2010). This is slower than 83% of sites.
That’s bad. Very bad. It doesn’t matter I’m spending hundreds of dollars for hosting.
I just installed Google’s “Page Speed” add-on. (It’s actually a Firebug add-on, an add-on to an add-on, which isn’t immediately obvious.) This tool made me aware of something I hadn’t thought of. My syntax highlighter plugin could be silently killing me.
How bad is this plugin killing me? Not sure yet. The plugin uses the “GeSHi engine” which I think is another way of saying “lots of extra code” to make my code snippets look cool. So now what? I think my only option now is to rip out all the syntax highlighter tags, from dozens of posts, then repost (after converting them) the snippets, one at a time, which will take hours. You know, it’s probably worth it.
But will this really make my site load that much faster? Probably it won’t make a huge difference. I suspect I need more dramatic changes, like a cache plugin, a faster server, maybe better connectivity?
Update: I think I found a solution. Page generation time is the problem, not so much the file sizes.
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OK, didn’t see any speed improvement using W3 Total Cache. In fact, pageviews went down, a lot. I’m assuming pageviews went down because the site was less dynamic, therefore less interesting. So I disabled it.
However I did remove all gif/png/jpg images from the theme, and dropped a banner ad. So the site seems a little faster now.
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OK, I installed the W3 Total Cache.
First problem I see, you can’t surf your own site while you’re logged in. Why? Because people will see at the bottom of every page: “Logged in as admin” etc.