I have been looking into different cache plugins, trying to speed up how fast my site loads.

Do you have any suggestions?

I was suggest to use W3 super cache, but setting that baby up is a little
beyond my understanding at this point

Thank you for your contribution,
Jeff Faldalen

I’ve been reading your blog since the beginning…when you had less than 3000 subscribers. I remember when you crossed the 3000 number…you were quite happy!

Anyhow, I had some extra time this morning and have been re-reading some of these classic posts….many of which are still very important today.

I was wondering if you were going to do a re-fresh or update of some of these?

Please keep up the great work, I attribute a lot of my current success to the tips I’ve picked up on your blog over the years.

Warm Regards,

David Gobeil

thank a lot for your kindness….

thank you

Thanks anyway… 🙂

at the end of the image Ie dog.gif/

Trouble with all the tips everyone always writes is that they are targeted at people that know website design etc

Help would be great…

Regrads

Richard

As in, reducing your main .html file by separating the CSS section on a stylesheet file on its own..

Thanks for the great tips. I’m just wonndering if there is any method or tools to optimize external javascript codes. External JS codes really killing load time of a webpage.

Thanks for commenting.

Besides, it only improves speed if you are actually linking to a static file — if you’re working with Servlets for example, there is no performance increase. Maybe I’m the only one working with Servlets. 🙂

They don’t seem to like positive comments, they think they’re fake 🙂

Another thing bloggers should consider, is their initial theme choice. Some themes are slow to load even as a demo with hardly any content. That’s a good sign to not even consider using it, inspite of what it looks like.

This is probably the best but least used option for speeding up web sites. It increase performance by a factor of 4-5 depending on the site. One needs to be a little care full as older browsers do not support but in general especially if a site is internal turn this on.

And to reply to the obvious retort :-):
No it does not slow down the web server in most cases. The time saved by pushing smaller packets through the web server, ability to cache more and the network card more than compensate. It also works well with dynamic sites.

I would add Number 7 – speed test it

1) Sometimes you just can’t put all your javascript in your footer (for example when using adsense or things in that line). For those times use the ‘defer’ attribute. If true, it tells the browser to execute the javascript code after the body of the page was interpreted and rendered.

Example (hope it will be shown):
<script src=”script.js” type=”text/javascript” defer=”defer”></script>

2) Use optimized versions of your javascript libraries or optimize them yourself. A lot of good javascript libraries put at your disposition an optimized version that comes without comments, with a lot less spaces, less characteres, etc. If your library doesn’t have an optimized version, you can optimize it by “crunching” it, i.e. do all the things optimized versions of javascript libraries have.

How to crunch? Here’s the explanation and how to do it:

Another thing I did recently was change the layout of my div elements. First, I placed each div by absolute positioning within another “entire page” div so they show up and don’t move around as content loads.

The other thing I did was move the content div above (in the code) the sidebar divs. Since I used absolute positioning, it didn’t effect the actual layout. I don’t know if this is good practice or bad practice, but it makes the content load first, then the sidebars. Plus I thought I heard somewhere that search engines like to see the content near the top of the page — but I may be entirely wrong on this. Somebody let me know if this was a dumb move.

egon mentioned not using content directly from other sites, rather host the content on your server (your host).

Another important factor is to look at your domain host itself. I know it’s sometimes difficult to compare hosts, but test the speed of your site on your host. Cheap hosting may become costly.

Also, I suggest removing anything that is sitting on somebody elses server. If that server has high load and slow load time, so will yours, and that sucks.

Image optimizing is important, and I highly recommend the Dynamic Drive optimizer that you linked to. I use it all the time.

Using fancy backgroung images intead of simple background colors is a common mistake, I agree.