Blogging had been super light lately, mainly because I’ve been spending an awful amount of time under the blogging hood, trying to boost the speed and performance as much as possible without sacrificing any of its major features. Speed is everything when it comes to traffic and keeping people on your blog. If your site doesn’t load fast enough you not only lose traffic, but a potential audience too.
So I spent the better part of the week testing the load times and discovered to my horror that it would take an average of 3-4 seconds for my blog to load, when the typical load for other blogs would only be half a second. Oy.
Improving speed meant I had to sacrifice a lot of much needed plugins though, including my emoticons. :( So I carefully went through each plugin I had to see which ones were acting as bottlenecks, and which ones I could afford to get rid of. Then I read up on MySQL databases (since MySQL powers my blog) to see how I could optimize my settings to the max without taxing the server. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I must have spent over 50 hours doing all this. Yes I can be a little obsessive like that. :-D
In the end, I made a compromise that allowed me to keep most of my plugins’ functionality by simply switching off a few things here and there, and managed to cut my load times down to 1.5 seconds. It’s still not where I’d like it to be, but at least it’s MUCH better than before.
The only major difference you’ll notice is that “Related Posts” no longer show in my individual posts, except in my feeds. I hate to see that go but it did improve speed times markedly. I’m pretty much done now, but if you happen to notice things moving really slow here, let me know.
And now, MAYBE I can finally move on from this and resume my regularly blogging schedule, this being a new month and all too.
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Honestly, I come to your site because of your posts. It could take 2 minutes to load Ace’s site and I would wait. It is the content that brings me in. More people lose interest when you are not blogging. My traffic has decreased significantly because of my lack of consistent blogging.
You could take the poor kitten pic off and that might save some time. Just sayin’… Poor
I read your site on Google Reader…so load times don’t affect me…but I do get very bored looking at “Habitation of Justice has 0 new articles” for days at a time…
I get this impression y’all want me to blog more often, but I’m not sure.
Actually all this work was to make sure people coming in via Google searches don’t immediately click the back button on their browser because my blog was loading too slow.
Yes. Blog more often.
Try wp-super cache?
Super Cache sucks because it does nothing for first time visitors, only repeat visitors who happen to be visiting the same page before the cache expires (which is why it’s most helpful for high traffic spikes to a particular page). It also doesn’t keep parts of my site dynamic either, which adversely affects my polls and ratings system.
Oh well, Ill just have to live with 1.5 seconds.
I read your blog to remind me why I got married… and also how much better my taste is in music. ;)
Try this plugin to replace the “Related Posts” one.
http://ajaydsouza.com/wordpress/plugins/contextual-related-posts/
Ok, dissing on my affinity for the Commodores and Air Supply is gonna get you a right good spanking.
But thanks for the link. :-D
Eh, I actually love Air Supply. Now the Commodores… Blech.
Awww, you don’t think you’re once… twice… three times a laaaaady!? ;)
I’ve been meaning to tell you that your page loads very slow for me. I don’t seem to have this trouble with other blogs but yours. I was thinking it was from all the ads you have on here or something. It does it continuosly when I move back and forth in here to leave a comment, etc.
Just checked it now and it seems fine, pretty zippy actually. :-D You may have visited while it was doing maintenance work in the background, which tends to slow things down, or it was one of the ads that might have had problems showing up. If you seem to notice it happening EVERY TIME you visit let me know!
unfortunately for me it’s always when I come here no matter the time and day. It won’t even let me use the arrows to page down till everything loads. It’s usually the ads that are loading last. It’s not dial up slow but a bit slow for cable internet. Who knows though, my computer is getting old and may just not be liking something on your page. My guess is it’s the ads.
You can try disabling javascript before coming back again. If my blog moves nice and zippy then I’ll know it’s the ads (since they’re powered by javascript) and Lord knows I have a crap-ton of javascript crammed on here.