In January, I interviewed Kyle Simpson on Episode 4 the ATX Web Show. We discussed Web Performance and Google’s plan to “Make the Web Faster”. Since then, Google has announced they will start rewarding your site’s page speed. And in their Webmaster Tools they hint that the bar is set at ~1.4 seconds.

80% of the time users wait for a web page is because of the frontend.

Web Performant

I was sort of thunderstruck with fear. Although we always strive for better, I typically found a 3-5 second page load great and up to 7 seconds acceptable. After recording the show, I stayed up a few hours that night fiddling with The ATX Web Show and increased site performance by ~500%1.

Since seeing those results, I only think about Web Optimization. I see the web in milliseconds now. If you’re like me and never considered optimization a necessity maybe now is the time to re-evaluate that. And don’t act like this isn’t your problem because 80% of the time users wait for a webpage is because of the frontend2. The goal isn’t to fit under some imaginary kilobyte threshold, the goal is to make sure that everything is as small as possible. Reduce Filesizes, Reduce Requests, and Enable Caching.

5 Steps to a Faster Website

I documented the steps I took to increase my YSlow and Page Speed grades without getting into costly CDNs and such. A lot of sites will tell you to just install a cache plugin. And while you should do that (see Step 5), it’s important to do that after you’ve optimized or else you’re just polishing a turd, curing a symptom not the disease, putting lipstick on a pig or whatever analogy you want to use. Very little of this is WordPress specific so even you dweebs on Expression Engine can optimize your sites.

Link: http://daverupert.com/2010/06/web-performant-wordpress/