Plugin to optimize your wordpress web site to load faster

Best Wordpress plugin to engage your users and collect their email. You can use header alerts, popups, or exit pages, and it works with any popular emailing service such as Mailchimp or AWeber
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Fabrice
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Plugin to optimize your wordpress web site to load faster

Post by Fabrice »

Before you can get your visitors interested by your content and happy to subscribe to your newsletter, you need first they could see your wordpress website, and speed is important factor which is also impacting your traffic with SEO ranking.

First of All, look at the current speed of your web site with

Speed Audit Tools

GTMetrix
: http://gtmetrix.com

it will grab the Google Speed Page analysis, with YSlow ( from Yahoo ), then a Waterfall of the loading timing and a bunch of advices. it is really the easiest tool I found to audit the speed of the web site when you will have to tune your Wordpress web site

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Another famous test tool is :

http://www.webpagetest.org/ but it is less convenient compared to GTMetrix which allow you to refresh ( so relaunch the test ) in 1 click


Wordpress Cache Plugins

the one I think the most complete is W3 Total Cache , it can cache files, database, minify ( but I found it hard to use and you need to carefully check the results ) but also connection with CDN ( Amazon cloudfront ) which is kind of magic when you configurer it properly.
CDN means Content Delivery Network, is not only useful for speeding the delivery of files with distributed server, ( cloudfront ) it means it will be a different server used depending on your IP and geo location.
Also as mentionned below, the browser limits their number of connection PER domain. using another domain for ressources such images with a CDN you allow the browser to make more connection in the same time.

you can also try CloudFlare which has plenty of nice feature, automatic minify for javascript and css. We are still testing it. so subscribe to this thread to get information in the future.


Optimize Pictures

Pictures are important, there can be easily optimize, from giving their size in the html code, to resize them, and also strip out the meta data or re compress them, here some tools to help about this

If you have already uploaded your pictures, the easiest plugin is

WP-Smush it

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/

once you have installed it, you could optimize existing pictures and images in your library. It won't resize them, but only recompress or optimize the information of the pictures ( for png ), so the purpose is to save around 15%, and make the score better, as it is the tool used by YSlow for evaluation, and kind of a similar solution for Google Page speed

See in 1 click in the media library we saved 7% on WPSubscribers Logo
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Light Image Resizer

can help to reduce, convert, and optimize PNG in batch, or manually, when you have the files available in local on your hard drive

Download Light Image Resizer, and soon an article Light Image Resizer for webmasters and webdesigners could be written if you ask for it. It can work on a folder and all subfolder to rewrite each photos, so use it with caution, but it will for sure help to make your png smaller by acting as frontend GUI for OptiPng

http://www.obviousidea.com/windows-soft ... e-resizer/


Online tool to optimize your WordPress

Sprite.me is a bookmarlet for your browser, it will help you to build a css sprite and a new image combining all the small images into 1 big. it is very efficient as it limits the number of threads ( download ) or hits to your server. you need to know the browser has a limit in number of threads ( 4 or 8 ) , while a typical web site can needs 80 to 120 hits when it is not optimize. it costs more time to connect and ask for the file, than to download it, so combining images in sprites, will reduce the loading time of your web site, by downloading a bigger file, instead of plenty of littles images. BUT.. it could be complex to edit your code. Sprite.me will generate one new file to upload, then a css
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once you submit your website to the bookmarket , a suggestion about graphics will be displayed
make sprite and it will create a new file

click on make sprite and you will have some code to update in your css and the location where you need to apply them, then click on export css to see the changes to do
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try SpriteMe now :
http://spriteme.org/



Data URI method

Because sometimes it is complication to make CSS Sprites for small pictures used for decoration, I finally found the best compromise for it, when you are in the final optimization ( so you don't plan to change graphics )

http://websemantics.co.uk/online_tools/ ... convertor/


Others plugins to consider

As nothing is completely safe in this world, I hightly recommand to make backups of your web site, locally, or with S3 , or dropbox.. for this, we are all using BackWPup, which is easy to configure with dropbox and very versatile to backup both files and database of your wordpress

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backwpup/
nico_pn
Posts: 71
Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2012 10:37 am

Post by nico_pn »

Thank you Fabrice,

We will have a lot of fun with all these tools ;-)
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Fabrice
ObviousIdea
Posts: 531
Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2010 6:42 pm
Location: Toulouse, France
Contact:

Post by Fabrice »

I found this article which inspires me, as Mentionned JC about DNS resolving , I think it could be profitable to split the files.

Also I should definitly look and tune up W3 Total Cache and file caching, I never know how my host is managing the disk caching with linux kernel.

http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/articl ... flare.html

and another Article from Jenni herself :) ( well documented with a lot of different links )

*****.com/wordpress/op ... speed.html
User avatar
Fabrice
ObviousIdea
Posts: 531
Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2010 6:42 pm
Location: Toulouse, France
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Post by Fabrice »

Another addition of tools found by JC ( to be tested ) http://dataurl.net/#about ( data url, css compression )

Technicle articles to combine your javascript using htaccess and some php code

http://rakaz.nl/2006/12/make-your-pages ... files.html
Saad Naeem
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Posts: 3
Joined: Sun Jul 01, 2012 2:54 pm

Post by Saad Naeem »

i have max cdn installed on my my site and when ever i activate wp-subscriber , maxcdn stops working from w3cache plugin,

wp-subscribers releases and output called

define('DONOTCDN', true);

how do i remove that?
JohnnyFit
Junior Member
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu May 31, 2012 8:37 pm

Post by JohnnyFit »

I am also unable to get this plugin to work in conjunction with a cache plugin. I have tried both Super Cache and Quick Cache. When WP Subscribers is activated, I am unable to load a cached version of any page.

I have tried this on both Chrome and Firefox browsers, while not logged in as Admin. The second I deactivate WP Subscribers, I am served a cached version of the page.

I have also deactivated all plugins to verify that another plugin was not the culprit.

Any suggestions on getting WP Subscribers to work with cache?


Saad Naeem wrote:i have max cdn installed on my my site and when ever i activate wp-subscriber , maxcdn stops working from w3cache plugin,

wp-subscribers releases and output called

define('DONOTCDN', true);

how do i remove that?
User avatar
Fabrice
ObviousIdea
Posts: 531
Joined: Wed Dec 29, 2010 6:42 pm
Location: Toulouse, France
Contact:

Post by Fabrice »

as the code to show or not show the popup will be cached, we have to turn off the cache, otherwise you will always see the popup for example even if the user has entered his information. so for now, it is the best solution we have :(
Prosperken
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Joined: Sun Jul 16, 2017 12:58 pm

Post by Prosperken »

I use w3total cache and ewww image optimizer on my wordpress site. I also did few tweaks like cloudlfare cdn and caching. The result....... it squeezed the page size and improved the Pingdom score. It is wonderful I must say if you need a reasonable fast website.
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