Over at the Official Google Webmaster Blog, Matt warns that Google might (someday) factor in page load times when returning search results. In other words, if your website is slow, it might fall off the search rankings.
He pointed me to a site I hadn’t seen before–webpagetest.org. It’s fantastic. I’ve used many different website optimization tools (including Web Page Analyzer, Google Webmaster Tools, and Page Speed), but WebPageTest provides several different sources throughout the world, and different bandwidths, with different browser versions, and a fantastic user interface.
I used it to examine the performance of two of my sites–www.vistaclues.com and www.northrup.org. Northrup.org was pretty good already because I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing it, but I did discover that simultaneous connections with older browsers was limiting the page load time a bit (despite the fact that I already use parallelization), so I juggled the locations of images around a bit.
VistaClues, however, was fairly awful. You can see the test results here. Specifically, compare my first test result with my last (with the same parameters).
| Before | After | |
| First Visit (time) | 15.4 seconds | 6.4 s |
| First Visit (size) | 830 KB | 592 KB |
| Second Visit (time) | 5.9 seconds | 2.4 s |
| Second Visit (size) | 60 KB | 33 KB |
Overall, I increased performance by about 250% and decreased bandwidth usage by about 30%:
- I eliminated a few unnecessary objects (including a reference to an object that didn’t exist because the theme developer had left it out).
- I enabled gZip compression. I had incorrectly setup the WP Super Cache plugin for WordPress and disabled gZip.
- I implemented parallelization by adding the sub-domains images1.vistaclues.com through images.vistaclues.com and referencing different images and objects using these hostnames–even though they point back to www.vistaclues.com. I also activated the Parallelize WordPress plug-in.
- I removed the stupid Gravatar (Avatar) pictures in the comments. Almost nobody used them and they REALLY caused a lot of unnecessary requests.
- I enabled caching for images, CSS files, JavaScript files, and other static files by editing Apache’s .htaccess file. No, I’m not becoming a Linux guy. ;)
- I minified some scripts and plug-ins by activating the WP Minify plug-in.
- I disabled some WordPress plug-ins that I was no longer using to decrease the page generation time.
With all that said, 6.4 seconds still seems like a long time to wait for the first page to load. Other pages do load faster, and the page generally appears within a couple of seconds. So, don’t take the page load time literally, just use it as a point of reference.
Add a comment if you have other performance suggestions or different performance tools.