Should I consolidate pages to prevent "thin content"

[JillB2013]

I have a site based on downloadable images which tend to slow a site. In order to increase speed I divided certain pages up so that there will be less images on each page such as here:

http://www.kindergartenteacherresources.com/2011/09/23/spongebob-alphabet-worksheets-uppercase-letters-a-h/

http://www.kindergartenteacherresources.com/2011/09/23/spongebob-alphabet-worksheets-uppercase-letters-i-q/

http://www.kindergartenteacherresources.com/2011/09/23/spongebob-alphabet-worksheets-uppercase-letters-r-z/

The problem is that I now have potential duplicate content and thin content.

Should I consolidate them and put all of the content from the 3 pages on one page? or maybe keep them as they are but add a rel previous / next tag? or any other suggestion to prevent a duplicate/thin content penalty while not slowing down the site too much?

[KaneJamison]

Hi Jill,

Your images on those pages are all thumbnail JPG files that are about 2kb. That's not a big deal - those shouldn't need to go on a separate page - I personally would put all of them back on a single page and focus on other site speed improvements.

A bigger deal is the large number of CSS and JS files that have to be loaded. Take a look at the page load times reported by a tool like Pingdom or Google's Site Speed tool. Most of the site load time is spent (A) contacting the server and (B) loading all of those CSS/JS files.

A couple tasks I'd work on to improve site speed:

• Read this excellent guide to how Portent lowered the load times on their Wordpress site. You should be completing many of these same tasks, although some are fairly technical.
• Use a caching plugin (w3 total cache or wordpress super cache). This plugin can always minify and combine all css files and all js files into 2 total files, which should help greatly.
• For better or worse, I've found that upgrading to a VPS instead of a shared host is the fastest way to speed up a lagging Wordpress site, especially one with a ton of plugins. This should be done after you set up caching and other tasks, however.
• Deactivate any plugins you're not using.

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions.

[FedeEinhorn]

There are a couple other scripts/enhancements you can do to speed up the site:

• CDN - Loading images using a CDN (Cloudflare offers that for free).
• Image optimization
• Lazy loading the images (Also available for free using Cloudflare)
• etc.

[JillB2013]

Thank you both for your responses. I will make the changes that you suggested.

Is it better to present the images as thumbnails with a link to the full size image (as I have done) or in a wordpress gallery?

[KaneJamison]

Hi Jill - the thumbails linked to the full size image is fine. A Wordpress gallery would simply be doing the same thing for you.