How can I reduce my webpage load time?

[craven22]

According to google

'On average, pages in your site take 4.6 seconds to load (updated on Apr 3, 2011). This is slower than 71% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (fewer than 100 data points). The chart below shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.'

My website: http://ablemagazine.co.uk

I've installed Cache plugins, Minify plugins, reduce the amount of posts on my main page. But my website is still taking too long to load and I'm afraid I'm being penalised for it.

Any tips?

[baptisteplace]

Page load time is a very small factor for website ranking, but this could be done :

Regroup CSS in a single file, same for javascripts. Make a CSS sprite for the background images.

Add expires and gzip in your htaccess file if you can :

<ifmodule expires_module="">ExpiresActive On
        ExpiresDefault "access"
        ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType image/bmp "access plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType image/ico "modification plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType image/vnd.microsoft.icon "modification plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType application/ico "modification plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType image/icon "modification plus 1 year"
        ExpiresByType image/x-icon "modification plus 1 year"</ifmodule>

<ifmodule deflate_module="">AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/php text/html text/txt text/javascript text/css application/javascript application/x-javascript</ifmodule>

[KeriMorgret]

Keep in mind that (to the best of my knowledge) Google is pulling the above data just from visitors that have the Google Toolbar installed, and does have a low number of data points for this conclusion.

In looking at your current home page, I'd say the image file sizes are something you can easily work on to help speed load time and increase user experience. In Firefox, right click on any image, and click View Image Information. It should take you to the Media tab of the Page Info dialog, and show you all of the media you have on that page, including background images.

Your theme files are large in some cases. The main-right.jpg file is 20k, header.jpg is 35k. Your logo is a 12k png. There are also several post images in the 20-40k range.

Yahoo has a tool called Smush.it which offers lossless compression, and there is even a Wordpress plugin that will compact new photos on upload, and reduce file sizes of existing images in the media library on demand http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/. For time invested, the plugin is probably the easiest fix to reduce your file size and speed up your page load time, in addition to fixing the images in your theme.

[craven22]

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately I already compress all my images with photoshop so the savings with smush.it are usually less than 500Bytes. I suppose it all helps!

[KeriMorgret]

The logo actually reduces a whole lot via smush.it, so that can help a little. Have you looked at the graphic elements that came with the theme that you didn't necessarily create?

Yahoo's Y!Slow extension for Firefox can also point out a lot of other areas for speeding up the site.