Everybody Staze...

Nobody leavz...

You are here: Home / Archives for YSlow

Return of website optimization

By

UPDATE (10/27/2011): As of today, I’m scoring a 99/100 on PageSpeed (missing point is an erroneous error about images being unoptimized), and a 99/100 on YSlow (missing point is about Cloudflare setting cookies on static content, which isn’t a huge issue). So at this point, I can finally say “USE CLOUDFLARE”. It’s more than worth it (which, since it’s free….).

So in a fit of boredom last night, I decided to take a look at page speed increases again.

This time is a bit different as I’m not using Cloudflare and I’ve changed themes. Since moving to the new theme, and an update to W3TC, I’d been getting in the mid-80’s for both Page Speed, and YSlow. Which shouldn’t be the case with Cloudflare. Everything says it should have greatly improved my speeds, and score… so something was clearly up.

So, some testing later, and I’ve figured out what was up. First, was disabling the automatic settings in W3TC. I’m guessing this (automatic minify) would work if you weren’t using a WP_CONTENT_URL (which I guess I probably don’t need anymore with Cloudflare… but changing to not use it would take a bit of work at this point.). The point of the WP_CONTENT_URL, however, is to “parallelize” the browser download process… so Cloudflare probably doesn’t solve this issue.

Anyway, disabling it, then going into W3TC’s minify section and adding all the URLs for your CSS and JS files that are loaded on your home page. Also, I went into my thematic child theme’s style.css, and removed all the @import’s, and added those CSS files to the minify settings. Reordering the CSS and JS was then a trial and error, but got it working.

Now, page loads are damn fast. And YSlow gives me 99/100, and Page Speed gives me a 97. Cloudflare gives me the CDN points, so the only thing hurting my YSlow score is Google Analytics not having long distance expiration.

Optimization takes time, but it works. I’m not positive why Page Speed is knocking off the 6 points, but I think it’s some CSS inefficiencies. *shrugs*

Good luck, and feel free to ask if you run into any issues. Might just redirect you to somewhere else, but it’s working.

New Optimize Prime!

By

So, thanks to a friend, I’ve started plugging away at my site again to make things run faster, take less bandwidth, and score higher on YSlow and Google Pagespeed (oh, and webpagetest.org, which I’ll get to later).

So, first thing I did was get some baselines. I ran my site through Yslow and Pagespeed again, and got a 84/100 and 94/100 respectively. When looking at Pagespeed, there was really nothing that wrong (or at least, nothing Google was telling me was egregious). Yslow, on the other hand, had a lot to say. The main thing, and something I’d wrestled with before, was CSS and JS minification (combining all of them, stripping out whitespace/comments, and compressing). So, I went back to work on getting that working. Turns out, in the theme I use (the seemingly wildly popular iNove) doesn’t load CSS or JS in the proper way. It would load them with normal HTML, and a PHP call to fill in there location. This is not correct. What SHOULD be done is a wp_enqueue_style or wp_enqueue_script to add the style/script to a queue, so that they can all be added by WordPress. This was preventing WP-Minify (a minifying plugin for WordPress) from intercepting the stylesheets and scripts, and minifying them. So, some hacking of my theme later, and viola! it works.

[Read more…]