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You are here: Home / Tech / Google / Site News: New theme, performance tweaks

Site News: New theme, performance tweaks

August 6, 2011 by Paul Spoerry 1 Comment

Your users’ experience in terms of navigating your site should be reason enough for performance tuning a site. Users have many options when it comes to consuming content on the internet, and a slow performing website will frustrate them and send them to another site. A faster and more responsive website will keep them more engaged and focused on your content, rather than waiting for scripts and images to load.

Another reason is for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) since Google announced they are using page speed in their ranking algorithm. This means that faster performing sites may rank higher in search engine results. As developers and marketers look to optimize their sites, page speed should be among the top things they look into. Consider the following from an article by Pear Analytics:

  • Zona research said in 1999 that you could lose up to 33% of your visitors if you page took more than 8 seconds to load.
  • Akamai said in 2006 that you could lose up to 33% of your visitors if your page took more than 4 seconds to load on a broadband connection.
  • Tests done at Amazon in 2007 revealed that for every 100ms increase in load time, sales would decrease 1%.
  • Tests done at Google in 2006 revealed that going from 10 to 30 results per page increased load time by a mere 0.5 seconds, but resulted in a 20% drop in traffic

While I liked the visual look of my site in the past, performance wasn’t great. I also knew it wasn’t as SEO optimized as it could be. I knew that one of the largest penalties my site was seeing was coming from CSS import statements, the dynamically created CSS by the theme (it used a xxx=css parameter on the end of a query string to get the CSS on every page load), and the JQuery implementation. JQuery was the same as the CSS; it was being dynamically injected. The implications of this were that even with caching plugins installed my site wasn’t performing all that well. Lastly, I knew that I had a bunch of “junk” in my database… old options left over in the tables, as well as old tables not removed, from uninstalled plugins that didn’t clean themselves up properly. I may do a “How To” article as some point in the future, but for now I wanted to highlight what a difference choices in plugins, themes, and caching can make.

Based on the above I started disabling plugins and paired down to just the minimum I knew I needed, disabled caching so I had baselines for performance, and then went on a hunt for a new theme. I looked at the major frameworks, free/premium themes, and performance claims.

The theme I finally landed on using Standard Theme. The decision was hard, there are some good theme’s out there but this one comes highly recommended, has an active user forum, and the price (yes… I PAID for performance) was low enough I could justify the cost. After putting Standard Theme in place I realized that while quick out of the box, it didn’t have as many drag and drop in place type of options as I was used to on my last theme… in other words, I had tweaks to do directly in the code. Once those were in place I started running performance metrics. Below is a side by side comparison on the old site vs the new site.

Mystique Theme Performance

Old Site Performance WITH caching

Standard Theme without caching

Standard Theme without caching

So it doesn’t immediately look as though the new theme is better, but keep in mind that the left image is the old theme with caching enabled and the right is the theme without caching or optimization. So what happened after I optimized images, styles, and enabled caching:

Standard Theme - cached, images optimized

Standard Theme - cached, images optimized

As you can see all scores went up, and page time performance increased. So what’s left? Combining the social icons into sprites. The article “Performance Research, Part 1: What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests” by Tenni Theurer on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog shows that popular web sites spending between 5% and 38% of the time downloading the HTML document. The other 62% to 95% of the time is spent making HTTP requests to fetch all the components in that HTML document (i.e. images, scripts, and stylesheets). I recognize the reason those images aren’t already sprites in the already optimized Standard Theme… which icons show are dynamic. Since I’ve decided on which ones I want I can convert those to a sprite and reduce the HTTP requests by nine. I’m also considering a Content Delivery Network (CDN)to increasing access bandwidth and redundancy and reducing access latency; though I’m not entirely sure it’s necessary or will be cost effective for the volume of traffic my site has at this time. It’s still something to evaluate though.
Here’s a historical overview of the site since I set to work on it… keep in mind I have no ads running at this point so once ads are back in place a performance hit will take place. Still, you can really see by looking at the changes historically what an impact tuning your site can make. If you’re interested in checking out your site performance I’d recommend GMetrix, as it will provide both Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow results. Page Speed and YSlow use different recommendations when analyzing URLs. Each service analyzes a page using a set of rules that they believe are most relevant to page speed and performance. Most of the rules overlap or are very similar to each other, but in general your scores should be comparable. GMetrix lets you see both at once.
GMetrix History

GMetrix History

Filed Under: Google, Site news Tagged With: css, google, Wordpress

About Paul Spoerry

I’m a groovy cat who’s into technology, Eastern Thought, and house music. I’m a proud and dedicated father to the coolest little guy on the planet (seriously, I'm NOT biased). I’m fascinated by ninjas, the Internet, and anybody who can balance objects on their nose for long periods of time.

I have a utility belt full of programming languages and a database of all my knowledge on databases... I practice code fu. Oh, I've also done actual Kung Fu, and have a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

I run. I meditate. I dance. I blog at PaulSpoerry.com, tweet @PaulSpoerry, and I'm here on Google+.

I'm currently work for IBM developing web enabled insurance applications for IBM and support and develop a non-profit called The LittleBigFund.

Comments

  1. Gerry says

    November 6, 2013 at 12:57 am

    Great post, thanks for the read.

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