Tag Archives: page speed

 

W3 Total Cache with Amazon S3 and CloudFront

A few days ago Frederick Townes, author of the W3 Total Cache for WordPress has released an update to this wonderful plugin, and yes, it now fully supports Amazon S3 and CloudFront as the Content Delivery Network! This is a major one for me as I manually upload most of the static assets to my CloudFront account which may take quite a lot of time. The W3 Total Cache plugin does that for you in seconds! Post attachments, images, javascript, css.. All those could go to CloudFront in just 4 clicks. Frederick also mentioned that the upcoming update will also be surprising, which keeps me wondering.

I also tried out the other options for page and database caching. A few tests showed up that memcache is faster than APC, so that’s where I stopped at database caching. Page caching was switched to enhanced, which I believe is a new option. The site performance graph at Google Webmaster Tools shows pretty good performance for Novermber and December (very close to 1.5 seconds) although the overall average is still up at 3.5 seconds, which in terms of Google is slower than 59% of sites. This is probably caused by the force majeures in September and October. Page load time peaked at over 7 seconds there.

One more funny fact about Google’s Site performance and Page Speed tools is the “Minimize DNS lookups” section, which most of the time shows up a single entry:

The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains: http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js

Interesting. Perhaps I should copy that javascript file and serve it from my CDN, I wonder if that will work. Oh and then I’ll be missing all the nifty updates to Google Analytics, like the most recent one called Asynchronous Tracking – very neat by the way!

Published 3 years ago with 7 comments tagged , , , , , ,


 

Every Millisecond Counts: Page Speed for Firebug

Here’s a little video that we’ve seen at Arvind’s and Sreeram’s presentation about speeding up the web at the Google Developer Day 2009 conference in Moscow. Inspiring isn’t it?

Arvind and Sreeram talked about a very nice plugin for Firefox (built upon Firebug) which is called Page Speed, developed and maintained by the Googlers. You may read more about the plugin on the official page at Google Code: Page Speed for Firefox/Firebug plus a bunch of cool tips and tricks right here: Let’s make the web faster. I used to run with one called YSlow by Yahoo, but the Googlers seem to have made a better job.

I ran the speed tests on my homepage and got quite a few sweet suggestions, mainly about combining and minifying my CSS and JavaScript files, distributing static content to different cookie-less domains and a couple more. Well combining and minifying CSS and JS would have been quite difficult in WordPress due to the series of plugins that use their own, if it weren’t of course for the W3 Total Cache plugin. In only a few minutes I managed to combine all javascript and stylesheets into single minified versions, which were recreated whenever a plugin was updated. After doing that, running the same test didn’t yield out that problem anymore. Distributing static content to different domains, well that’s one more issue that would have been solved by that brilliant cache plugin and its CDN features, but I guess I’ll have to wait for Amazon CloudFront compatibility.

One more thing I love about Page Speed is that not only they state the problem, but also provide the solution, or at least an easy guide to the solution. Now with a few warnings left, my Page Speed overall performance is okay. I hope to optimize that later this month for even faster access, and perhaps sign up with a PubSubHubbub service (Brett Slatkin had a fantastic presentation on that one at GDD too), and I can finally pronounce that correctly, Hubbub for short.

Published 3 years ago with 7 comments tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,



back to top