Site speed and Panda

[shallow]

According to Google Webmaster Tools, my site is slower than 76% of sites (slightly better stats than when I checked two weeks ago).

My site developer spent quite a bit of time speeding up the site (WordPress)early last year. His assessment, as well as Alexa stats, are in direct opposition to Google's stats.

But we know whose stats really count, right?!

My site has been hit very bad by Panda and, after doing a lot of reading in these and other forums, I'm not convinced there is much I can do to change things without spending much more than I can now afford.

Will improving site speed in any way help some of the negative effects of Panda? If so, I'll invest the money.

Thank you.

[shallow]

Look at the image files themselves, too. Many graphics workers don't want to compress jpgs below 60% in Photoshop, but 40% is just fine with today's compression algo.

Guilty - images are an important part of my site and how they look is important. They must be fairly large sized too. I usually compress at 45%, maybe not enough when there are several images on a page.

I'll certainly improve this going forward and will go back and make some tweaks when I have time. I have about 1000 pages in my site, 800 of them actual articles.

Gzip compression for text assets can be a biggie, too.

That's already in place.

I'll share the other ideas with my web developer.

Thanks again.

[londrum]

one thing that i found helped my site speed a lot was caching database queries.
most database queries just end up with a big array. if you cache the contents of the array so you dont have to look it up again it will knock chunks of the loading time. (especially if you're a lazy coder like me, and have loads of queries per page)

[mhansen]

We use WordPress for many of the basic websites we build now, including one rather ambitious ecommerce project! Its easy to use, the end-user can take to learning quite a bit on their own with all the free resources out there, and with the right setup... well, its pretty darn easy to use! (Us, God-admin, User... basic editing rights)

Not sure I can list tools we use due to forum rules, but for initial load times, we run everything through tools.pingdom.com. It creates a nice waterfall graph to see which files are causing which problems, etc.

Listed below is what I find most important... as it relates to WordPress and site speed.

1 - Domain canonical.

If you choose to let WordPress handle your virtual 301 to the canonical, (going from http://example.com/ to http://www.example.com/ or the other way around) its going to delay your TTFB (time to first byte) by 1-3 seconds.

Suggest: Handle your canonical in the actual htaccess file in the root of the domain, not the WP virtual 301 that's created in the database.

2 - MySQL Cleanup.

(Note, always keep a backup of your database, there's a good plugin for that too)

If you have a lot of posts and pages, you will end up with a lot of bloat in the database of stored updates, last updated by, etc etc. Grab a "WordPress DB Optimization" plugin to clean them out weekly! It will reduce database time to first byte significantly!

If you have a very busy site, you can lookup ways to completely "disable post revision tracking" in wordpress.

3 - File-by-File, call-by-call Optimization!

When you use pingdom to create your loading profile, look at every single image carefully! I once found an rss icon (16x16 pixels .png) that was almost 160k (yes, 158,000 bytes, many layers... etc, it was unreal!) in size.

We start with the largest files and simply work our way backwards. Its amazing what 30 minutes can do in this area alone!

Point.. pick through each file reference one by one, to try and reduce them tot he smallest possible size you can live with! (I aim for -10k for large images)

4 - Compress your CSS file!

Its not uncommon for some WP themes to get into the 30-40k css file size. I know, thats friggin huge! I use [cssdrive.com...] to compress the css file size and remove whitespace.

5 - W3 Cache Plugin

Use it for all its worth! :-) If you are unclear about its setup, take the time to learn it or have your developer do so. Even though you set the options to cache, you still may need to walk through it and tell it WHAT TO CACHE.

We have had sites with an original load time of 8-9 seconds reduced to -2 seconds just by optimizing the 5 things mentioned above. Its never a quick and easy process, but spending 1 hours on it now, may have positive effects in the coming weeks.

[shallow]

Thank you everyone, for your kind suggestions. Problem is, I'm getting mixed messages about what may work and may not work for speeding up my site. Some say css sprites, others say "ehhh."

Unfortunately, since Panda, I don't have funds to experiment since I must hire a web developer to work on my site. What would you do if your income, in a few weeks, dropped 40-60%?

Sorry, this is honestly not a complaint. It's just the way things are for me after Panda.