One of the things I regularly do is see where I can make my sites smaller with less requests and lower file sizes. One of the things I’ve noticed on my WordPress sites and those of others is that images are stored in an extreme high quality and thus with very little compression resulting in larger image file sizes and longer loading times.
The reason for this is that WordPress basically by default uses an image quality of 90 (out of 100) when creating it’s different files sizes ie thumbnails. This even when your original has a quality of let’s say 40. This results in images of the same quality as the original but stored as if the quality is 90 instead of 40. For me a quality of 40 is the best balance between file size and quality, especially because I’m operating in a country where connection speeds are on average still low.
I’m currently working on a WordPress based travel site….
I left some space here where the experts can chuckle, LOL, ROFL and whatever else they think is appropriate. To those cynics I say good luck with you’re home made platform. WordPress is so much more than a blog platform, it’s the perfect framework for almost every project. It’s known for it’s near perfect and solid database design, it’s equipped with a great admin interface, offers great caching plugins and many more. I at first thought I had to migrate to another platform but along the way I found out that at least for me the possibilities are unlimited. And scalability? Well, read this post and make up your mind again. Continue Reading →
So, everyone by now knows the major must-have plugins for WordPress like W3 Total Cache and YARPP, but there are some less spectacular simple plugins out there that are a must for your blog. So here’s one for the sake of SEO and reputation of this blog, a semi-intelligent post about the not so obvious but still must have WordPress plugins. Most of them are just as simple as useful and don’t strain the performance of your blog.
All plugins are running on this WordPress MU site version 3.2.2 and are doing what they promise but obviously no guarantees from this side, try at your own risk. Continue Reading →
There must be a thousand posts out there about “boosting” the speed of your WordPress blog but it seems not much of them can show the before and after, the actual effect.Also most posts are pretty general on using the W3TC (W3 Total Cache) plugin but forget about the details and difficulties when configuring the W3TC plugin.
So for this post it’s mandatory that you use WordPress and you have installed the W3 Total Cache plugin, you can find the plugin here. Also you will need Firefox with the Firebug, for one to easy analyze which javascript and css files are loaded and secondly it’s one of the tools to test your site speed. Yep peepz, time for a true geek post!
The new “WordPress Backup To Dropbox” plugin is exactly what I needed. I tend to do a lot of customizing in templates, plugins and even the core which tend to go lost when execute an upgrade without thinking. The new plugin makes it possible to completely automatic backup your WordPress blog to you Dropbox, giving blog owners an ease of mind. Great idea, pretty good execution at first sight, however, within 5 minutes after starting the first backup I received a message from my webhost.
Shortly after this message I received the same message again with the changed status “process killed” even though the whole backup was successful.
My guess as a (intermediate) techie guy is that the zipping process was guilty and probably the fact that I hit the “backup now” button twice because I saw nothing happen after the first time.
One thing that I found in the settings of this plugin is that it has two settings that are contradicting. In the “Day And Time” field you have to select on which day you want the backup to be executed, making it a once in a week backup while this makes the setting “Frequency” completely useless. Anyway, please drop your experience with this plugin in the comments, thanks!
UPDATE: After the latest plugin update the backup executed nicely without any complaints from my webhost, it might be because they’re just nice guys but for sure the memory issues have become smaller.
UPDATE: The good news was temporary but the latest update to version 0.8 does the job without zipping your blog before backing it up. This does solve memory issues but the option to have an archive of the last 6 weeks for instance has gone due to that change. All new updates and issues can be followed on the wordpress forum.
One of the things I regularly do is see where I can make my sites smaller with less requests and lower file sizes. One of the things I’ve noticed on my WordPress sites and those of others is that images are stored in an extreme high quality and thus with very little compression resulting in larger image file sizes and longer loading times.
