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W3 Total Cache Cut My WordPress Blog Load Time in Half

by Darryl Kraemer on March 2, 2010 in Wordpress with 5 Comments

So I’m always looking for ways to improve the load time on this blog, and my wife’s blog over at Vibrant Living. While searching Google on the benefits of eliminating whitespace in your HTML, CSS and Javascript files, I stumbled across a WordPress Plugin called W3 Total Cache.

It look interesting so I started reading the info page on it. Now, it made some big claims, and backed them up by listing the whos-whos of big blogs that rely on it to optimize the load time of their pages and posts. I include a snippet below:

The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. Trusted by many popular blogs like: mashable.com, briansolis.com, pearsonified.com, ilovetypography.com, noupe.com, webdesignerdepot.com, freelanceswitch.com, tutsplus.com, yoast.com, css-tricks.com, css3.info and others — W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

So, I decided to give it a try. I used a website tool called Pingdom Tools to capture a full page load test both before, and after installing and configuring the plugin.

Here’s my before stats for darrylkraemer.com (link to Pingdom archived stats):

And here are my stats after installation and configuration for darrylkraemer.com (link to Pingdom stats), using the default settings for W3 Total Cache:

Big difference. Over 11 seconds load time, to just over 6 seconds load time. The biggest improvement was in the Time To First Byte (TTFB) as shown in the second screenshots for the before and after. The total package delivered to the browser was the same size, but the time it took to get there was considerably quicker.

I tried this on my wife’s blog, and achieved similar results as shown below.

I want to share a neat Firefox plugin with you, that shows you TTFB, Total Load Time, Amount of Data Delivered, and Number of Requests, all in your status bar. This will help you test changes without having to go to Pingdom to see the results. It won’t replace Pingdom’s ability to show you exactly what pictures or scripts may be slowing your page load, which is a great feature if you’ve made some change, or added a plugin that suddenly slowed your load time signifigantly.

Hope these tips help, and if you tried out W3 Total Cache, I’d love to hear your results in the comments below.

How To Add The ReTweet and Facebook Share Buttons to Your Blog

by Darryl Kraemer on February 19, 2010 in Wordpress with No comments

If you are looking for ways to help your readers share your content with their social networks, then these two WordPress plugins are a must every blogger. If you’ve been to Mashable, or TechCrunch, you’ve probably noticed that they are using them as well (along with the Google Buzz button, a topic for a future blog post). If two of the most successful Social Network blogs online are using them, there’s probably a good reason why.

Simple FB Share Button

This adds a button to each of your posts, and has a couple of options for the style that you want to use. If you look at my posts, I’ve chosen this style:

Installation is pretty straight forward. Just click this link and follow the instructions they provide. Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you’ll see a new item under the Settings Menu on the left-hand side of your WordPress admin page called “Simple FB Share Button.”

There are a couple of options you can set:

  1. Whether you want to plugin on or off.
  2. What style of badge you want to use.
  3. Where you want the badge to show up in your posts.

That’s it. 3 steps and you’ve now given your readers an easy way to share your content with their facebook network, without having to leave your blog.

TweetMeme

As you’ve probably guessed, this plugin adds a twitter ReTweet badge to your blog posts. You can grab the plugin by clicking this link and following the installation instructions. This will add a badge to your blog posts that looks like this:

Once you have the plugin installation and activated, you’ll see a brand new menu item on the left side of your WordPress Admin page called TweetMeme. In the Settings menu, there are options for you to configure the style and positioning. One key setting to ensure you update is the Source setting. Make sure you change this to your twitter username so when you’re users are ReTweeting your posts, they RT you, and not tweetmeme.

If you’ve used these plugins let me know what you think of them in the comments. Or, if you have better alternatives for doing the same job, I’d love to hear about those too.

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