There are many posts and tools for speeding up WordPress. Some of them are gimmicks, but here’s one that actually works. PHPSpeedy is a new free script that significantly speeds up page loading times by making fewer HTTP requests, adding a far-future expires header, Gziping page components and minifying Javascript, CSS and HTML.
I’ve just added it to my site and it’s definitely working (ignore the slow loading NetAudioAds that all stalling my pages at the moment). Just take a look at the improvements I created below:
Test page With Firebug, before compression:
Same page with Firebug, after compression:
As you can see the results generated by PHPSpeedy are very impressive to say the least! Installing PHPSpeedy is very easy (Note: backup your index.php file before attempting this. If you are unsure of what you are doing, please don’t try this!)
- Download PHPSpeedy to your blog’s root directory
- Change mod the PHPSpeedy config file to 777 and then go to http://www.yoursite.com/php_speedy to configure PHPSpeedy
- Choose which options you want to use (I left all on as default except for ‘GZIP Page’ as it stopped my homepage loading). Once done PHPSpeedy creates a test page to check that everything is working ok
- If it is, then add the following the code as instructed by PHPSpeedy at the TOP and BOTTOM of your theme’s index.php file
Note: I couldn’t get it to work with WP Super Cache enabled, so I disabled the cache as I’ve been having problems with it anyway
