Resources from the 2013 Eat Write Retreat technical panel.
Speed Matters
- April 2010, Google announces: “new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed”.
- Google also offers Page Speed tools to help diagnose and improve your site’s performance.
- How long does your site take to load? http://webpagetest.org/
- Slower sites have been proven to cause negative psychological effects on users. (Source)
- If a page load takes more than two seconds, 40% are likely to abandon that site. (Source)
- The average Internet connection speed around the world was 2.3 Mbps by the end of 2011. (Source)
- Sales at Amazon increase by 1% for every 100 milliseconds it shaves off download times. (Source)
Performance Tips and Tools
Images
- Save your JPG photos at 80%. (70% is actually worse than 60%.)
- Yahoo! Smush.It – Online PNG optimizer
- WP Plugin – EWWW Image Optimizer
- WP Plugin – Smush it
- Icon sprites: What they are and a great tool for creating them
- Icon font: http://genericons.com/
- WP Plugin – Genericon’d
Javascript/CSS
- YUI Compressor: Copy/paste to minify your CSS or JS
- WP Plugin – W3 Total Cache: many options like caching, minification, GZIP compression, but can be confusing to set up
- WP Plugin – WP Super Cache: easy to set up, not a lot of customizability
- WP Plugin – Batcache: performs better, limited options, requires memcached
