WordPress Optimisation

I’ve just been comparing the pageload times for two of my similar (architecture, not content) wordpress sites.

Site A was coming in at about 1000-1500 milliseconds, whereas Site B was anything up to 6000 milliseconds 🙁

Turns out that caching had been disabled during a search to find a dodgy plugin, but never re-enabled on Site B..

That got me thinking though.. what if I could get the load time down.. would that improve the bounce-rate?

So, before I starting messing about with settings, I took some baseline stats with www.whichloadsfaster.com, (try it, it loads two pages in parallel, and measures load times..)

Then I re-enabled caching on site B. Suddenly, Site B loads faster than site A..
Next move: use the same caching settings on Site B on Site A.. (Site B had compression turned OFF, A was ON..)
Bingo! Both sites are now around 700-1000 milliseconds!

Next move: use the csprites plugin on both sites. (this makes dynamic css sprites from the images, loads faster).

We are now down to 500-750 Milliseconds on BOTH sites.

Can I just remind you of where we started here?

P.S. this took less than half an hour, all-in..

Plugins used: wp-supercache, csprites
Tools used: www.whichloadsfaster.com