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?
| Site |
Before (ms) |
After (ms) |
| A |
1000-1500 |
500-750 |
| B |
6000 |
500-750 |
P.S. this took less than half an hour, all-in..
Plugins used: wp-supercache, csprites
Tools used: www.whichloadsfaster.com
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