How to Optimize Your Wordpress Themes: Part Two
Posted on March 13, 2007, under Development, How To, Networking, WordPress.
Yesterday I wrote about How To Optimize Your Wordpress Themes, in reviewing there are a lot of functions in themes that print out data dynamically while that data may not change that often so it doesn’t need to be dynamic. In a further look on decreasing page load times, and reducing bandwidth with Wordpress and your themes there are several other techniques that once can deploy in order to accomplish these goals.
Whitespace is another way you can reduce the amount of data a user has to download when visiting you site. Whitespace usually plagues HTML code because when writing HTML one enters tabs and spaces to make the code legible. Additionally code comments can litter HTML code, and they are not even viewable in the final result. Each space or tab adds up in the overall scheme of things, and removing these unnecessary characters can reduce bandwidth over time.
I have mentioned it before, that compressing your CSS also will greatly reduce load time sand bandwidth usage. CSS Drive has a great tool for quickly accomplishing this. If you use JavaScript heavily your JavaScript file can be compressed as well.
Lastly, with WordPress you can easily enable GZIP compression for your pages under the Reading Options in the Wordpress administration panel. This will send back a compressed version of you pages if a supported browser requests so. In most cases this will greatly reduce the bandwidth usage on your server. When you reduce the bandwidth, you also in turn can reduce the amount of work your webserver has to do.
In the latest redesign I have employed all of the solutions above, and have already seen a great reduction in bandwidth used and an load times. I will post some solid data once it is available.
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How to Save on Blog and Website Bandwidth Bills - Code and Coffee on June 18, 2007
[...] plagued with extra whitespace characters in between tags. I have written in the past about how to Optimize Wordpress and HTML templates, Compressing your JavaScript, and Compressing your CSS files. All good practices that will result [...]