making wordpress and other sites faster

[dashu1]

Hello,
I learn't a fantatsic new trick today to make wordpress and other sites load up to 3.5 times faster!

As you may know Google are taking speed into account now (although it supposedly isn't much in ranking terms - yet anyway), but the faster you can get visitors in front of your site the better anyway.

The trick is to compress your site before it's sent to the browser on the users PC.

There is a wordpress GZip plugin available now, but you don't need it, there's a much easier way if your host has Zlib compression enabled.

All you need to do then is add 2 lines of code above the document type in your header, and it'll automatically compress your site for you!

Rather than me blathering on or trying to take credit for it, you can find out how to do it and test your site here:

http://www.wprecipes.com/compress-wordpress-output-and-speed-your-blogs-load-speed

 

[DarrenTSO]

Gzip compression is good if your site has a lot of javascript and css. One thing to remember though, is that if your site is doing multiple gzip compressions per page load, that under heavy load you could experience worse performance than non-compressed pages.

Utilising the plug-in CDN tools and Google's free CDN can also be useful - they can provide jquery and a few other popular js libraries via their network.

 

[illtemper]

Unless you cache the gzip or zlib file I can't see this being any faster at all as it's just an extra process that needs to be generated every time your page loads for each new visitor.

 

[dashu1]

It zips the whole thing and sends the zipped version. You can measure whether it's faster or not.