You might have noticed blogan.net is a little zippier. A few things have changed recently:
- My web hosting service moved my site to a new, faster shared server. Thanks, WebHostingBuzz! This is what inspired me to make more changes.
- I combined my print CSS into my regular CSS file. One less file to download.
- I removed all the Facebook, Twitter, and +1 social media cruft. It’s amazing how much these slow down a page load. They also allow Facebook and Google to track when you visit blogan.net.
- I installed W3 Total Cache. Very full-featured with caching, minifying and setting expires for browser caching.
- I removed a bunch of plugins, with the hardest to remove being Easy Fancybox. It’s very pretty, but includes multiple JS, CSS, and image files.1
- I started using CloudFlare.2
- A little while back, I started using WP Smush.it which losslessly compresses uploaded images automatically.
I think the results speak for themselves: a YSlow rating of 100!
- I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep Easy Fancybox disabled. It would be nice to have a quick Lightbox alternative without a bunch of support files. I haven’t found one yet… Maybe the minification will make it a non-issue. Yeah, that’s it. ;-) Update: I wasn’t able to keep Easy Fancybox disabled. It just works too well on posts with large galleries of pictures. Adding it back dropped my scores to 95. ↩
- This seems to be causing a “Network Error (tcp_error)” using the standard proxies at work. WHB doesn’t think it’s their issue. ↩
