There is no better way to irritate your readers and prevent new RSS subscriptions than to use a slow loading theme.
When we are online, everyone expects instant content. Three seconds or less!
None of us have the patience to wait for a page to slowly put itself together. Online, anything more than 10 seconds is an ETERNITY!
Imagine our shock then when we found out from a few readers that Web2Center was taking upwards of 10 seconds to load in some browsers.
Yikes!
Speeding Up
We thought we'd done a pretty good job re-coding this theme and cleaning out the turtle-ish elements. So, fortunately, our troubling discovery coincided with a post from my favorite SEO blogger that explained, from a insightful technical standpoint, what one could do to accelerate a WordPress blog's load time.
The post is here: Speed Up and Clean Your WordPress by Joost de Valk
I recommend reading the comments in this post but don't get overwhelmed by the tech-speak. These guys are super coders who like to analyze every aspect of Joost's posts.
Just stick to the recommendations -line by line- and your load time is sure to decrease.
You Tell Us
So far, we have activated wp-cache and cleaned up the footer per the instructions. Next steps are the header.php tweaks that Joost suggests and adding a "function_exists" qualifier to appropriate php commands.
These adjustments have certainly improved load times on my end but, for me, it had always loaded in 3-5 seconds so… you tell us… is Web2Center still loading slow?
And… If you are a fellow WordPress blogger, I hope you enjoy Joost's SEO blog.
Thanks for the great feedback Tom! Glad you liked my post
A lot of it has to do with any javascript on the site to. I have run into blogs that would not load for 10 minutes or more because one of the scripts slowed things to a crawl. But your site comes through fast.
Thanks for the feedback Stephan! That is like music to my ears…
It is important to note for bloggers inexperienced with coding that the point of wp-cache and other similar plugins in to essential streamline the content on the page. As one of those inexperienced bloggers, i now know that this may mean functions that enable your sidebar or adsense ads may be deactivated. So, when you are going to run a caching program, I think you really have to understand the "adding a “function_exists” qualifier" and what that means to your site. Again, im not upto speed on this, but after trying to activate a caching plugin, the pages came up essentially black except for the post text. After deactivating the plugin, I had to manually add code to my sidebar.php templates to get my site back to the way it was. I know there must be an easier way to accomplish what I was trying to do, but the point I want to make is inexperience bloggers must not be lulled into sleep by all of the great add ons. You really have to understand the basics of coding – so when things go wrong you will have a background to begin trouble shooting. Great post!