WordPress: Make Your Blog Load Faster
Google is very interested in how fast your pages load, and we talked about that in another post, “Google, Caffeine, and What It Means for Webmasters.” So, if you haven’t read that, it might be helpful to understand why I love what I just learned from John Chow.
In his post from March 21 entitled, “How to Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to Make Your Blog Load Much Faster,” he talks about moving some of the scripts, streaming media, CSS files and other things to a CDN, it helps your blog to load faster, no matter where you are in the world. What a CDN does it to distribute your content to several different servers around the globe. If someone in China is reading your post when your server lives in the U. S., for example, when using a CDN, the viewer won’t have to wait a longer time for the content to reach him or her in China. The father away from your server the viewer is, the longer they have to wait to see your content. So a CDN is pretty cool.
John also mentions a plugin that I just downloaded and installed called W3 Total Cache, and if you’re interested in moving some of your content to a CDN, the plugin makes it pretty easy.But even if you’re not using a CDN, it will still help the load time of your blog improve. For example, it tells browsers that they’re allowed to cache your home page and the RSS files. Why is that important?
This is from the plugin’s support files:
“We feel that caching objects after the first request and checking for updates before responding subsequent requests (which is kind of how web browsers work too) creates more opportunities for interesting applications and mashups where the blogosphere doesn’t require institutional investment to be able to handle developers making hundreds of requests every day the same way we use Google, Twitter and Facebook (for example) APIs today. Think about it, even when major search engines crawl your site, they have to be “gentle” so they don’t bring it down, let’s turn the paradigm around so that every blog can deliver content in real-time in various formats.”
Sweet? Seems to me that every blog should have this plugin. Mashable uses it, too. That’s recommendation enough for me. And in case you’re still on the fence, the creators say that the plugin will improve the performance of any WordPress blog:
“Precisely, that is unless you don’t write any posts in your blog nor have any readers. If you’re someone that’s always into the latest web development technique or plugin, now you can “have it all” without making your readers suffer.”
Heck, I don’t want you guys to suffer. 
And you shouldn’t want your readers to suffer with long download times, either. Plus, you get the added SEO advantage of speed. Win-win.
Go grab it.
