Last thursday, I migrated Yoast.com to Synthesis, the managed WordPress hosting platform operated by Copyblogger Media. Previously this site had been hosted on a VPS.net Cloud Server, which was rock solid as this site grew to almost a million pageviews per month. VPS.net is fast, affordable, provides good support, and I continue to recommend them.…
Site Speed
Your website’s speed has an impact on almost every bit of “performance” of your website. Speed impacts rankings, it impacts conversions and average pageviews per visitor, basically, not working on your page speed means you’re losing money. Which is why we obsess about it and that is what we write about it in this category.
Lowering the Price for Site Analyses
I’ve made a pretty drastic change this morning in a manner that I normally do not do. I usually only raise my rates and never lower them. However, I’ve significantly lowered the rates of my website review this morning, going from €750 to €495. Why I made this change? Simple: I wanted the site analysis,…
Site Speed tracking in Google Analytics
Just a quickie: I just updated my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin to incorporate the new Site Speed tracking feature that Google announced last week. The feature is on by default and can be disabled in the advanced section of the settings. As you can see from the announcement post, this new feature helps you…
Separating frontend and admin code
In most cases, your plugin has stuff it needs to do in the admin area. It probably also has stuff it needs to do in the frontend. These two never happen at the same time, so you can actually separate the two. The easiest way of separating frontend and backend code is having a set…
Killer Performance Tips from the Expert
My business & podcast partner Frederick Townes, who also happens to be the CTO @ Mashable.com, has finally finished a long awaited (by me at least) post covering lots of the performance tips he’s applied at Mashable (I hope you’ve seen their awesome redesign) and in other projects to make the sites faster despite having…
How to reduce HTTP requests for your WordPress site
The web is sort of a reversed highway: you get tickets for going too slow and bonus points for speeding. Whether you’re “just” a blogger or you have an e-commerce site, your site needs to be fast. We’ve written about what to do to speed up Magento before, and I’ve mentioned caching for WordPress more…
Site Speed is now a Ranking Factor
Just wanted to jot down a quick blog post with my thoughts about two blog posts about speed. Matt Cutts has been writing both on his own blog and on the official Google Webmaster Central Blog to tell everyone what we knew was coming: site speed is now an official ranking factor. Now I want…
CSS Image Replacement, what’s up Matt?
So I’m a big fan of CSS image replacement, for several reasons, most importantly because it allows for a semantically correct page while having some text replaced with images, but also because I love sprites and I love using them well. I’ve also always been in favor of the use of CSS Image Replacement for…
Magento performance hosting
The system requirements of Magento are quite extensive, it requires at least PHP 5.2.0 extended with mcrypt, PDO_MySql and simplexml. For the database Magento needs at least MySQL 4.1.20 with InnoDB storage engine. At MagentoCommerce.com you can find a complete list of requirements. But how do you know if your server meets these system requirements?…
Optimizing WordPress database performance
I’ve been working with a plugin that was mentioned on the wp-hackers list last week, called debug queries, to optimize the performance on some of my sites, including this one. The plugin was pretty easy to use, and I’ve improved a bit on it. I’ve sent the patch to Frank, who authored the original plugin,…
