Well. It’s the last post from our website performance optimization Stage 3. Now we can say for sure – it’s a fast WordPress blog! But what actual gain have we achieved with all these actions? Let’s review them.

Extreme performance actions

• We reduced size of CSS rules. Due to data:URI technique usage this saved us about 75 Kb, or 20% of website size. But it’s an uncommon result – usually this step provides nothing in terms of web performance.
• HTML minify saved for us about 0.6 Kb for every page (0.15% of not cached website size, and about 11% for returned visitors).
• Cookie-free domains. About 10 ms, or nothing (after multiple hosts usage).
• Static HTTP images reduced website load time by about 52 ms (but were not able to efficiently combine HTML images, this seems to be a useful technique after CSS Sprites), or 1% of website load speed.
• Then we saved another 100-200 ms with removing transparent fixed block. This relates to page rendering, not actual network load.
• Finally we delayed all AdSense blocks and got about 150 ms (3×50 ms) with not blocking JavaScript. But all this in case if you have any dynamic ads on your blog.

So simple sum shows about 30% speedup (not 40x, not 5x, not even 2x – only 1.3x). And almost all of this came from removal of unused data:URI chunks. Usually all actions together will give about 10% speedup. It’s very little.

Overall results

These results can be also confirmed with YSlow. Please compare this image (it was taken at the beginning of Stage 3)

with this one (the last YSlow chart).

There is actually no difference. The same number of files (we added a few AdSense – so the latter situation is even worse). But performance didn’t change significantly. We just tuned our website to handle more advertisement with the same initial speed. There is nothing more.

Conclusion

There is no valid reason to integrate to your website extreme performance best practices. You can just apply some basics and advanced techniques, and stop with this. But if you have heavy blog with a lot of ads – unobtrusive JavaScript or unused styles removal should help. This conclusion is proven by numerous graphics and tests, so it’s just your choice – to waste time for nothing or not

Related Posts

• February 17, 2010 -- Removing blocking AdSense (7)
• January 8, 2010 -- The right way to speed up your blog (3)
• January 7, 2010 -- Is my WordPress blog fast enough? (part 2) (4)