In this three part series I will detail the plugins I use when creating a wordpress site. In this part I will go over the plugins that can greatly increase your sites loading speed. Study after study continue to find that user experience is directly related to how responsive your site is. Put it this way
Plugins that can increase your blogs speed:
Autoptimize basically takes your sites javascript and CSS files and adds them all together completely compressed (and gzip’d). It also compresses your html and removes all comment code from the browser’s source (it keeps it in the file though). This is great if you paid a lot for a custom design that you don’t want others to copy.
cSprites works in the same manner, except this time it works with images. It adds all your images into one big image and adds the appropriate CSS to make it work. The reason to do this is that if you have 20 images in your design and posts, your browser has to send a request for each image individually, resulting in some significant lag time.
Use Google Libraries is excellent for blogs using javascript frameworks such as jQuery or MooTools. The reasons to use Google’s CDN network rather than your own server are many but the basic thing is: ITS FASTER! Why? Google will geo-target your viewers and serve them a copy that is closer to them and if they have been to a site that used google’s version previously they will have it cached and not have to load it at all!
You probably don’t need it unless your have 10k+ monthly views or get hit by Digg, but to be on the save side using WP Super Cache will generate static html files of all your posts and pages. This way each time someone comes your server does not have to process all the dynamic data from the database.
