Page Speed Experiments

I decided to try out Google’s Page Speed extension for Chrome to see how fast my site loads.

Without optimization, my Page Speed Score was 59/100. After I implemented Page Speed’s suggestions, my score went up to 92/100.

The extension suggested the following improvements:

Enable Compression

Enabling gzip compression would result in a 70% reduction in the transfer sizes of my page’s resources.

Combine images into CSS sprites

I’ve had some experience with this while developing Silver Dollar Shooter. Loading many small images separately incurs a fixed overhead per file. With small files, this can be a large percentage of the total size of the file. So transferring a lot of small images wastes a lot of bandwidth. By combining small images together into one file, you can reduce the transfer overhead.

I should not that this process is much more complicated than just making individual icons and throwing them on your server.

Leverage browser caching

I seem to have a lot of files without expiration periods set. These files will be transferred to the user on each page visit, instead of being stored in the browser cache.

Serve scaled images

I have a couple of icons for Silver Dollar Shooter that are scaled down with CSS or HTML. If I resize the images myself in Photoshop, I can serve the same size image at a much smaller size.

Results

I installed the W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress. After enabling minify for javascript and CSS, the standard caching settings, and a later expiration period for my files, my score went up to 92/100. Not bad.

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