Speeding up WordPress web site

In general there are several ways for tracking your web site speed:

• http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/

• http://tools.pingdom.com/

• If you are using Chrome, right click and from the context menu select “Chrome Inspect Element”

• There is also “Page Speed” plugin for Firefox and Chrome that can provide excellent web site speed statistics.

• Firefox Firebug plugin …

There is an excellent Yahoo tutorial for general website speed optimization.

The best website speed optimization techniques are:

• Minifying the number of HTTP requests (either using CSS sprites technique, image maps, combining HTTP requests using WordPress plugins)

• To set the “Expires” on a Cache-Control Header of the HTTP request. If you are under apache this can be done by modifying the .htaccess file

• To use the Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen.

Finally WordPress plugins for web site speedup:

• W3 Total Cache (excellent choice for dedicated hosting)

• Hyper Cache (probable the best choice for shared hosting)