Getting faster page loading times

Last night there was some interesting happens on James’ Blog, as two people Fire G and myself set out to make James’ Blog load much faster as my friend Fire G (Fire Studios) had informed me that my site page load times was really slow. Now a days worrying about someones internet connection isn’t that much of a headache anymore as most people are on broadband, so you don’t have to constantly limit your image sizes etc as much as you used to, but Fire G was right, the blog on a whole was loading slow.

I started by installing a neat WordPress Plugin called Super Cache, this would benefit this blog as it will convert any PHP pages into static html files so they load faster and of course will have been cached so a certain page can located quicker, this installed smoothly (and is currently active now) then my buddy Fire G said he had a even better script that could optimise the site even more, so he began packaging the script. I was busy at the time so I just said here’s a FTP account connect to it and configure the script from there, so began configuring and changing my lovely files! Little did I know how much a big mistake given Fire G FTP was! (Just kidding buddy!)

After 30 minutes or so, he messages me over IM saying:

“Dude I’ve broke your CSS on your blog, but don’t worry this happened when I did it”

“Fine” I replied

After about another 20 minutes he fixed it for about 2 seconds and then it broke again. If your interested in what WordPress Admin panel looks like broken CSS here’s a interesting image:

Of course the CSS was also broken for the actual blog as well (Aplogies to any readers that had to deal with no CSS what so ever!)

Eventually we both got talking on our headsets over ooVoo, and attempted to diagnose the problem. In actual fact it was generally him telling me what to do and then me dropping the line of “Don’t tell me what to do when you break my blog” (In a friendly manor of course!) Eventually we got it working after some changes to the .htaccess of the blog the css returned as being processed correctly. While im posting I should aplogise for any visitor that got the maintenance mode page coming up when they tried to view the blog. That would be me trying to delete some undeletable files!

In the end however the sites load time has dropped by 6 seconds, which is a very good result, because lets face it. If it hadn’t dropped by much I would of screamed after all the trouble that we both had to go through to get it to work. And to my buddy Fire G’s credit he spent alot of time trying to fix it, while I just helplessly watched him destrory my beautiful blog.

More optimising will commence as there is alot of javascript on this blog and this is defiantly a major factor of slow loading web pages, so more work will be carried out to bring down the javascript. I can almost say for 100% that the blog will not just suddenly break down again, me and Fire G have configured the script now and don’t have intention of looking at it ever again, I think if we did we may have a horrible flashback to the tragic day and probably need counciling after the repeat of the whole event!

Meet the man who breaks blogs via FTP below: (I love you really Fire G lol!)

Click here to go to Fire Studios