Atahualpa performance optimization using w3 cache and CDN networks
 

I just decreased my page load times from 3-10 seconds even on refresh (extremely annoying and damaging in all ways) to less than 1 second, even for logged-in users (that in theory are not being cached). I followed procedure in this excellent article:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/ho...for-beginners/

And this one:

http://netdnacdn.jira.com/wiki/displ...W3+Total+Cache

For installing W3 Total Cache plugin and MAXCDN (a CDN or content delivery network) to my site. MAXCDN costs $40 the first year ($30 with the wpbeginner discount code, check the article) and then $99 a year after that. I am a commercial provider so this was a no-brainer, however, I think that excellent results could be had just by setting the w3 cache image , css and js expiration settings (to encourage browser caching) through W3 cache > Browser cache setting and then enabling all the settings (set expires header, set cache control header etc)

This is a huge relief as Atahualpa was becoming unmanageable with 6-7 javascripts, large CSS files and lots images on my sites.

Note the comment by the plugin author at the bottom of the main article

http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/ho...for-beginners/

where he says that database caching and object caching should be done with care as it may actually slow down some servers. The main thing apparently is to set page cache, expire headers and CDN.

Note that expire headers may require exclusing the image captcha directories, see the article for details. Contact form 7 is already excluded by default but I use SI Captcha and Simple Capchta as well so will need to do some investigation

For what it is worth, using Firefox/firebug I still see
9.7s (onload 6.6s)
7.83s (onload: 3.95s)
8.32s (onload: 4.22s)

Thanks Paul. Looks like I may have a bit of work to do still ;)

I am guessing that the main improvement is coming from the W3 "expire headers" function which will dramatically reduce the http requests on refresh or new page views which was my goal.

But obviously will not reduce load times for people coming for the first time

Another very good article that goes through the W3 Total Cache settings one-by-one

http://c3mdigital.com/2010/09/reduce...3-total-cache/

Atahualpa is not a lightweight theme, and particularly once you start to get content and image-heavy, I consider this a requirement.

I have taken my Google Speed Test from 75 to 88 or 89 with Atahualpa. Thanks to Atahualpa, I can and do publish my load times in the my website footer. I do not know anything about websites, but I have built three of them with Atahualpa. I checked the load time on my site http://www.jaywren.com just now on Firefox and here is the result: "42 queries. 1.251 seconds." Sometimes they are faster, sometimes they are slower. I do not know why, but I think the reason is related to browser caching and server speeds.

I tried the caching plugins but I monkey around with changes on my websites trying to learn what I am doing and my Google Speed Test rating did not change with the three I tried.

The biggest speed gains I got came from following basic Wordpress and Atahualpa guidelines. I replaced all my widget images with styles. I configured excerpts in the Appearance >>Atahualpa >> excerpts to provide the visitor more information in less space, reduced redirects to some extent, eliminated all links in the post/page footer Appearance >>Atahualpa >> Post/Page Edit because I realized Google, Facebook, etc do not use their landing page for a forum so why should I?

I would like to learn how to give longer cache times to some of the statics resources in my header area, but I think I do better without caching anything beyond that.