Comments on: 8 steps to reduce blog load times from 4sec to below 1sec

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 05:03:32 +0000

Any luck with getting Google Analytics to stop using cookies with the CDN?

By: stephan

stephan — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:08:25 +0000

@Michael: Thanks for the explanation.

By: Michael S

Michael S — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:42:51 +0000

@stephan PageRank is an algorithm to analyse the links pointing to a specific page. Google originally counted all links pointing to a page as a vote for the page. it is among other metrics a factor to determine the position on the SERP. other factors are among many others e.g. relevancy of the content, domain age, language, location of the server (e.g. for regional searches), time (e.g. for news) and now new: page speed. I still believe, as you said, that PageRank or more importantly the links pointing to your page _are_ the most important factor to get a good ranking.

So page speed will affect the position of your page in the SERPs but won’t have a direct impact on your PageRank which as said only analyses the links pointing to your site. there may be an indirect effect however, as your page might get more popular if it’s faster and people then link to it more often.

Actually I only wrote the comment to say that

“Page speed influences pagerank (PR) in the future” should be put to something like “Page speed influences the search engine rankings in the future” :-)

By: stephan

stephan — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 09:45:01 +0000

@Michael: I might add I already used WP-SuperCache for static pages, a MUST as you’ve said.

By: stephan

stephan — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:52:22 +0000

@Michael: Care to elaborate? I thought PageRank determined the position on the search engine results page primarily. If it doesn’t, what is PageRank good for?

By: Michael S

Michael S — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:24:31 +0000

and one more thing: if you happen to use wicket for your webapps, there is some interface speed up advice over there: http://techblog.molindo.at/2008/08/wicket-interface-speed-up-merging-resources-for-fewer-http-requests.html

By: Michael S

Michael S — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:22:21 +0000

9. load javascripts you don’t need immediately asyncronously or on demand. e.g. if you’re using Google Analytics, move to the asyncronous Google Analytics (http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-analytics-launches-asynchronous.html)

10. use CSS sprites to decrease the amount of HTTP requests

11. caching. everywhere ;-) e.g. static resources on server side (most CMS do this out of the box)

and to be precise: page speed will not influence page rank (PR) in the future – it will affect your ranking. page rank is a metrics based on your inlinks and is one factor (among many others) to determine your position on the search engine results page (SERP)

By: stephan

stephan — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:36:32 +0000

@Oliver: From Pingdom Tools the CDN, from Firebug/Network most probably the DNS lookups.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:23:01 +0000

Can you tell out of which point you got the biggest performance boost?

By: stephan

stephan — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:57:53 +0000

@andy: For now, yes by hand. I wrote a function for Wordpress

    function cdnbase() {
        echo "http://cdn.cmstatic.com/1";
     }

which is used throughout the template, so I only need to change this URL after playing with the site. Then when finished, add infinity expire headers. I plan to read this from a plugin page in the future, and autosync from the local directory to S3/Cloudfront.

By: andy

andy — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:54:05 +0000

Thank you very much, interesting stuff here!

Unfortunately its a bit unclear how exactly you manage the different versions of your static files (js/css) at cloudfront.
Do you have to change the includes of your blog manually?