This is my first time tweaking and optimizing a website and its proving to be interesting every day.Sometimes my walkthrough writing is entirely paused due to this.Powering the site with wordpress made things really easy.I didn’t know that the average page loading time can affect google rankings and even drive away visitors.Since then,my main concern has been optimizing the image size,image loading,reduction of javascripts and plugins dependant on them and moving them to the footer.There were many helpful resources on editing the htaccess file(I was quite jittery at first) and the entire process was a cake walk.With the loads of things I’m learning everyday on website optimization,I may soon start my own ebook on this topic .There are a gamut of website which have self help tutorials to assist noobs like me to tweak website and wordpress.I’ll list a bunch of the most useful links at the end of the post(it might help others who are absolutely lost like I was when I started).This helped me add many tit bits that could help the pages load faster.However,this is not enough.There are many new things that I plan to add,but not sure whether I’ll be able to handle so many things in so little time or not.Thinking of coming up with a BigFish games mini store to cater players who may like to ‘taste’ games other than RPGs.With the new year coming forth,I wish there were 48 hours in a day to finish everything I planned!

Here are the websites which presents cool information if you want to speed up your wordpress powered website.These are nothing that is new or like rocket science,I found them quite simple and useful. I have bookmarked all these pages as I use them often for my site(and also because I keep forgetting from where did I copy paste the codes to tweak my site).

1) Removing unnecessary php and database calls that affects the page loading time.
http://www.ajaykumarsingh.com/wordpress/simple-steps-to-speedup-slow-wordpress.html
http://yoast.com/speed-up-wordpress/
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/09/22/the-3-easiest-ways-to-speed-up-wordpress/

2) Compress the file components on your site by gzip.An excellent compressor and multi-utility plugin is recommended here(though the plugin is not free)
http://www.mooladays.com/2009/12/05/22-ways-to-optimize-wordpress-to-load-even-faster/

3) Add expire header to images/js/css files(can be done by editing the htaccess file in your webhost root folder i.e. public_html folder) and add dimensions to the images.The returning visitors will find it useful as their browser will record the expiry date of the files and will load them from their cache unless the expiry date is being reached.

4) Removing Etags and last modified header-If you’ve made any changes in the images/js files hosted in your site,that may not get updated if you remove these two features.However if your site’s images or javascripts dependant features are not updated regularly then you may consider removing these two as it will improve page loading time.These and other optimizing features are better explained at-
http://www.samaxes.com/2008/04/htaccess-gzip-and-cache-your-site-for-faster-loading-and-bandwidth-saving/

5) Install plugins or htaccess codes that caches wordpress.I use the wp-super cache and Smart Optimizer which does a wonderful job in reducing the page loading time.It is absolutely recommended for busy sites which receives heavy footfalls.
http://farhadi.ir/works/smartoptimizer
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

6) Use a subdomain to store the media files and so that parallel downloading from your subdomain loads your page faster.If you have a website that has a lot of flash,videos or image file, then try compressing the files any utility mentioned in some of the links I mentioned above.This is well explained here (but the database code didn’t work for me,I had to update the media links manually )-
http://selinap.com/2009/01/host-images-in-a-sub-domain/
http://teck.in/image-hosting-techniques-for-website-performance.html

7) Remove javascripts from header-it consumes a lot of time in loading a page if a javascript is loading slowly or hangs at the begining when one enters your site.Identify all javascript function calls from the header and cut paste it into the footer(read the articles I’m linking here before you do so).It is well illustrated here-
http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/2-simple-wordpress-blog-optimization-tips-and-tricks-1643

8 ) Cut down on Wordpress plugins.Minimize wordpress plugins or modify the header and footer so that the footer calls the plugin functions instead of the wordpress header.This will reduce page load time again.See it in details here-
http://buzzdroid.com/wordpress/yslow-and-wordpress-plugins-kill-your-score/
http://www.honeytechblog.com/how-to-optimize-website-loading-time-and-performance/

9) Use CSS spriting for images or combine javascripts.This is to reduce multiple HTTP calls to additional files.Refer this site for additional details-
http://wordpressgarage.com/tips/38-ways-to-optimize-and-speed-up-your-wordpress-blog/

10) Use tools to determine the page loading speed.It is important to know how fast your page loads in different internet connections.The page loading time for a 56k modem will be much much slower than a cable or T1 connection.This site refers some good benchmarking and other standards-
http://www.modernblue.com/web-design-blog/speed-up-your-website-and-increase-conversions/

There are many tips and tricks that will speed up wordpress and they are more or less covered by all the site links I mentioned above.I hope it will help people who are not very conversant with coding and programming.But a little familiarity with coding will make things easier for you to understand and implement them.