Blitz is a configurable service that will pound your site with page requests, allowing you to specify the concurrency, timeout, and duration of the onslaught. As it goes about this, it builds statistics and plots them along timelines. You can watch response times, errors and timeouts as it slowly ramps up the number of concurrent users until it reaches the maximum. At the end, it even projects how many hits per day your setup can handle at that rate.

The service has a generous free tier, though they offer paid upgrades for higher concurrency and duration. The free tier offers 250 concurrent users over a one minute rush. (Though if you sign up with this invite link, they will add additional concurrencies to your account.)

I found Blitz very useful when I was trying to squeeze faster response times out of my WordPress setup, tweaking my caching system options and adjusting Nginx and PHP configurations. Since they use the connections at their datacenter, you get more real-world results than if you simply ran Apache Bench locally on the server, or from your residential internet connection. Both tools have their uses, of course, and Blitz is a good one to have in your arsenal.

Page Speed Service is an online service to automatically speed up loading of your web pages. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.

This is targeted mainly at people running small to medium sized websites, such as WordPress blogs, on shared hosting. The service takes the load off your server, so you don’t have to worry about it running slowly or going down from traffic.

Page Speed Service is currently in a trial period, where it’s free for anyone who wants to use it, but it may end up costing more in the future.

It will be interesting to see how this competes with CloudFlare, which offers more features and a free plan that is more than sufficient for most users. (You can pay $20/month for extra analytics and some more advanced features.) CloudFlare isn’t just trying to speed your site up, though. They also want to help protect it from DDoS attacks, email harvesting, and other unpleasantness. It already has quite a bit of traction.

Non-blocking loading is the key to fast pages. Moreover Head JS loads scripts in parallel no matter how many of them and what the browser is. The speed difference can be dramatic especially on the initial page load when the scripts are not yet in cache. It’s your crucial first impression.

If you have a JavaScript-heavy website, it’s worth taking a look at. If you take a look at the demo pages they have set up, the page that uses Head JS to load the scripts definitely displays much faster.

Head JS :: The only script in your HEAD [Head JS]

This strikes me as particularly inefficient. Considering CSS selectors usually have the most specific criteria on the left, and then subsets more to the right. I don’t know why things are done in this manner, but it seems that they are…

What sorts of CSS selectors are more efficient than others? Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks has some answers.

Fortunately, computers run fast enough that you shouldn’t really have to worry about it too much. It’s nice to shame some minuscule amounts of time off of the rendering, but you’ll see a much more drastic speed increase by minifying and compressing your CSS and scripts.

Efficiently Rendering CSS [CSS-Tricks]

But what if you’re running on your own server, be it VPS, dedicated, or something else along those lines? What can you do to squeeze some extra performance out of your high-traffic blog?

Enter W3 Total Cache, a plugin that the infamously slow-loading blog Noupe has recently started using to combat the sluggishness that their constant social media hits cause. It can do a lot of things, including:

• Offloading static content to a CDN, if you have one.
• Minifying and compressing your CSS and JavaScript files, and caching them in memory or disk.
• Caching RSS in memory or disk.
• Ensuring that browsers cache things, such as images, CSS and JavaScript on their end for future page loads.
• Caching database objects in memory.

The plugin’s biggest feature is probably its support of various memory caching systems, such as memcached, APC, and XCache to store things in memory. This makes things very fast. Hard disks are a major bottleneck in servers. If you put frequently requested information in RAM, it can be served a lot faster. Try visiting a page on Noupe. It may load a little slow the first time if the page hadn’t been viewed recently, so you may have to load it again a second time. Things are real fast once they’re in the RAM cache.

I’m thinking of trying it out for myself in the future, once I go through with my plans to move from Apache to NGINX server software, which should free-up a bit of my RAM.

The internet seems to be a parallel reality where time passes differently, slow at times, fast at others. Web pages seem to take eons to load, no matter how fast your internet connection is. I remember having to wait more than a minute for most pages to load (that was back when I had dial-up). Nowadays I have a DSL connection that generally runs in the 700k-900k range. It’s a lot faster, but not fast enough. Sure, some pages load lightning-fast, but others still seem to crawl along. While they’re not taking over a minute to load, it sure seems like it.

While you’re using the web, time flies by overly quick. It seemed like it was taking an hour for that video to load, but it was really only five minutes. So why is it four o’clock? Oh yeah, you logged-on to World of Warcraft for a few minutes… But how does that come-out to be an hour?

Do you get what I’m saying?

So what can you do to make your blog load faster?

• Install WP Super Cache. You’ll notice the difference immediately. While it won’t magically make every page load faster, it will make your more popular posts quicker.
• Pick a Faster Host. If your webhost has a slow connection, and horribly oversold servers, you can’t expect great performance out of your site. I’m currently getting by with a 1and1 shared server plan, which is okay (and cheap), but not as fast as it could be. Michael of Pro Blog Design uses Media Temple, a pricier host that is held in high regard by bloggers everywhere. MT is known for their speed and reliability. For those looking for cheaper plans, I’ve also heard hood things about A Small Orange. Do your research before buying hosting. Check loading times for sites that use the host, look for current reviews (from reputable sources), etc
• Lighten your images. Use less images in your template if possible, and make sure you optimize them correctly.
• Compress your CSS. Use a CSS-optimization service like Clean CSS, or CSS Optimizer. Make sure you save the original stylesheet, in case something goes wrong!
• Remove excess widgets and whatnot. Any extra files (JavaScript or otherwise) that must be loaded will cause a performance hit. If a bit of JavaScript doesn’t serve any purpose, then remove it. does “MyBlogLog” benefit your readers? I doubt it. Refer to this chart for help deciding what to keep.
• Disable plugins. As with miscellaneous bits of JavaScript, plugins detract from performance as well. There’s the overhead from running the PHP commands, there’s MySQL access times, etc. If you don’t have a good reason to use it, then toss it.
• Kill unnecessary template tags. Don’t waste server resources by using bloginfo(‘name’) when you can just write the name of your blog. See Pro Blog Design’s 13 Tags to Delete From your Theme.
• Simplify your design. Go simplistic, and your blog will load faster. As of this writing, Webmaster-Source’s overall design only has two images. The logo, and the tiled edge graphic. Everything else is just CSS magic. The aforementioned ProBlogDesign.com takes a similar approach.

Now that you’ve optimized your blog, you can use the time you will save waiting for your blog to load every day to play World of Warcraft, er, write more blog posts.

Many blogs and small website are hosted on shared servers. Unfortunately, those bargain hosting plans have their share of problems. Most of the problem come from overselling, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do to improve your site’s performance. This guide will briefly detail some of your options.

Scripts

PHP scripts can eat-up system resources sometimes. Simple scripts, like the use of the include() or require() functions to include bits of XHTML temlate throughout your site, don’t take much processing time, but more complex scripts (like Content Management Systems) can be really taxing under heavy traffic.

If you use the WordPress CMS, which is notorious for it’s resource-hungry scripts, you have a nice drop-in solution. You can use the WP Super Cache plugin, which stores static versions of files (refreshing them every couple hours) to decrease the load. It works well, and response times are visibly faster.

The most resource-hungry part of PHP scripts is generally MySQL queries. If you can minimize them, you’ll improve server performance significantly. If you have enough experience scripting, then you’ll probably be able to find some ways to reduce the number of queries. Think about it, if a script executes five queries, and 500 people load the page one time apiece, that’s 2500 times the database is queried. Forgetting to close connections will add even more unnecessary load. Also, be sure to note that SELECT commands are much more efficient than INSERTs.

Further Reading

• Things I Know, PHP Tips
• The Spanner: PHP MySQL Tips

High-Traffic Websites

Your website can take a huge performance hit if one or more other sites on the same server have high traffic levels. The websites take-up huge amounts of system resources, and your site suffers as a result.

There’s not much you can do about this problem, but your host can. If other sites start to take-up “unfair” amounts of system resources, your host will likely take action.

Anyway, be sure you don’t take-up more than your fair share of server resources. As your site grows, you’ll eventually outgrow your shared hosting account. You may eventually need to get a VPS, or even a dedicated server.

Shared hosting is a great deal, and the best way for most websites to start out. If you do your research, and find a reputable host, shared hosting will probably meet your needs (until your site grows too big, anyway).