ManyRoads Performance Issues
Sadly, many of you may have noticed that we were off line for a bit; and that our site has been bouncing around, while someone (me) has been frantically attempting to repair site performance difficulties. I guess it is safe to say, we are getting a bit on the large size, and exercise alone won’t fix our issues.
So for those of you who might be interested in a bit of techno-speak, here is what I have done to improve our site performance and lighten the load we place on the HostGator servers.
To begin with, I deleted the following WordPress plugins:
- All in One SEO Pack
- BulletProof Security
- Exclude Pages from Navigation
- File Gallery
- Image Gallery Reloaded
- Quick Cache
- Secure WordPress
- SEO Rank Reporter
- Slideshow Gallery
- SweetCaptcha
- Term Management Tools
- WP-Members
- WP Minify
I installed the following WordPress plugins, for functionality and lighter footprint purposes):
- Greg’s High Performance SEO to provide Search Engine Optimization while minimally impacting site and server performance.
- WP Super Cache with WPSCMin plus the additional “min” plugin.
- P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler): to test the impact of the site plugins on page load times.
- Cloudflare: to protect and accelerate the website. ManyRoad’s web traffic is routed through the Cloudflare intelligent global network to automatically optimize the delivery of web pages in order to get the fastest page load times and best performance. Cloudflare also blocks threats and limits abusive bots and crawlers from wasting bandwidth and server resources.
- WP Smush.it: added to reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it (Yahoo) API within WordPress.
- Head Cleaner: to clean-up and reduce redundancies within the site theme header functions
- jsDelivr CDN which moved all javascript from header to footer and deferred javascript processing to later in the page loading processing
- Use Google Libraries: to use common javascript libraries from Google’s AJAX Libraries CDN, rather than from WordPress’s own copies.
Additionally, I purchased a MaxCDN account and am operating ManyRoads using CDN via WP Super Cache.
Finally, I added the following to the Many-Roads.com .htaccess file (to enhance performance):
# BEGIN GZIP
<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript
</ifmodule>
# END GZIP
#pagespeed
<IfModule pagespeed_module>
ModPagespeed on
# using commands,filters etc
</IfModule>
#end Pagespeed
# BEGIN Expire headers
<ifModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault “access plus 5 seconds”
ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access plus 2592000 seconds”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 2592000 seconds”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 2592000 seconds”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 2592000 seconds”
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access plus 2592000 seconds”
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 604800 seconds”
ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 216000 seconds”
ExpiresByType application/javascript “access plus 216000 seconds”
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript “access plus 216000 seconds”
ExpiresByType text/html “access plus 600 seconds”
ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml “access plus 600 seconds”
</ifModule>
# END Expire headers
# BEGIN Cache-Control Headers
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
<filesMatch “\.(ico|jpe?g|png|gif|swf)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “public”
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch “\.(css)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “public”
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch “\.(js)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “private”
</filesMatch>
<filesMatch “\.(x?html?|php)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “private, must-revalidate”
</filesMatch>
</ifModule>
# END Cache-Control Headers
I have run diagnostic test performance on:
Many-Roads now scores at between 88-92/100 depending upon the site performance tests conducted – in the past we were at between 50-68.
If anyone out there can think of anything I ought yet to do, please let me know. Absent brilliant ideas from on high (or maybe from one of you), I don’t believe I can do much more to see, test and understand my site’s performance and load factors.
We know that by big site standards this is not a high traffic rate, but for us 100,000+ unique visitors is both amazing and wonderful.
The past month has been quite busy for me both from a genealogy/ ManyRoads website perspective as well as otherwise. It seems like I have been everywhere but home for most of the past month. Now with the holiday season, we ( Becky and I ) are busy with things in the family and otherwise, as I am certain everyone is at this time of the year.
I must admit I am really pleased with the listings. I am also a bit ashamed to say that I missed noticing one of them for more than 8 months. I guess that just shows how ‘quick’ I can be.
Included among these are:
We hope you have found the information, pointers, etc. on ManyRoads to be of value. I know that I have learned a lot, made many new new friends, found ‘new’ (not ‘lost’) relatives, and kept very busily entertained. By way of sharing a few additional points of interest, the ManyRoads site now has:
We have added the following items to ManyRoads over the last few weeks:
