I happened upon the site WebSiteOptimization.com and started testing the performance of my site. I was astounded by how long it would take to load the front page of my site over a 14.4 kbps modem connection. True, not many people use a modem connection anymore, but still, 130 seconds is a long time to wait! Now this the time required to load every last image, not the the time required before the page starts to render and become readable, but still there is room for improvement. So I started playing around with performance settings and quickly made some substantial gains.

First of all, I enabled the WordPress CSS-Compress plug-in, which compressed the CSS file and all of the images referenced within it, which reduced the number of HTTP requests. Secondly, I enabled GZIP compression (through the Options -> Reading -> "WordPress should compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them" option.) I noticed that the new Contact Form plugin, which I hadn't even implemented on any page, was also causing a bunch of HTTP requests, so I deactivated it. I made some substantial improvements; I noticed pages loading substantially faster on my cable connection and was very pleased. A test showed 14.4 kbps download times were reduced from 130 seconds to 40 seconds!

But then I realized why I hadn't enabled Gzip compression previously: some of my WordPress plug-ins won't work with Gzip compression enabled. According to Denis de Bernardy:

The gzip is enabled before the output buffers are actually processed, so using it prevents plugins that use output buffers (external links, admin menu, ad spaces, etc.) to work properly. The gzip option in itself should never be active anyway. Apache can do this by default, and in the cases where it does you can end up with double-gzip'ed content.

So I worked to enable compression within Apache by modifying my .htaccess file, but that just brought my site down. Mod_gzip and mod_deflate aren't supported and I'm on a shared server, so I don't have full control. So I made the call, and axed the plug-ins that weren't working, namely the plug-in that identifies external links and another that places an administrative menu bar across the top of my site (for me only.) I really like those plugins, but they are not worth the performance hit. Until I find a way to enable Apache (server-controlled) compression, I'm going to go without them.

Total HTTP Requests: 30 | after: 11

Download Times*
Connection Rate Download Times (before | after)
14.4K 130.70 seconds | after: 40.22 seconds
28.8K 68.35 seconds | after: 21.51 seconds
33.6K 59.44 seconds | after: 18.84 seconds
56K 38.07 seconds | after: 12.42 seconds
ISDN 128K 15.82 seconds | after: 5.75 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 6.85 seconds | after: 3.06 seconds
*Note that these download times are based on the full connection rate for ISDN and T1 connections. Modem connections (56Kbps or less) are corrected by a packet loss factor of 0.7. All download times include delays due to round-trip latency with an average of 0.2 seconds per object. With 30 total objects for this page, that computes to a total lag time due to latency of 6 seconds. Note also that this download time calculation does not take into account delays due to XHTML parsing and rendering.

My long-time friend Bryan recently described me as "a person who will spend a lot of money on some new electronic gadget and then take it apart before he even uses it." He's right; I can't help myself. I want to make everything "better." This has extended into the use WordPress Plugins on my site. I'm always looking to add something new and my plugin count has increased to nearly 40. But the list has grown large and I've started to debate the usefulness of several of them. I then receive an e-mail from a native Dutch speaker by the name of Ilse, who reverse-translated the Global Language Translator plug-in translation. I found out all sorts of interesting facts about myself:

• My sex is not male, but little man (ouch!)
• I really like the television show Lights That Shine on Friday During the Night and that the classifications of NBC smell really bad (a.k.a. their ratings are low)
• My favorite artist is the Band of Matthews of Dave
• And, most alarmingly, I really like young goats but don't have them yet

In case you're as curious about that last one as I was, Ilse was kind enough to  inform me that it was supposed to read kids instead of goats.  Trust me, it is kids, and not goats.

So now that the non-English-speaking world perceives me as a little man who likes young goats and watches smelly television , I think it's time to cut my losses. Global Translator has been uninstalled. I tried it out on the promise of "making the site more accessible to non-English speakers." It is certainly a worthy goal, but I wasn't doing anyone any favors, especially myself.

I've uninstalled several other limited-value plugins over the past few days and hope to trim the list down to below 30. There's nothing worse than upgrading to the latest version of WordPress only to have a long since abandoned plugin break everything. Combating this is the excellent WordPress Plug-in Installer plugin, which makes plugin installation a 20 second vs. 5 minutes process, and the new WordPress Plugins site, which allows publishing, voting, popularity ranking, and comments for all plugins (I've been begging/voting for this for a long time.)  Must. Fight. Urge. To. Tweak.

I finally got around to updating my website to version 2.2.1. The feature I was most looking forward to built-in tagging. I was a previous user of Ultimate Tag Warrior, but I had to stop using it because it broke the Wordpress search feature (posts with no tags were not included in search results.)

To my surprise, I couldn't find the tag feature or the Ultimate Tag Warrior importer. After a great deal of Google searching, I found that tagging was removed at the last minute from Wordpress 2.2.x and will be delayed until 2.3. Additionally, I found that Christine Davis release a new (actually the final) version of Ultimate Tag Warrior, , Arne Brachhold released a new version of Google Sitemap Generator, and Stewart Farquhar released a new version of Google Sitemaps - Append UTW Tags. I re-installed all three, activated them, and I'm pleased to say that everything is now working properly again.

For those who don't know these plug-ins do or why they are important, let me explain. Tags are great because they identify the keywords within a post and help link related posts together; this can help generate additional site traffic. Sitemaps are indexes for for websites; they contain a list of every page on the site so that search engines do not have to crawl through the site and look for new content. For example, here is a link to the sitemap.xml file for CarltonBale.com. The third plug-in appends the tags into the sitemap, so search engines can find the tags more easily. When they work together properly, these three plug-ins can help create additional traffic. It's called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and there have been volumes written about it. If you're interested in learning more about Wordpress SEO, Google is your friend.