WordCamp Cape Town 2012 - Optimizing WordPress on the frontend.

Editor's Notes

1. Hello, my name is Byron, and I am the co-founder of Tangram, a small full service agency. Today I am going to be talking to you about optimization of your WordPress themes, and a few of the things that you can do to make your website load faster without needing too much technical know how.
2. With the WordPress theme market booming at the moment, and lot’s of plugins and services harnessing the power and popularity of WordPress, end users are wanting more from their website. Most blogs are no longer just simple text with images and the occasional youtube clip of a cat playing out a Star Wars scene. Whether it be sliders, fancy share plugins, premium web fonts, responsive videos and more, all these services are readily available and can normally be installed on your site in a few minutes.
3. This is great for the site owner, and gives your site some really nice bells and whistles, but what about your most important asset, your viewers? Sure, they love that you aren’t using Comic Sans, and it’s great that you can view your site on all mobile device’s, even Android phones. But every plugin that you add, or premium theme that you buy, even if optimized correctly, is probably going to add a number of additional JS and CSS files, some additional image calls, and increase the number and complexity of database queries amongst other things. All of those increase the most important aspect of your website, the load speed. Now if you are running a best of breed dedicated server that is only hosting your one WordPress site, and you have your server setup to handle load balancing, caching and running on a separately hosted enterprise version of MySQL, these things probably aren’t going to really affect you or your users. But this is the real world, and you probably use shared hosting, with 400 other sites running on the same server so performance and optimization is key.
4. Today I am going to take you through a number of optimization techniques that you can apply to your theme or by adding a few select plugins.
5. Every additional call to a JS file (internal or external) adds a few milliseconds of load time, sometimes those milliseconds can become seconds, especially if the service you’re loading from is taking strain. PROs & Cons
6. Transient API Cache for MySQL Queries 5 queries to the DB per wp_nav_menu Pro’s and Cons
7. Image Spriting CDN