Optimizing Speed for Image Heavy Wordpress Blog

Question

I'm working on a clients existing Wordpress Blog and the layout is image heavy. I did a speed test with Pingdom Tools and it is SLOW! Here were the results:

Total loading time:
    29.9 seconds
Total objects:
    172 (1631.5 KB)
External objects:
    24 (536.2 KB)
HTML (X)HTML:
    3 (39.8KB)
RSS RSS/XML:
    0
CSS CSS:
    25 (206.4KB)
Scripts Scripts:
    43 (754KB)
Images Images:
    95 (346KB)
Plugins Plugins:
    0
Other Other:
    6 (285.3KB)
Redirected Redirected:
    1 

Almost 30 seconds! What are some things I can do besides caching the page? would using CDN be a good idea? I tried using minify plugins, but they keep breaking the pages. The website is on a shared server (Bluehost).

Answer 1

First you should use Web Page Analyzer to test the website and the results will give you several solutions to speed up the site. Your overall goal should be to get every recommendation green.

Start by reducing the number of HTTP requests which can be done by suing a minification, this combines the number of output files and groups them into a single file e.g. 10 .js files become 1 js file. I suggest using the W3Total Cache Plugin to do this.

If the site has a ton of images you'll also want to make sure each image has been optimized using Photoshop's Save For Web option this can dramatically decrease the image loading times. You'll want to create a batch to do this so you can optimize all the images in one swoop.

I've also installed the WordPress plugin jQuery Image Lazy Load WP and this works well to speed up users perception of the site.