Speed up WordPress

I don’t have the feeling that my blog is particularly slow, but that’s because I haven’t really started out yet. I’m very worried that it will get slow soon, especially because I will have blog posts with (optimized/compressed) 40-50 photos.
This can’t be changed, but other things can.

I already read a lot about it, went through various tutorials, but yet I feel there’s some more I could do.

First of all, my blog seems to be doing well at the moment. At least according to Webpagetest.org.

Here’s my blog, so you can try yourself.
I’m trying to figure out what all the results REALLY mean, but I don’t get all of them.

Images:

I already compressed most of my images.
CSS sprites take a loooooooooot of time and so I’ll skip this for now and work on that much later when I actually get a bit higher traffic.

To compress my images I use Photoshop (save for web) and Yahoo’s SmushIt.

Javascript:

The scripts I’m using seem to cause some problems in terms of speed as I get the following suggestions from the Webpagetest.org site:

“380.5KiB of JavaScript is parsed during initial page load. Defer
parsing JavaScript to reduce blocking of page rendering.”

I have absolutely no clue what that means. Could anybody tell me more about that?
(I know that this is not particularly related to WordPress, but it’s part of speeding it up anyways, so I hope you’re willing to help me out here)

Another warning concerning Javascript:

The following external resources have small response bodies. Inlining the response in HTML can reduce blocking of page rendering.
http://zoomingjapan.com/travel/mount-koya-travel-report/ should inline the following small resources:
    http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/plugins/gravatar-box/gravbox.js?ver=1.0
    http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/modules/wpgroho.js?ver=3.2.1
    http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/themes/alltuts/js/contact-form.js?ver=3.2.1
    http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/themes/alltuts/js/my-slider.js?ver=3.2.1
    http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/themes/alltuts/js/scrollable.js?ver=3.2.1
    http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/themes/alltuts/js/sliding_tabs.js?ver=3.2.1
    http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/themes/alltuts/js/sprinkle.js?ver=3.2.1
    http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/themes/alltuts/js/tab-renamer.js?ver=3.2.1
    http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/themes/alltuts/js/welcome_back.js?ver=3.2.1
    http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-includes/js/l10n.js?ver=20101110

So, it was recommended not to have any script calls in your template files, I put ALL of it in a js folder in my theme instead and that’s what you get. Thousands of tiny scripts. Of course I’m using wp_enqueue_script!
Does that mean it’s better to put it back into my header.php? Or create a custom.js and throw in all the code that possibly can work together well?!
Or put all the Javascript in the footer.php?!
I just don’t understand what would be the best environment for WP here!

Redirects:

Remove the following redirect chain if possible:

http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/2b7d7f6b4622da443cc8081ca78db661...
http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/themes/alltuts/images/usericon.png?s=30

Remove the following redirect chain if possible:

http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/35991606c4e61d2d3a4ba61a9e03ab79...
http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/themes/alltuts/images/usericon.png?s=30

Remove the following redirect chain if possible:

http://www.zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/themes/proton-child/images/toplight.png
http://zoomingjapan.com/wp-content/themes/proton-child/images/toplight.png

This is coming from the following code in my function.php:

add_filter( 'avatar_defaults', 'newgravatar' );

function newgravatar ($avatar_defaults) {
$myavatar = get_bloginfo('template_directory') . '/images/usericon.png';
$avatar_defaults[$myavatar] = "ZoomingJapan";
return $avatar_defaults;
}

Can I get rid of the redirect, but keeping the function alive?

Other steps:

• Disable revisions (done)

• Empty trash every 2 days (done)

• Optimize dabatase once a week (not yet)

• Use a cache plugin (done: W3 Total Cache)

• Flush early (not yet: <?php flush(); ?> not sure if that’s a good
  idea to use??!)

• Use CloudFlare as CDN (not yet: what do you think about that? does it work well with WP?)

Do you have any other suggestions that are relatively easy to implement?

I know, quite a lot of questions, but if you can give me just a little suggestion for any of the points, I’d be really grateful.

Thanks a lot in advance.

I was in a similar situation recently and started using W3 Total Cache too.

I’m not sure what settings you have at the moment, but it’s worth experimenting a bit if you can to see that you’re really using W3 Total Cache to the max

For example, I originally only had Page Cache and Browser Cache checked on the main screen, but I hadn’t gone into the dedicated sections and optimised them there too.

My advice would be to try enabling different options (checking different boxes) one at a time and previewing the changes, then once you’ve made a few re-run your speed checks

You can also try turning on the Minify setting in W3 and experimenting with that. You can either do Auto or if you really want to go to town chose the manual setting and then on the dedicated Minify page, use the Help option towards the top to automatically detect Javascript and other CSS files that you can potentially minify (don’t forgot to add them via the appropriate checkbox too), you can also chose to delay the loading of these files in some cases which may help with your Javascript parsing issues.

Be extra careful with Minify and test the changes (on more than one browser after clearing all caches) as you may find that some scripts don’t ‘like’ to be minified or won’t accept being loaded later in the page (for example you might botch the loading of the CSS on your site)

Finally I would also recommend trying Cloudflare (though I’ve seen people have mixed results with this in terms of speed) and also a CDN

I use MAXCDN which seems good and cheap to me and is nicely integrated with W3, here’s some more info on that:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-install-and-setup-w3-total-cache-for-beginners/

I am not an expert at this yet but I’ve used W3 Total Cache to significantly speed up a number of sites in the last few days, the key is experimenting bit by bit and testing, it can be a bit laborious but if you’re looking to get the absolute most out of your WP setup it’s worth a try

PS Also try and install the WP Smush It plugin and use it to compress all your images
PPS Always gets said but just to repeat, disable any plugins you’re not using too

Hope this helps!

Big love

Nick