Busby SEO Test – Wordpress Hack to Make Your Site Loads Faster
January 15, 2009, filed under Blogging Insights
Take a look at your site load speed. How long do visitors need to wait before the whole page appears?
Whether site load speed affects SERP directly is still arguable. But there are more than enough reasons to believe that site load speed does influence your site’s popularity indirectly.
The larger your page is, the longer it takes to load and fewer people will stay and read the content. Less people know about your content, there’s going to be not uch left to spread the words on your writings by bookmarking, re-tweeting, linking, commenting or even subscribing to your feed.
With Google nowadays takes into account factors like feed subscribers, bookmarks and incoming link to decide a page’s position, it makes sense to optimize our site load speed in order to achieve higher ranking in SERPs.
Across the internet we can find hundreds of articles suggesting ways to minimize site load time. The popular ones are reducing images, third party scripts to eliminating uneccessary php requests.
On my Busby SEO Test entry, I tried to apply those techniques by having the unecessary parts for the competition thrown out and leave them intact for regular visitors. The modification was performed to the sidebar and footer area. If you compare the sidebar and footer between my Busby SEO Test entry and this one for example, you’ll see that the Busby SEO Test entry has no sidebar while the other one has.
Having no sidebar containing banner ads and scripts will increase load time and for the competition, I decide not to load them. I did that by executing a set of command when the blog fulfills a condition declared in the source code.
If you’re not on competition, you can display category based messages to your visitors or anything else you can think of. Interested?
There’s not going to be many programming involved. It’s no rocket science but you still need to make backups before.
Are you ready? Let’s proceed…
We’ll going to use the file sidebar.php for the example. What I’m going to do is adding some codes that will make the blog displays an empty sidebar when visitors are reading my Busby SEO Test page.
- Open the sidebar.php and put this code on the top or right after div id=”sidebar”
<?php if (is_single(‘17′)) { ?>
The above codes says that “if the visitor is reading post number 17 then…”. Here, you can make adjustment according to what condition youu want to check. It can be if a visitor is viewing the archives page, an article from a certain author, articles from category X, etc. They are called conditional tags in Wordpress. For more conditional tags, you can find them here.
- Right after the code, supply the command you want to be executed. In my case, nothing. So I’ll just write
<?php } ?>
- Or if you want to add something, you can do it this way
your codes here
<?php } ?>
- You can simply stop here and see the results. But in my case, there’s another condition I must anticipate. That is when people are reading pages other than the page specified above. So instead of the above code I’ll go with
your codes here
<?php } else {?>
your codes here
<? php } ?>
- So, the full code I use to display an empty sidebar when people are reading the Busby SEO Test page and display the full sidebar when they’re on the other pages is
<?php if (is_single(‘17′)) { ?>
<?php } else {?>
what needs to be done if other pages are shown
<? php } ?>
Pretty simple isn’t it? As alternatives to (is_single(‘17’), you can choose from the following:
- is_home() – blog is displaying the main page
- !in_category(1) – blog is displaying articles from categories other than category 1 (notice the exclamation mark)
- is_page() – blog is displaying a page
- is_archive() – blog is displaying the archive list
- (is_home() || !in_category(1) || is_page() || is_archive()) – blog is displaying either the main page or articles from categories other than category 1 or a page or an archive list
Any troubles? Shoot me a comment or review the article!
What do you think of this modification? Do you have any other ideas you can share to increase site load speed?
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We need some advice about make the WP blog display fast? Should I use WPChache? or another plugin? Could you please suggest us?
Tabloid Internet´s last blog post..DoFollow Blog List Here
The famous solution is to use the WP Super Cache. I heard it works better that the WP Cache. However if you modify your blog’s layout frequently, I recommend you to avoid caching plugins since it won’t display the latest change on your blog’s design.
I used it when I redesigned this blog and wondering why the changes weren’t reflected… doh!..
Sorry for the late reply
@ Tabloid Internet & Loius Liem: WP Super Cache sucked big time on my shared server with Hostgator. I tried HyperCache, 1BlogCache, WP-Super Cache and DB-Cache and only Hyper Cache worked excellently well.