Posted on August 18, 2010. Filed under
Websites.
No Comments » Just launched the new theme for my blog. Its pretty standard and has a minimalistic design. Coincidentally it looks like the WordPress 3.0 admin area. Though the site was in dire need of a new design, the real reason I started this little project was to improve site speed. After moving to my new MediaTemple (dv) server, I noticed that this site was using up a lot of bandwidth (My old hosting didnt even gauge my bandwidth…).
After looking at my site’s final output source code, I concluded…
- My site has way to many plugins. I had many 3rd party sources which really delayed the site from being fully loaded
- The current theme was using a lot of useless JavaScript
- Some images used in the blog were not being stored locally
- High file size (for the web) JavaScript and CSS files
- Twitter Plugin wasn’t caching the data properly
Once I figured this all out, the best solution was really to delete all unused plugins and removed plugins that relied heavily outside the site. I also minified my CSS and used very small images for the layout. Overall I would say the main source of the loading time being over 6 seconds using the old theme was primarily due to all the external calling because sometimes the load would be really long on retrieving the script or image.
Anyhow the new theme is up, I’ m ready to see if some of the keywords I’m targeting will get a higher rank due to increase site performance!
Old vs New
Posted on December 25, 2009. Filed under
Misc,
Websites.
1 Comment » Before you install WordPress, you’ll definitely want to see all the options on the table. You can either go on http://wordpress.com/ and sign up a blog for free over there or you can download the latest version and install it on a server/webhosting. Since this is a tutorial in how-to, you’ll definitely want to download WordPress and have your own blog on your own domain.
Requirements
- PHP 4.3 or greater
- MySQL 4.1.2 or greater
- Mod Rewrite enabled on a LAMP/WAMP Server
- FTP enabled server (prompt host/username/password)
- MySQL database (prompt host/database name/username/password)
- Dedication to update!
After confirming the requirements, go ahead and download the latest version of WordPress at http://wordpress.org.
Once you downloaded the zip/tar onto your desktop, go ahead and extract all the files to the desktop.
This next part you will need an FTP client (http://filezilla-project.org/).
- Open the FTP Client
- On the top bar (quick connect), fill out the host, username, and password
- Go to the directory you want wordpress (for mine its the HTTP root NOT the main root)
- On your desktop open the wordpress folder and select all the files then drag it into the server windows on the FileZilla (or your own FTP client). The reason you don’t drag the WordPress folder itself because then the url would be http://yourdomain.com/wordpress instead of http://yourdomain.com
- Once all the files have been uploaded, close everything out, open your browser and go to the URL you uploaded wordpress to.
If you have your database information ready, go ahead and click create configuration. Fill out all the database information in its respected spots.
Once you submitted the information and the database has been confirmed, copy down the password it generates (I just copy paste it because you can change it right after). After that click login.
Username: admin
Password: (CTRL + V) if you copied the text.
Once you login, on the top a yellow bar with red text prompts you to change your password. Click yes then change the password (scroll down) to whatever you want.