I won’t go into too many details, I got everything I learned from google and my customisations aren’t very ground breaking.
Jdub tweeted about the wordpress apc object cache being updated. So I (re)installed that. I had it installed a while ago, but a wordpress upgrade broke it. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/apc/
Everyone knows about wp-super-cache, and there’s some good nginx recipes and discussions on the internet already about how to run the two together.
My blog isn’t very big, or updated very often, so I tried setting wp-super-cache to preload cache files once a day. Except after the first day, it seemed to get stuck and wouldn’t regenerate them. So now, it just generates (and compresses) them after the first visit and I’ve configured it so spiders can generate them, which isn’t the default. The cached files are set to expire after a day.
I’ve noticed recently that spiders are sometimes using the short url form ?p=100 rather than the long SEO style urls. With my nginx config, it won’t serve a super-cached file using the short url form. It won’t serve a super-cached file if the url has a ? in it.
This was new to me, a wordpress plugin called wp-minify. It’s an awesome idea. It combines multiple css (and, separately, js) links into one, minified version, and compresses and caches the result. So the browser only has to make one css get and one js get. Just helps pages load that little bit quicker. Good for the search engines, good for the users.
I set nginx to gzip text output, as well as look for a pre gzipped file first. So I basically ran:
for a in `find /www -name "*.js" -o -name "*.css" -o -name "*.html"`;do cat $a |gzip -c > $a.gz ;done
wp-recaptcha is a pain the bum when it comes to page load times, it slows the page display to one second. But it does a good job of stopping boring spam comments. auxesis suggested moving the <script src=…> to the end to the dom, which I’ve done, and that does help with the feel, it doesn’t reduce overall load time though. It’s just that I couldn’t find a good way to do it, and I’m going to have to merge my changes with every upgrade.
That’s about it I think, the name of the game was to decrease page load times.
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