Making WordPress Faster – Combining External CSS and JavaScript

I am working on a plugin (originally started by DD32) that combines all external CSS and JavaScript that passes through WP_Scripts.

This will provide an order of magnitude page load time decrease for nearly all WordPress blogs.

Unfortunately, in order for this to work enough to close the open ticket, several things are going to have to be figured out:

Themes and Plugins need to use wp_enqueue_script() and wp_enqueue_style()
Most javascript will need to be rewritten, preferably to be exeecuted after the DOM is ready.
LTR (left-to-right) styles
A framework for minification and gzipping of the resulting scripts and styles.

I will be posting more about this in the future as I work out the details.

Tags: blogging, external css, ltr, order of magnitude, page load time, Plugin, scripts, wordpress

4 comments

Rahsheen on December 17, 2008 at 4:42 pm

Sounds very interesting. Can’t wait to see what develops. Always looking to make my blog load faster…usually unsuccessful :)

Reply
gregory on December 26, 2008 at 6:24 pm

You might want to check out php speedy and mod_concat

http://aciddrop.com/2008/07/15/php-speedy-wp-version-047-works-with-wp26/

http://www.artzstudio.com/2008/08/using-modconcat-to-speed-up-render-start/

They handle file concatenation. I am looking into getting mod_concat to work with wordpress 2.7 using the k2 theme.

Reply
1. mjc on January 5, 2009 at 12:09 pm
  
  btw, php-speedy is very easy to set up and works well :)
  
  Reply
mjc on January 1, 2009 at 3:17 am

interesting, greg, but I am integrating this sort of solution into WP itself, rather than doing it outside.

Reply