Reducing your comic's load time
Monday, January 31, 2011 at 5:00AM Member MoJones wrote an impressive guide to making your comic load faster on your site. I want to post it here so it doesn't get buried.
I've been obsessed with page-load speeds for years, and I've learned quite a bit in that time - although I am by no means an expert. Page-load speed isn't just a user experience issue - although it is certainly that - it can also affect your Google page rank. Useful tools for monitoring and analysing your page load speed are pingdom.com and a the pagespeed Firefox plugin (yslow is also handy, but it hates Wibya, and will mark you down for using it). Pingdom tests your site from a server in Europe, so if your host is in the US it might show slower results than if you tested withWebpagetest with its multitude of locations to choose from - but Pingdom is useful as a benchmark. I'm using a WordPress/Comicpress(2.7) install, because that's what I started with five years ago. There is an argument that says if speed is your priority, you shouldn't use Wordpress at all - and that's a fair point. WP is great, but it's big. If there is a leaner system out there that does everything I need and is secure, I'll switch to it.