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The quest for speed continues! I have signed up for a CDN service with MaxCDN. What this means is all my static files are now hosted on servers based all over the world reducing loading times for people wherever they visit from. Thanks to Yoast for the 25% discount voucher! Early tests seem to indicate a significant improvement to repeat view loading speed but it’s too soon to tell fully.

Loading speed is vital to the overall success of any website. A quick loading speed means much more then just how many seconds it takes the page to load. It’s more about how well setup that website is and how much care and attention the owner has put into tweaking various elements. As the owner of a photoblog I have been guilty of neglecting the optimisation of my photos for some time, but that’s changing now.

I’m steadily working back through all my posts and optimising the photos. Why you ask? Well I have tweaked the remainder of my website and I’m very pleased with a score of 98/100 on the Web Page Test. Now all the actual setup is as lean as possible it’s the right time to concentrate on the actual loading time my visitors experience.

Happy New Year everyone! Since I wrote about the Spam Free WordPress plugin by Todd Lahman on 6th December I have been totally spam free! I don’t get masses of traffic but 3 to 4 spam comments a day gets a little tiring so I’m very pleased. I also run a couple of other blogs using Akismet and Bad Behavior but they are still receiving spam comments that require deleting each day.

You can get it from Todd Lahman’s website here or from the WordPress Plugin repository here.

Another new plugin in an attempt to keep this blog as clean and fast as possible. Despite using Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins I’m still having two or three spam comments to delete every day despite my site having relatively low traffic. In an attempt to find a solution that will work on my other projects I have turned to the Spam Free WordPress plugin by Todd Lahman. It’s pretty easy to add into the theme and is much simpler to use than CAPTCHA which I loath! So from now on you just need to copy (Ctrl+C) and paste (Ctrl+V) the password field to have your comment approved.

Simple!

Another plugin update. This time a geo-tagging plugin that seems to run nice and quickly and is easy to use. Visit StreetMap.co.uk and use their tool to choose the latitude and longitude, enter it into the plugin and it shows a nice Google map of where the photo was taken. As much to aid my memory as anything else.

I’m a bit of a sucker for high scores in validators and page speed tools. However not being massively technical I went looking for a WordPress plugin that would enable GZIP compression and minify my HTML, CSS and Javascript. The page speed tools report an improvement but until I optimise all of my images which are taking up most of the download time I don’t expect to see a considerable improvement.