Most of you out there spend a great deal of time fine tuning your sites and making sure that your content is easy to consume for your visitors. There’s one key factor that you can easily control and that is the speed of your blog. It’s a widely known fact that the faster your site, the more likely readers are to spend more time on it – don’t ask me why, but it’s been proven.

So what you say? Well I’ll show you what. If you earn a living from ad revenue, then page views are your friends. Even if you don’t monetize your web site by impressions (page views) alone, getting 1 or 2 more page views from thousands of visitors will push your site into a new pricing tier and increase your monthly income. That’s why we want to share a few tips with you:

• Use an opcode cache, like APC or eAccelerator or XCache:
  For those using anything except shared hosting, an opcode cache is your secret weapon. It makes sure that your web server doesn’t have to process every script from scratch to build the pages; it instead keeps those instructions in memory, which are often tens to hundreds of times faster.
• Configure MySQL for optimal performance (query, table, join, index caching):
  Keeping your database optimized and having a professional make sure that it’s running at peak performance are vital measures for any site.
• Use HTTP compression:
  For your pages/posts, cascading style sheets, JavaScript and favicons, making the time it takes for these things to download much less.
• Improve your browser caching:
  Implement entity tags, future expire headers, cache control etc for your pages/posts, cascading style sheets, JavaScripts and images etc so that visitors to your sites will enjoy even faster page loads on their next visit.
• Combine multiple cascading style sheets and JavaScripts used in your pages:
  The time required to download one large file is less than the time to download several files (even if they are small), so this is a key step.
• Use punypng to optimize your images:
  For WordPress users smush.it already has a plugin available that integrates seamlessly so that’s a great start. The smaller the file, the faster your users can download it and the more you money you save on bandwidth.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN):
  At BSA, we use NetDNA, which we recommend, but a quick Google search will uncover many others that are very affordable. A CDN is a high performance cache service that uses servers located around the world so that whenever a user visits your site, the images, cascading style sheets and JavaScripts will be downloaded from the server nearest to them, which is  A LOT faster. Many people don’t realize that Amazon’s S3 and CloudFront services are much more expensive than other options out there – using a CDN is more affordable than you think. It also allows you to get more performance out of a less expensive hosting package!

These are some fundamentals for improving user experience and encouraging visitors to spend more time on your site. If you’re using WordPress, you’re in luck – a very popular plugin among our publishers called W3 Total Cache does almost all of this and more right out of the box. Check it out, for those of you using other content management systems; unfortunately we don’t have any shortcut recommendations at the moment as we use WordPress here at BSA. If any of you out there have some tips for Joomla, Expression Engine or MovableType etc, please let us know in the comments. To optimize your images, check out the WP smush.it plugin here. For now punypng is only available for manual use. As for the database optimization plugin for WordPress, one of the most popular is WP-DBManager.

Clearly these are oriented towards the PHP, MySQL, Linux based sites that we work with, but the principles are the same. Let us know in the comments if you’d like any Ruby on Rails or Microsoft Technology oriented tips.