WP-Minify Plugin to improve your Blog Performance
Ajith | Dec 2009 | Blogging Tips
A lot of us are familiar with the WordPress Super Cache plugin that can drastically improve the performance of self-hosted WordPress blogs. This plugin works well by caching a self-hosted WordPress blog’s PHP files on the server as static HTML pages that are ready to serve anytime.
Yet another blog performance optimization plug – that works a little differently as compared to the super-cache – is the wp-Minify Plugin. I just experimented with it on this blog and it ‘felt’ like the blog loads a little bit faster than it used to be.
How wp-minify works?
While the WP Super Cache works on minimizing the processing time at the server, the wp-minify works on to reduce the size of files that needs to be downloaded from the server there by saving bandwidth and reducing time to download. Basically, it compresses the style sheets (CSS files) and javascript files used by blog themes & plugins and consolidates them into single files. By compression what I mean here is removing redundant white spaces and other unnecessary information (comments etc) from these files thereby reducing their size and merging them into one. The plugin internally uses the minify engine that incorporates several optimization features as per Yahoo’s guidelines for high performance websites.
Is wp-minify for you?
If your blog uses a lot of plugins and a style-heavy theme then you may use wp-minify to improve the site performance drastically. In my case, I could save only about 3KBs because my files were somewhat optimized as I coded this theme myself. Also, I use very few plugins (13) on this blog.
The author of wp-minify claims that he could compress his 138KB script files into just 33KB and that would mean that it takes only one fourth of the time to load (those compressed files) after optimizing. Of course, the other uncompressed files are still there.
You may download and install wp-minify plugin via this link. The plugin is so easy to setup and all that you need to do is to keep its cache directory as read-write-execute (chmod 777). Unlike the super-cache plugin, you may not face issues while upgrading WordPress or even while moving WordPress to new host.
If you have already used this plugin, please share your experience here.
Happy Blog Optimizing!
Great info dude!
I will try it and i think it will compress better than yours because, my css files and other files are not optimized.
I have one question. There might be cpu usage at server end for every request as it is compressing the files right?
Or it is also cached?
No CPU overhead man… it’s compressed only at distant intervals and it’s cached as well.
Did not work for me Ajith. All the formatting went for a toss. I had a problem with the super cache plugin too. On the other hand I’ve had better success with CSS compression using online tools and then changing it via the Editor in WP.
You can use offline compression as you said but you have to do it everytime you add stuff like plugins. Formating issues are caused because of certain plugins/widgets that don’t confom to script inclusion guidelines. You can still get your formating back using the debugging methodology explained in the support site (use Firebug to check which script is in red and exclude it probably)
Great one. I was not aware of it. Compressing CSS files is a great idea. I will surely try it out. Thanks for sharing.
You are welcome.
Look cool, since Google recently made some changes about the way it will stare your performance.
Right. High performing sites and Class C hosting will always have some SEO advantage. Talking about performance, man, you have to change your hosting
Thanks Ajith.
i hope it can make performance optimization for my blog.
Give it a shot and let me know how it works for you.
I tried this after reading your post, but it didn’t work as expected. Many of the plugins conked, even the alexa widget had problems, not so easy and straight-forward as I expected it to be.
Raju, please check out the debugging guidelines – it’s pretty easy to fix with Firebug and once you are done, enjoy the performance improvement
@Raju,
I had problems with statcounter and alexa. We just need to add the problematic .js scrips in the exception list which is provided in the admin panel.
Now it is working for me.
Ajith, This is the first time to your blog. Great one!
I installed the Wp-Minify plugin and it did improve the loading time however my Google Search functionality got messes up and nothing shows up.
Do you know how to fix it? Have you encountered this issue before?
Thanks
If Google search functionality is affected you can exclude the relevant javascript files from wp-minify options. To find out which files to exclude use the troubleshoot guidelines. It’s pretty easy. Basically if you use the firebug firefox plugin it will show problematic js files to be excluded
http://omninoggin.com/wordpress-posts/how-to-troubleshoot-wp-minify/
Tried it out twice and wasn’t pleased the CSS and JS dependant functions of my blog’s theme were completely lost. I think it Over-Minified my files. lol
Compressing css file is the first of its kind… This is the first blog wherein I hear such information…interesting idea
Ajith, I’m a big fan of website speed optimization tools and I use wp-minify as well.
The only downside of this plugin is that it loads the merged script file in the very top inside the html head tag.
This causes the the browser to deal with javascript files before even loading styles and images.
I disabled the minification of the style.css file in my site because it’s already minified, and I use wp-minify for js files only, so if you look in my page source, you’ll see that the call for the merged js file is before the style.css file.
I tried to switch the order but unsuccessfully.
Minify JS (JavaScript) and CSS Files to Speed Up Your Website.
Read below
http://www.globinch.com/2010/07/09/minify-js-javascript-css-speed-up-your-website/
Great plugin
It works well at present.I use it to replace the total cache minify,as that gave my blog no end of hang-ups
Still debating whether to implement html minify.I use MaxCDN
Great work
can someone tell me How to use it, I mean what options i ve to activate in this plug-in in order to decrease my site load.
Need any quick response.
Thank you
I do not use wp-minify anylonger but WP 3 Total Cache! Awesome plugin with multiple cache & serve optimization techniques including minify, compression, caching of pages, database queries, objects etc. Try it out.