For the past few months, I’ve been working to improve my site’s pageload time. I’m doing this to help improve overall user experience as well as to help my search engine optimization. I’ve written about some of the methods I’ve used for speeding up WordPress, but I’ve also changed hosting companies (to Mediatemple) and implemented Amazon’s S3 services for hosting my images. I also just installed WP Super Cache at the recommendation of friend, Adam Small.
It’s working. According to Google Webmasters, my pageload times have decreased to well within Google Webmaster’s recommendations:
Google also lets you set the default for whether or not your site is set to go directly to the www.domain or without the www. This is where things get interesting. If I observe my page load times without the www, they’re fantastic. However, if I look at the pageload times with the www, they’re terrible:
The irony of course, is that the hosting package I have always goes to a www page. Because of the huge difference in Google’s response times, I’ve set the site configuration to the non-www address within Google Webmasters. I also removed redirect code in the root of my site in the .htaccess file that was redirecting non-www requests to a www domain.
I’m not sure if any of this helps or hurts, but it seems the logical thing to do. Any thoughts?
