My #1 all-time ProPhoto WordPress tip

Without a doubt, I have a number one all time, inter-galactic champion, most important tip ever for ProPhoto blog users:

THOU SHALT BE COMPLETELY OBSESSED WITH PAGE LOAD SPEED ABOVE ALL ELSE.

What do I mean by that? Well, the great strength of the ProPhoto theme is also it’s tragic flaw: huge pictures. Huge pictures make our blogs awesome. They can also make them very slow to load. Our friends and fans and clients will not put up with sites that take forever to load. Remember, we as photographers tend to have really good high-speed internet connections because of our unique needs (4GB uploads to Pictage ring a bell for anyone?), but most people are not so lucky. The last thing you want to do is frustrate your users because your site takes forever to load.

What to do? I’m glad you asked. Here are 5 ways to dramatically improve your page load speeds:

  1. Reduce the number of posts that appear on each page. This is the most important single thing you can do to reduce page load times. I heartily recommend keeping your posts per page somewhere between 4 and 6. If you tend to post a lot of pictures per post, I’d go for 4 posts. If you only post a few pictures per post, 6 might be fine. This can be changed by going to “Options” –> “Reading” (or “Settings” –> “Reading” if you’re on WP 2.5 already) and putting a number other than the default 10 in where it says: “Blog Posts: Show at most: _____ posts”
  2. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize. Most of you post images that are 900px by 600px, since this is the size the blog was created for. (Some of you post even bigger pictures than that–Mark Ridout does.) These pictures should be about 100k - 200k in file size, depending on the complexity of the image. If your pictures are consistently bigger than that, you should probably tweak your export settings out of Photoshop or Lightroom. I usually use Photoshop’s “Save for Web and Devices” export dialog and set it to JPG –> Quality 80. (more on this…)
  3. Optimize your logo, biopic, and masthead (flash fader) images as well. See if you can shrink the file sizes on all these images at all without losing too much quality, to speed up page load.
  4. Background image beware! A lot of you have taken advantage of ProPhoto’s ability for you to upload your own background image. This image, even more so then your other images, should be extremely lightweight. I recommend keeping it below 100k (below 50k is better) if possible. Small, repeating GIF files work great for this. A few of you have tried to use background images that were several megabytes in size. That’s way to big.
  5. Check back for a post coming soon about a plugin you can (and should) install that can shave up to a second or two off every single page load. This deserves its whole own post, so I will write it up later.

I honestly think having a speedy blog makes it much more user friendly, and much more likely that people will keep coming back day after day to see your pictures. So, be a Nazi about page load speeds! In fact, next time your somewhere with slow internet (dial-up even), check your blog to get a good read on what lots of people might experience with your site.

Related Post: What size images should I post? How do I resize & optimize them?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 and is filed under Pimp my Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “My #1 all-time ProPhoto WordPress tip”

  1. On April 3rd, 2008 at 2:11 pm Petra Hall said:

    I suggest to use even more compression than 80, I use 60 in Save for web and it seem to do a good job at still keeping good quality. And it’s for blog viewing only anyway, so it’s not critical to have a very high quality.

    Saving for web is usually something that’s not recommended, but it does shave off a few K’s as it doesn’t save the EXIF info, while it still keeps the ICC profile.

  2. On April 3rd, 2008 at 2:14 pm Jared said:

    Does saving for web kill the EXIF data? I didn’t know that. If you don’t use that feature, how do you export and compress?

  3. On April 3rd, 2008 at 2:27 pm Petra Hall said:

    Jared, it does on Mac’s anyway. I think it might still preserve it on Wintel machines. According to “those in the know” you should only save jpegs, even for web viewing, as a regular save as and choose the compression there (that goes up to 12, where 7-8 should be ok for blogging).

  4. On April 10th, 2008 at 4:23 pm Chad Franz said:

    Thanks for #1!! That helped my load times greatly!!

  5. On May 2nd, 2008 at 12:14 pm Lindsey Marie said:

    Hello! I am just wondering if i want to create a background with brush effects and such in Photoshop what are the specifications for doing this as far as document size and stuff like that! Thanks in advance!

  6. On May 2nd, 2008 at 12:20 pm Jared said:

    Lindsey Marie » there are no real hard and fast rules. try to keep the file size as small as possible, and you should probably plan on the image dimensions being fairly small and tiling, so you will have to create an image that tiles well. but, beyond that, just experiment and have fun!

  7. On May 12th, 2008 at 8:21 pm phototristan said:

    You might also consider a web host that is speed optimized and load balanced. They cost a little more than your ’standard’ web hosts but in my experience, you’ll notice that your site will load a lot faster. Most web hosts just put a disk drive online and call it done. But the good ones have fast RPM drives and systems in place to balance the load, etc.

    MediaTemple.net is one such web host. Another one (and the one I’m using and like) is EngineHosting.com.

    I noticed a big jump in my site load times after switching to them. Also, no downtime, unlike my previous host which did go down fairly regularly.

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