WordPress & jQuery

The release of jQuery 1.4 brings many javascript improvements in performance, better handling of attributes, manipulation of DOM events and many more. Head over to the jQuery site for more details and a breakdown of the new features and improvements.

That’s great and we all like speed and flexibility improvements. Now, how would you like these in your blog from today? Well a very quick and easy modification to your theme can have you utilizing the latest version of jQuery from Google’s CDN servers. I took the code block from the source site below, inserted it in my functions.php but replaced the jQuery version number. Check out the adjusted code block below:

if( !is_admin()){
   wp_deregister_script('jquery');
   wp_register_script('jquery', ("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js"), false, '');
   wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
}

See where I just put “..jquery/1/jquery…” – by referencing the “1″ instead of “1.3.2″ we will get the latest version of jQuery loaded on the site. A quick look at the source code and we can see that the inserted javascript source is indeed via Google’s CDN and by clicking on the source code we see it’s version 1.4. To use simple terms in this code we are telling WordPress to “forget” it’s usual jQuery source / script setting, then preparing WordPress for the new settings (please load jQuery from Google’s CDN) and then serving up the new information for WordPress to use.

A quick and easy way to give your blog / site the benefits of the recent jQuery updates and improvements. If you encounter an issue with your site or  jQuery after this change you can easily revert to the previous version (1.3.2) by either removing the code block you added or, to keep jQuery hosted by Google’s CDN, adjusting the version number from “1″ to “1.3.2″. For those more familiar with jQuery coding there’s a list of “backwards incompatible” changes settings on the jQuery site.

If you’ve changed your site over to jQuery 1.4 how did it work out? As smoothly as mine did? Leave me a comment.

Source: http://digwp.com/2009/06/use-google-hosted-javascript-libraries-still-the-right-way/

Let’s face it, having the fastest website on the planet is everyones dream. There are many hosting services and options available with each service so finding the best combination can be a bit of a crap shoot. Now, Google, in their webmaster tools, has put together information for webmasters on how Google sees site performance and offers suggestions as to how to reduce a sites load time. Take a look at Google’s post in their webmaster blog “How fast is your site“.

Webmasters (administrators) can now login to Google Webmaster Tools to review their site(s) and click on the Labs section to see the pages on the site that could benefit from performance improvements.

Google Webmaster Performance tab

Suggestions

By analyzing the suggestions from Google you can make site / server configuration changes and see the improvements over time. If you can’t wait to see if the changes you are making improve the load time then Google also offers the Page Speed tool - a plugin for Firefox – working in conjunction with Firebug. When installed, Page Speed, shows up as an extra tab in the Firebug panel where you can set it to automatically analyze performance of each of your sites pages on load. If you prefer to analyze pages individually you can also cilck the “Analyze Performance” button on the Page Speed tab.

In the tab there is also a “Show Resources” button to show you each element of your webpage, how long it takes to retrieve, type, domain, File Size and transfer size. So you can easily identify the slow loading culprits and take the suggested action. Typically suggestions can be as simple as compressing images a little more (without losing quality – try Picnik.com), or perhaps serving some highly used images (like link sharing gifs) from the website domain rather than loading from the linked site domain.

Google Webmaster Tools Suggestions

Google also rates your page/site configuration giving an indication of the perceived severity of the configuration issue(s) and how you might improve them. Other suggestions include configuring your website for caching of images and other static files and moving .css and .js to optimal places within the site’s code.

I find these tools useful and for a site like mine I can work on fine tuning configuration occasionally and having another tool to use helps me identify the best optimizations.

In Summary

Most of the information the Page Speed tool offers is the same as Yahoo’s YSlow plugin. The Google website performance tips captured with the Page Speed plugin along with information highlighted in Google webmaster tools will definitely go a long way to help webmasters improve their site load times.

Have you used these tools? How did the suggestions work for your site / situation? Leave a comment below.

Note: Yahoo’s Yslow is available here