Interesting … Performance Improvement is a difficult area … but here are some tips.
Performance Tips
1. Turn off all plugins including W3TC and run tests again on gtmetrix.com and pingdom tools
2. Keep this as your ‘baseline’ performance.
3. Turn on all your usual plugins and run the tests again and note the results
4. Unless you are expecting 10000 visitors today or tomorrow leave the caching plugin off and re-run the tests tomorrow.
5. Focus on the results of the Pingdom / GtMetrix to find areas you can improve
6. Enable W3TC but disable all the caching options
7. Run your tests again.
8. do a search on W3TC and Bluehost … and I found this about problems with minify causing spikes
9. Enable Page Cache (Disk enhanced) in W3TC …
10. Flush the Cache
11. Run your tests again after about 10 – 30 mins.
12. Enable Browser Cache
13. wait and test again 🙂
Performance Improvement should focus on the majority of your visitors
This is usually Not Logged In / Anonymous Visitors don’t worry about the wp-admin css for now.
php.ini and PHP Memory (out of memory errors
Check with BlueHost what you can do with PHP.ini or .htaccess to increase the memory for your WordPress.
Browser Compression
Just now I tested my site damien.co with gtmetrix and got 99% but the results were garbarge as gtmetrix didn’t handle the browser gzip compression.
It’s worth checking that you haven’t enabled browser compression in your .htaccess or in the settings of W3TC. Then ask Bluehost if they support browser compression.
Pingdom Tools
One of the reason i like Pingdom is the Performance Grade tab which gives a sliding scale of how good your site performs … Note you can click the ^ on the right to reveal more information.
