PHP and MySQL
WordPress Plugin
Click to view a screenshot of my Speedy Smilies plugin in action (PHP, JavaScript)
My first WordPress plugin, Speedy Smilies, was released in July 2009 and focuses on improving page download and display time. Performance research by the Yahoo! User Interface team shows that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the single biggest impact on reducing response time. My plugin speeds up and beautifies WordPress sites by substituting the individually-wrapped WordPress smilies with a single CSS image sprite containing all of the emoticons.
Instead of 22 separate emoticon images totaling 5,517 bytes, the Speedy Smilies plugin loads a single 1,645 byte image, reducing the filesize by over 70%. The real benefit, however, is the drastic reduction in HTTP requests; instead of 22 objects, Speedy Smilies loads only 2 objects (one CSS file and one emoticon image). At a 200ms ping time, this change alone saves approximately 4 seconds caused by object request latency!
But my plugin goes a step further, even. Instead of simply adding its own CSS file and causing another HTTP request, it locates your WordPress theme’s CSS file, minifies it, and then adds the necessary style information for the emoticons to the end of the minified file. For the WordPress default theme, even after adding the new style rules for emoticons, the end result is a 20% reduction in the CSS filesize (from 10.1 KB to 8.1 KB). Minified CSS files are served with the necessary HTTP headers, like Cache-Control: public, so the files will be cached indefinitely by web browsers and proxy servers.