How’s your theme doing?

One of our goals when we met in London a couple of weeks ago was to give our VIPs tools to better understand what’s happening with their themes and sites.

We’re happy to introduce a new stats graph in the VIP Administration page (Dashboard → VIP) for every VIP Site:

The graph displays an hourly page generation time average for all pageviews for all the sites running a specific theme (blue line), and WordPress.com’s average page generation time (yellow line). Commits to your theme SVN repository are highlighted with black circles.

You can zoom-in to any part of the graph by simply clicking and dragging over the section you’d like to drill down to. Hovering over a commit will show you the revision info, committer name and first few words of the commit message.

Why is it fluctuating so much?

Sites with thousands of view per hour will see a relatively even line, while the line for sites with fewer visitors will probably fluctuate. This is normal: if your site is not that popular (yet!), a fair amount of visits may load unprimed cache, causing a rather high generation time, especially if your theme relies on a lot of external content or heavy queries.

Optimizing for performance

The aim should be to get your theme to or below the WordPress.com average line – as you probably know, search engines now take site speed into account when ranking results. If you’re already there – congratulations! If not, take a look at the Caching, Database Queries, and Fetching Remote Data pages on this site for some pointers on the biggest performance bottlenecks, and be sure to contact us if you have any questions.

More stats coming soon

This is just the beginning, and we plan adding additional VIP-specific metrics — what kind of stats would you like see? Let us know!