15 Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Blog
November 12th, 2010 by Tweet
Slow WordPress Blogs turn everyone off – Google doesn’t like sites that load slowly, and readers have to impatiently wait to read your brilliant material. In that waiting time, they might even click that back button. Fast-loading websites and blogs are a necessity in the impatient information age.
Luckily, there are plugins you can use and general advise you can follow in order to speed up your WordPress blog, making it more appealing to your visitors and the search engines. Today, we have a post with 15 ways to help you to speed up your WordPress blog. Please feel free to comment!
Plugins That Speed Up WordPress
Plugins extend the WordPress system by allowing you to use third-party code to extend the functionality of your WordPress blog. These plugins can do a lot more than just make your blog prettier – they can make it faster as well. Here are 5 must-have plugins to speed up your WordPress blog.
WP Super Cache: Any PHP files on your web page have to be processed before they load. Processing takes time. WP Super Cache makes static html files from your dynamic php pages – all your browser has to do is read and display, no waiting for processing. Download
Optimize DB: You can log into your MYSQL database manually and tell it to optimize tables, or, even easier, you could download the Optimize DB plugin that will do it for you. Optimising your databases saves you time on every query, so depending on your website, that means some big speed increases. Download
DB Cache: Each database query uses up precious CPU cycles. DB Cache loads all queries into the cache to reduce CPU load. Download
Parrallelize: Each hostname (a name used to identify a device for internet and other communication) can only handle 2-4 http requests at a time. Parrallelize will automatically submit requests to different hostnames to parallelize http requests. Download
CDN Tools: JavaScript and media files are expensive in terms of load time. CDN Tools will load them to an external server in order to reduce load times – it can even load your larger JavaScript files for free from Google servers! Download
General Tips to Speed Up WordPress
Aside from plugins, you can do a lot of things yourself to speed up your WordPress blog. Some of them are one-time things, some of them are long-term habits. Follow these 10 tips to speed up your WordPress blog.
Stay up to date: WordPress periodically comes out with new releases that include security fixes and new functionality. In addition, each new release usually contains code fixes and speed improvements. The newest releases support plugins that let you speed up your blog. Updating is a hassle, but definitely worth the work.
Remove unused plugins: They slow down your blog by adding unnecessary, unused code that still has to load every time somebody accesses your page.
Disable post revisions: Post revisions, great for multi-author blogs, aren’t really necessary for single-author endeavors. Post revisions creates a new row in your wp_posts table every time you save a post. As that space adds up, your speed slows down. Turn revisions off in your wp_config.php file by adding the line define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false); right after the <?php tag.
Tidy up your database: With plugins, user data, and WordPress itself all modifying your WordPress database, it can easily get messy and slow. The easiest way is to log into phpMyAdmin, select your tables, and first click “repair,” then “optimize.”
Optimize your CSS and JS: Whitespace and indentations make things nice for humans, but they’re extra work for computers. Putting all your JavaScript into a single file and loading it at the bottom of the page (in the footer) can also make a big difference in load times.
Avoid using plugins: Each plugin is a separate piece of code that loads every time you or, depending on the plugin, a user, access your page. Poorly written plugins do even more damage as they consume bandwidth and cpu cycles. The easiest way to solve the problem? Avoid using plugins whenever possible.
Reduce the number of scripts and widgets accessing external resources: Each request takes time to load, and if widgets and other external resources are integral parts of your site, then you are leaving your load times up to other servers that you can’t control. Further, a lot of different external requests will certainly take their toll on your reader’s machine as it tries to put everything together. External resources are good, but don’t overdo it.
Optimise your images: Images that aren’t sized correctly eat up bandwidth. A good rule of thumb is to stick to 40kb or less.
Reduce the number of calls you make to your database: Each database call requires both processing and wait time. Reduce the number of calls you make, increase site speed.
Split really long posts into multiple pages: The “<!–nextpage>” tag will conveniently split long posts into multiple pages so that you can focus on your content, not on the load time for long pages.
Conclusion
Unlike some blogging platforms, WordPress makes it easy to speed up your blog. Use these plugins and follow this advice to see immediate speed improvements.
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Kip K Kip is a writer at BroadbandCompare.com.au, a broadband comparison website offering detailed buying advice for a range of broadband fans.
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informative one
Good list, but some of these plugins are not compatible with WordPress 3.x.
Thanks for all this useful plugins and tips, I have just installed WP Super Cache and I will certainly install others plugins like this to make faster my website. It’s much better for visitors and SEO!
informative one
thnx it was very good
Great tips! I start implementing them at once
This blog took so long to load, I had to time to load up Twitter in my browser to look up the tweet that led me to it, after I’d deleted it from TweetDeck, reply to it twice, and the page still hadn’t loaded. Sometimes you should practice what you preach.
Thanks for the comment, and I know our blog is not super fast, but it is faster that 55% of other sites, as mentioned on Alexa
Also, I must give blame to the promotion buttons at the bottom of each post for the article loading slowly. For example, if the Web Blend is having hosting problems, it causes my blog to freeze as it is trying to load the promotion button. I am working on the problem. 
Some good tips that I haven’t thought of, like disabling revision and Parrallelize (need to look closely at that one). Unfortunately, some tools are not compatible with the latest WP version.
i like WP Super Cache, thanks
great tips
Adding the WP Super Cache plugin now.
These ways to speed up WordPress really do come in handy. Thanks for sharing these.
nice post…
please visit this..
klik
thanks
Thank you for your advice
I like this post… Thanks
I appreciated your tips of how to speed up WordPress blogs here. I used W3 Total Cache plugin, what is your thoughts about it?
I’m always looking for ways to speed things along. Thanks for the tips!