7 ways to speed up a wordpress blog

No one likes to wait for a web page to load - if a site is taking too long to load, the visitor is more likely to close it and move on. This is especially true for blogs, which are meant to be seen and read. Today, we will share with you several tips on how you can speed up a blog running on WordPress.

1. Eliminate unnecessary plugins
Don't use too many plugins - they will noticeably slow down your website. Imagine them as too many apps running at the same time - they will affect the overall performance of the blog. Keep the number of the plugins low - let's say from 5 to 10, but don't go over 20.

2. Optimize your Database
All the information for your blog posts and comments is stored in a database. So, to speed up the loading speed, you can optimize this database. There are two ways to do that - with the WP-Optimize plugin, or manually. The plugin is the easier way, but always remember point 1 of this article. If you want to do things manually, follow these instructions:

1. Inside your web hosting Control Panel, locate and open PHPMyAdmin- you can find it in the Database Manager section.
2. Once logged in the PHPMyAdmin, select your database.
3. Click "Check All" at the bottom of the page.
4. Choose "Optimize table" in the drop-down list next to it.
5. Done!
3. Cache your Database

Another way to speed up the work of your database is to cache it. This way, you will reduce the number of queries made to the database each time a user visits your blog. You can cache your database with the DB Cache Reloaded plugin.

4. Disable Post Revisions
Post Revisions exist since WordPress 2.6 and they are useful when there are several writers working on the same blog, or if you make constant changes to your blog posts. If left enabled, this feature will create multiple entries for a blog post in your database, effectively slowing it down.

5. Use a Cache Plugin
You can also create static versions of the most visited web pages. This way, you will reduce the queries made to the database. And static HTML pages load much faster. There are a lot of cache plugins, but be careful with their configuration - if they are left untended and not properly configured, they tend to use too much CPU power.

6. Optimize your images
Have your images optimized - you can use Photoshop's "Save for Web" function, which will save the image with a good balance between size and quality. Here is a list of other image optimization tools:

Online Tools:

* PunyPNG
* Smush.it
* Online Image Optimizer

Desktop Tools:

* Shrink O'Matic
* PNGGauntlet

7. Optimize your CSS and JavaScript files
Another way to speed up your website is to optimize the CSS and JavaScript files - this way you will reduce the size of the files and save some disk space and decrease the server load. There are several tools you can use to do that.

To compress the CSS files, you can use several tools:

* WP CSS plugin
* CSS Optimizer
* CSS Compressor

To optimize your JavaScript files, use:

* JavaScript Compressor

 

You forget to mention a good webhost. A good webhost is the first and the foremost requirement of a Good and Speedy website. Do not forget to install CDN services for your website.

 

Thumbs Up !

 

You also forgot to mention about cutting out the unnecessary instruction and translation codes in the themes. And loads of unnecessary tags. And if you so concerned about speed then dont use any wordpress plugins and no need for SEO plugins. Just manually adjust the meta tags and title tags as per your need.

 

Wow! great info shared! Thanks indexhtml

 

Found some new stuff I did not know about thanks!

 

I just disabled the post revisions and deleted 3300 lines in SQL which decreased DB size from 16MB to 6MB!!!

 

it's correct: Don't use too many plugins

 

I too agree to eliminate unnecessary plugins. I think max to have 20 plugins not more then that.

 

Thanks for your advice. Two thumbs up.

 

Thanks for Article.....great stuff

 

@indexhtml The free ebook in your signature, when you click on the signature, shows the download on the page as a 1.8Meg executable file. I do not download those for any reason - ever. Do you have it in a safer format? The view online did not work.

I visited your site, as I would be interested in seeing what you had to say about hosting services. View online did not present an ebook, just an intro page with all of your web site links in a menu on the left. I did not dig through your website to try and find the ebook, so thought I'd try the download link. When I hovered on the download link, the file showed it was a Zip file, so that was better. I figured if it had an EXE inside, I would just delete it. I downloaded it. It was not a Zip file as indicated by the URL, it was an EXE file as indicated by the download page, so this was misleading.

Perhaps you would consider changing that to a useful file like a PDF that does not require execution as a program? Your article above was helpful, so I would have considered your services had I not been presented with this conflict.

 

Hi,

Thank you for your interest and the useful feedback.

1/ we can assure you that the .exe file is perfectly safe. It is an eBook created with EBookGold software which be default produces an .exe file type. However, I have forwarded your comments to marketing to see if another format can be created to alleviate those type of concerns - thank you.

2/ re the 'View Online' option - what you saw was in fact our eBook created as a small website for anyone to read in web format online to save any download. So please feel free read the information there and get back to us if you have any questions at - - we would be pleased to help.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards,
Sales Team

 

I'm big about speed and tend to use Wordpress for everything.

I play a game with myself to see how low I can get my total web site weight (60kb right now); less than a second to load.

Great tips!