17 Ways to Speed up your wordpress blog – 17 Tips and Tricks for increasing Wordpress Performance

Posted by: Toan Nguyen Minh on November 4 in My Style

Run a speed test on your page.

Before speed up for your wordpress blog, you just test your current speed. And here are 3 best tool to do that:

Choosing Best Web Hosts for your Wordpress Blog

The most important thing makes your blog loading slowly is the bad hosting. A right web host will help your blog increase performance for both readers and robots of search engines. If you saved about $1,000 for investing to your blog, you should buy a dedicated server with a fast processor & heaps of ram to build your blog. Here are top 5 best VPS Services:

If you don’t have enough money to buy a VPS, I recommend you choose one of best shared hosts below:

Configuring Apache for Maximum Performance

Read the complete guide to configuring apache for maximum performance.

Upgrade to latest WordPress Version

Upgrading to the latest Wordpress version is also help speed up wordpress blogs because in new wordpress updates, the developers of WordPress will fix some errors of Wordpress Source to make about wordpress better and to make the plugin better.

Delete unwanted plugins & upgrade to latest plugins versions

If your blog is loading slowly, please look at how many plugins you are using. Then check some plugins if you’re not using a plugin disable it and maybe even delete it. And don’t forget to delete plugins that’s really unnecessary for your blog.

Also you must upgrade plugins that on your blog to the latest versions. The developers release new versions of plugins because they’ve modified the code to make wordpress plugins work better.

Install WP Super Cache Plugin

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates static html files that on your WordPress blog then it will not actually load any content from the database at all therefore the post will load faster with less stress on your server. It will make your blog loads faster and optimize articles on your blog for search engines to help your blog have better google ranking.

Download & Install WP Super Cache Plugin

Install PHP Speedy

PHP Speedy WP is a script that you can install on your web server to automatically speed up the download time of your web pages. CSS Background Images are automatically converted to data URIs. This is useful in reducing the amount of HTTP requests even further.

Download & Install PHP Speedy

PHP Speedy for Wordpress

Install WP CSS

WP CSS plugin GZIP and strip whitespace from your CSS files. It allows you to confidently use @import inside a CSS file and not worry about what happens on the user’s end. It will look through your style.css file and put any @import files into it. A cache expiry time can also be set.

Download & Install WP CSS

Install DB Cache

This plugin caches every database query with given lifetime. It is much faster than other html caching plugins and uses less disk space for caching. with DB Cache your site will work much faster and will use less disk space for cached files. Your visitors will always get actual information in sidebars and server CPU loads will be as low as posible.

Download & Install DB Cache

Install Optimize DB

MySQL is a great database, but it doesn’t clean itself up the way it should sometimes. This plugin runs an optimize table command on your WordPress tables, effectively defragmenting it. This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated. The interface is very simple at the moment: just one button: Optimize Now, and some info on how much space will be saved. It looks like this:

Download & Install Optimize DB Plugin

Using Google AJAX Libraries API

The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular, open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader’s google.load() method, your application has high speed, globaly available access to a growing list of the most popular, open source JavaScript libraries including:

Optimizing your Mysql Database

Optimizing your Mysql Database can have a huge performance on your load times & load on the server, especially if you have a big database. Following steps below you can save more than 10% of your current database size.

Log into PHPMyAdmin
Locate your Wordpress DatabaseTables
Make a Backup First
Check all the tables in the Check Boxes
Select the Optimise Tables Option
That’s it!

Using Amazon S3 Storage service

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Read: How to Host Images on Amazon S3 Storage Service – Step by Step Guide

Optimize your images

Optimize your images will make your blog load faster and get higher ranking on Google Search engines. Now having many many tools for optimizing images and here are top 10 tools for optimizing images:

1. Web Resizer

2. GIF Bot

3. Smush It (from Yahoo)

4. Dynamic Drive Image Optimizer

5. JPEG Cleaner

6. Web Graphics Optimizer

7. Image Optimizer

8. Wordpress Automatic Image compression plugin (Smush.it)

9. Stanley Shilov’s Image compression Tool

10. Image Reducer Optimization Tool

Minimize PHP and database queries

If you replace the PHP queries with static HTML, every time a page loads, your browser just reads the HTML. HTML code will help your blog load faster then PHP code

An example of lots of queries & requests:

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?></title>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo(‘html_type’); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo(‘charset’); ?>" />

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo(‘version’); ?>" />

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>" media="screen" />

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>" />

<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/mootools.js”></script>

An example of minimized queries & requests:

<title>WPCandy - The Best of WordPress</title>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.3" />

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://wpcandy.com/wp-content/themes/wpcandy/files/style.css" media="screen" />

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/wpcandy" />

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://wpcandy.com/wp-content/themes/wpcandy/files/mootools.js"></script>

Optimize CSS & HTML & Javascript size

To optimize CSS & HTML & Javascript you must have many knowledge about them but now on the internet has many tool to help you do this job. Here are some great tools that I usded:

CSS:

CSS Formatter and Optimiser

CSS Compressor at Iceyboard

CSS Cascading Style Sheet Optimiser

Cleancss

HTML:

Html Optimizer & Html Optimizer

HTML Optimizer at Iwebtool

Free HTML Optimizer

JavaScript:

Free JavaScript Optimizer

Free Online Javascript Optimizer

Premium Tool for optimizing both CSS & HTML & Javascript:

Web Site Maestro

Cache Gravatars

Now most of blogs are using Gravatar with the little images next to your comments. However gravatars have two big flaws in regards to site optimization:

Every gravatar image is a new HTTP requests even if same image is loaded (page with 100 comments would have 100 additional HTTP requests)

Gravatar images do not contain expire headers

To optimize gravatar for your wordpress blog, please download and install ZenPax Plugin.

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