WordPress Quick Speed Optimizations
Having a good blog isn’t all about SEO, linking and content. The experience must also be good for the user. And if the user has to wait till their coffee is cold before your blog loads, they are sure to not come back again. Heck, they will probably not wait longer than 10 seconds, and that’s if you’re lucky.
In today’s fast paces world you need fast and efficient websites. With the help of this article, you can speed up your Wordpress blog in just a few minutes and little work on your part.
This quick tutorial is based upon the full 38 Way To Speed Up Your WP Blog article on WPGarage. I have picked out some of the tips for you to use here. The tips I have here won’t take you as long as the full 38 steps. Using the steps I went from a monstrous tested 18second full load time down to a nice ~3.5seconds load time. Very nice improvement. Does anyone else notice that my blog feels snappier and faster?
The first and probably best thing to do is disable any plugs you are not using. Many times we activate a plugin and forget about it. This just slows down your blog considerably especially if you are not using the plugins features. For example, on this blog I used to have Next-Gen Gallery installed for holding my photography. Since I moved my photography to a different blog, it was no longer needed. I thought I might use it for something, but after some testing it turns out the NextGen slows down a blog by a large amount!
To test how fast your blog is, go to http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/. Over at Pingdom you can quickly see how much time each part of your blog (or website) takes to load. For my, all the NextGen stuff made by blog load in 18 seconds, according to Pingdom.
Here is what my blog looked like before speed optimizations.
After disabling all my useless plugins, I went and downloaded two very important and useful plugins: WP-Super-Cache and WP DB Optimizer.
Both will help speed things up greatly. The first, Super-Cache makes things faster by loading one bigger php static php file instead of many smaller php files. DB Optimizer makes your WordPress database, well … more optimal. There are a few things to note before you use either plugin:
- WP-Super-Cache has to be enabled manually in it’s admin setup page.
- DB Optimizer has to be run manually. To do this all you have to do is go to it’s admin page. That’s it. Nothing more.
Just by using these short and quick techniques I got my blog to load much faster and feel much snapper when browsing it. Even Pingdom agrees:
I’m rather sure I could speed it up much more if I went ahead and completed all 38 steps. Though I do not see any point of optimizing my blog that much. 3-4s is fast enough for me.
If you have any special ways of optimizing your blog, let us know in the comment section!
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One Comment on WordPress Quick Speed Optimizations
- Rebecca on
Tue, 9th Feb 2010 9:33 am
Just wanted to drop in a little note on the caching plug-in. You should *always* disable it before doing any kind of cosmetic upgrades to WP. Otherwise, you’ll be bashing your head against the keyboard, wondering where your CSS changes are. 
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