Is your WordPress blog performing at it’s best? How quickly does the page load? Is it sluggish? Your website’s performance is one of the key factors in ensuring that the visitors are having a good experience with your site. So I think it is worthwhile to spend some time tuning/optimizing the site for performance. In this article I have listed various tips and tricks on how to speed up a WordPress Site.
Before diving into the optimization tips and tricks I recommend measuring the current performance of the site so you have some benchmarking figures to compare against after you make the changes and see how it has affected the performance.
How to Measure the Performance of a Site
- I use the from Google to measure performance and try to do a score of 85+ out of 100. Page speed has a browser add-on to measure the performance of a site. Page Speed analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.
- You can also use YSlow Firefox add-on to measure the page load time of a site. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. So to use YSlow you will have to get the Firebug add-on and then install the YSlow addon.
- You can use Pinddom Tools to test website ( The Best ONE )
- You can use the website speed tester to find out how fast your site loads.
- You can also use the stopwatch on numion.com to test how long it takes to load a webpage.
Basic WordPress Site Optimization Tips and Tricks
- Upgrade to the latest WordPress release (you should be doing this for security reasons anyway)
- Use W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin (Forget WP Super Cache). W3 Total Cache is just awesome… even I use it
- Minimize simple unnecessary PHP queries. For example, instead of using php get_bloginfo(‘wpurl’); ?> just replace it with your wordpress installation URL so the browser can simply read it instead of making a query.
- Load javascripts in the footer (The golden rule – CSS on top, javascript on bottom)
- Kill some plugins that are unnecesary or doesn’t add much value to your site (Disable or delete these plugins)
- Optimize and Repair your Database from myPhpAdmin. You can use the Optimize DB plugin that does this for you.
- Check your theme Code (Use valid HTML code)
- Get a Good hosting
intermediate to Advanced Optimization Tips
- Keep your page sizes less than 100kb. Do not use too many unnecessary images and video on a page. Always compress the images appropriately.
- Combine css files into one big css file (One 50kb file loads a lot faster than five 10kb files)
- Combine javascripts into one big file.
- Reduce the number of dynamic PHP and http calls (Use subdomains to share the load)
- Use external scripts. Instead of placing tons of code in your header.php file, use external scripts. This allows the browser to cache the script so it won’t have to read it for every other page.
- Add far future expires header to images, CSS and javascript files.
- Don’t use ETags unless you are taking advantage of it.