How to speed up Wordpress blog

Reaper-X | Nov, 7 2006 15 Comments Related Posts Share RSS Feed

Update: Please check the new how to speed up wordpress, because this is an old post and no longer up to date with the latest version of Wordpress and also the new version use a more advanced technique to optimize your wordpress blog

Okay, since today (i mean this post) i’m going to change my writing style into a more direct way without saying useless thing first such as intro, or something like that. And i hope you’ll like it just like i do like writing on my blog here. Okay ?

Btw right now im going to give you some tips on what you should do to optimize your wordpress powered site so it can be loaded faster into your visitor browser :

Use minimalist theme

The simple way to say it, is using a wordpress theme that’s not using some fancy stuff in it. That means no AJAX, and less javascript used on the theme itself.

Compress the CSS / Stylesheet and Javascript files used

If you’re using lots of javascript on your wordpress powered site, no matter what the reason is. Try compressing the Javascript and CSS / Stylesheet used. You can compress your javascript easily using various free online / offline javascript compressor. Btw i’ve already post about it before.

As for the CSS files, you can try removing the comment on the stylesheet directly using your favorite text editor such as notepad. Or you can try using various shareware or freeware css editor.

Enable GZip Compression

Fortunately Wordpress already have a built in function to compress your webpage using GZip compression. It’s under Options -> Reading .. and of course if your site visitor using a gzip compatible browser, they can access your site much faster. And if you want to check how big your page size is (including external files, script used on your blog, etc) you can go to this page.

Use required plugins only

That means only use the required wordpress plugins on your site without anything else and this goes especially for the new blogger that use Wordpress as their blogging platform. As a side note, if your site get lots of visitors daily, you might try using WP-Cache plugins on your blog.

Forget about those blog ranking image

If you have already visit this site before, i’m sure you’ve seen some of those in my blog. Although it’s great to see how your blog performing on the internet but there’s one drawback. Because it is using remote image (image that’s stored on somewhere else not on your site), if the server those image stored is not available, it’ll slow down your site. (trust me every blog ranking image that is used on this blog before, has a downtime issue for several times and because of this issue it makes my site slow)

Enable Object Cache

By default wordpress 2.0.4 / 2.0.5 doesn’t enable object cache, but you can enable it easily by adding these lines at your wp-config.php files to enable object cache :

define(‘ENABLE_CACHE’, true);

and to set it’s expiration time you can add this line :

define(‘CACHE_EXPIRATION_TIME’, 900);

the number define how many seconds before the wordpress cache expire. Btw by using these, it have succeed on reducing the number of queries used on my blog here, although when enabled at the first time it gives you a high queries usage, but the next time you open that page, the number of queries used will be decreased (if it’s for me the queries used on homepage, decreased by 16).

Okay that’s all for website optimization tips … see ? direct and to the point unlikemy previous writing style :D