Optimize WordPress Performance
This tutorial will provides some suggestions on how to optimize WordPress performance
WordPress is a fast and easy to use blogging script with a number of innovative features. Usually it is fast and stable, but if you are experiencing a lot of traffic, your site can slow down. Depending on how extensively you modify WordPress, you could also be using more bandwidth that you should be.
This tutorial will guide you through a number of methods for speeding up and slimming down your WordPress blog.
- Install WP Super Cache
This WordPress plugin is an excellent modification that reduces resource utilization and bandwidth. Blog pages are converted into .html files, so that when your blog is accessed it bypasses PHP and MySQL, speeding up your blog considerably. It also helps to reduce bandwidth consumption. It is simple to install and configure and comes with a wealth of options.
For more information and installation instructions, go here:
- Compress your CSS files
This tweak doesn’t always yield great results, but it can usually reduce your CSS filesize by roughly 10-20%. This can lead to significant bandwidth savings, especially if you are using multiple large CSS files, depending on the amount of traffic you recieve. The tradeoff is that the CSS files are far harder to read, because the compressor removes all whitespace. Simply copy and paste your theme’s CSS file into the compressor below, and it will compress it for you. - Deactivate unnecessary plugins
The huge range of plugins available for WordPress allows you to customize it to almost any purpose you require, yet large amounts of plugins can slow down your blog. Go through your plugins and see if there are any you aren’t using anymore/aren’t in active use, and disable them. This can lighten resource utilization of your blog significantly.
- Host your news feeds externally
If your site uses news feeds such as RSS heavily, they can eat up a considerable amount of bandwidth. An easy fix for this is to move your feeds to an external site, such as FeedBurner. This can save a large amount of bandwidth if RSS feeds are a popular feature on your website.
- Make sure your blog is up to date!
One of the most important and easiest steps to take in optimizing your blog is making sure that WordPress is up to date. New releases not only fix bugs and security issues but optimise the code and MySQL queries, leading to better performance. Even better, WordPress wil notify you when your installation is out of date.
WordPress is the perfect Content Management System for all your blog publishing and website management needs !
