8 Radically Simple Ways to Make Your WordPress Blog Runs Like A Cheetah
Ensuring our WordPress blog is at its optimum speed is crucial as it will affect the very first impression of our blog visitors as site loading is the very first thing they will have to face before they can enjoy our blog post.
If the loading time is terribly slow, it will definitely piss our readers off and most important thing if they are your ‘first-time’ site visitors. They will probably never come back or cannot find your blog whenever if they want to especially if they come from the search engines.
So, for today post I would love to share 8 really simple and basic ways to reduce your WordPress blog loading time. I have tried my best to reduce all those technical stuffs in the list so that you have no problem to understand the ways to improve the loading time of your WordPress blog.
Enjoy!
1. Upgrade to the latest WordPress version
This is pretty obvious. WordPress will never release any new version of WordPress if it will not make your WordPress blog better. Sometimes, it makes me wonder why some of us hesitate to upgrade their WordPress blog.
It is plain easy as you just need to click the update button and everything else will be done for you. It only takes less than a minute.
p/s: Have you upgraded to the latest WordPress version that has just been released?
2. Delete unused plugins
You must not used unnecessary amount of plugins for your WordPress blog and you have to deleted theme form the server. It is because it can dramatically affect the speed of your WordPress blog as it may contain tons of scripts and codes.
Remember this – blog with more features is not necessarily a blog that people will love. Sometimes, simplicity is the king.
Ask yourselves – do your blog need such great amount of plugins to be a better blog?
3. Install WP Super Cache Plugin
I am pretty sure that you have heard about this plugin as there are a lot of blogs out there that regard this plugin as a must have plugin for a WordPress blog.
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
In none technical words, it will use the ‘image’ of your site and use it each time your readers visit your blog instead of has to process same data each time your readers visit your blog. So, it will reduce the burden of your server and therefore, your WordPress blog can process faster.
4. Install WP CSS
With this 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.
For those who are not familiar with the above technical stuff, may find it hard to understand. The important thing you should know is it can definitely make your WordPress blog faster.
(Tests were measured using a Firefox plugin called Firebug. Firefox was run a Mac Pro (2008) using OS X 10.5.3. Eight CSS files that were being included in this test: typography.css, form.css, list.css, special.css, skin.css, menu.css, other.css, sIFR-screen.css – all created to simulate an average size of a typical website.)
5. Rid Off Hotlinking
Hotlinking can a really huge problem if there are a lot sites hotlinked with your WordPress blog. They will drag down your WordPress blog as they will make your server load increasingly high.
For those who do not know about hotlink, hotlink is a term that is being coined when someone else/site uses data especially images from your site. So, although others are visiting the blogs that have hotlinked you, the images that come out in their blogs will be from your server. So, it will increase the bandwidth usage excessively.
Sometimes, hotlinking is called bandwidth theft.
Below is how you can prevent hotlinking in your site through .htaccess file:
|
#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option |
You just need update the .htacces file and change the domain name above with yours. The last line is an image that will display instead of the hotlinked image– how about an advert for your site?
6. Turn Off Post Revision
WordPress starts to have Post Revision feature after it launched the 2.6 version of WordPress. Although it has its advantages, it also comes with disadvantages.
One of the disadvantages is whenever a post is edited, a new row will be created in wp_posts table. Hence if your posts or pages got edited 10 times, you will have 10 new rows in wp_posts table.
In no time your wp_posts table will be filled up and the post ID will be huge.
To know how you can riff off this feature, Lester Chan has covered this topic in details.
7. Reduce Image Size
Images make our blog post looks great but it can also come with cost. Images that are in high resolution will use a lot of bandwidth and therefore affect your WordPress blog’s loading time.
With WP Smush.it, it will help you to reduce the size of images in your WordPress blog by reducing its quality with no obvious impact on the images.
8. Optimize Your WordPress Blog Database
Just like a computer, we have to defragment the database of our WordPress blog and to ensure in to be clutter free.
This process can be done manually and automatically through WordPress plugin.
For manual process, you have to locate the database of your WordPress in myPhpAdmin, select all the tables in the Check Boxes, select the Optimise Tables Option.
For automatic process, you have to install easy to use WordPress plugin called Optimize Database by Joost De Valk of Yoast.com. After you have downloaded it, just hit the ‘Optimize Now’ button.
This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated.
Do you have any suggestion?
Do you have any suggestion on the ways that you have used to increase the speed of your WordPress blog? I am sure that I have missed some of them. How about you help me out? I would really appreciate it.
© 2013
I dont worry about large image files because I’m using this trial CDN service from netdna.com. So all of the images and theme files on my hosting are already cached by the CDN service.
The reports that I get from my readers about my site performance are all positive.
Try it! There’s a free 250 GB trial account for 15 days and if you like it they have this offer 1TB for 10USD. The bandwidth is valid for a year.
This is a worthy tips — i always wonder what i can do to speed up my blog load time and now, i know the answer. Thanks to you Helmi.
Thanks for this. One question – my site was loading slowly a while back and I uninstalled all the plugins one by one to see which might be causing the slow performance. Seems it was WP Super Cache, which I’ve now disabled. Any idea what would cause that?
Hi, I’ve never heard people complaining about this problem. And I even try to search about this problem in the internet but have not find people with the problem like yours.
I think it is because of the settings that you used for the plugin. Have a look at below post and you can probably get some ideas how to set up the plugin.
http://blog.tigertech.net/posts/better-performance-from-wp-super-cache/
If the problem still exist, try this plugin instead of WP Super Cache
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/
No problem. It is a great feeling to see others love and find my post to be helpful.
Cheers!
Thank you for the information, Ariff. I ma sure that there must be a lot of people is looking for this kind of information.
Have a nice day!
I’d recommend to get rid of various tracking scripts and to leave MyBlogLog and Google Analytics only.
One thing, that also was bugging me a lot was Google Friend Connect and its poll. Too complicated coding did its job for page loading time. So I had to remove them.
Hi Allan,
Thank you for the tips. It can be annoying to see those widgets take some times to load.
I don’t really see the relevant of MyBlogBlog at the the moment as compared to couple years. There are not many people use MBlogBlog anymore.
How about you? Does the MyBlogBlog has its positive impact on your blog?
Well.. this is interesting story, actually. I was using MyBlogLog for some time.. but then someone blogged, that MyBlogLog will soon be sold out or shut down, so I’ve deleted its widget from my blog.. oh, and its script too.
But lately.. I have realized that MyBlogLog is still alive and it’s working. So I’ve just installed the script, because otherwise it cannot track your feed.
What’s the benefit?
MyBlogLog, actually, gives you very quality backlinks.. Google Analytics shows them above many others. And this means that Google trusts this service.
Speaking about traffic.. Well, you get some, but not too much. I used to sign in just to join groups related to my niche and accept new contacts.
Besides, statistics shows, that my blog is, actually, visited by some of the contacts.
Summarizing it.. I should say, that you don’t need to spend much time there. 5 mins per day = backlinks + a bit of traffic
Seems like there is a plug-in for everything, doesn’t it? Some themes are very fickle about what plug-ins you use, and some plug-ins required you to add some lines of code. Not too technical but not something I like to do.
I don’t use it but it sounds to me that WP should at least have some cache function. If it makes WP load faster, why not?
Great info Alan. Thank you for sharing it with me and others in Huzzer Magazine. Very informative.
Hope you can share opinions and experiences in Huzzer Magazine again in future. I am sure that others will love to read it.
Yes, most of the tips above have plugins that can give the same effect to our WordPress blog. But, it is advisable really heavily on plugin as not all of them have been coded in a good way.
Yah, I agree with you about the cache function. Maybe, the reason is WordPress may only want to focus solely to the core while for the features, it is up to the communities to help them to make WordPress better.
So, by doing this, WordPress will get better, the communities will be more active and can have sense of satisfaction by helping to make a great platform to be better.
What do you think?
Interesting! Guess I should give MyBlogLog a try.
Thanks for sharing. I will try MyBlogLog. Is this service free or do you have to pay?
Cool list! There were some I didn’t know about.
This is great info. I especially like the info about stopping people from hot linking the images. I didn’t know anything about this before. I may need to do some studying or check out that wordpress book though since some of this is over my head.
Nice list. i didn’t know about Optimizing you wordpress database. I think I will look more into it.
Me too. I never knew about all this optimizing stuff. I always thought WordPress is already as it is. There’s no need for optimization
It’s a huge loss if people start hot linking images from your site especially if your wordpress is running on limited bandwidth resources.
You might just have to buy more bandwidth if it is all used up
We surely need more posts like this.
Before this my blog speed never even crossed my mind. Now I am very concerned about it. I even went back and deleted a bunch of plug ins that werent really necesary
Yet another thing to add stress to my day…people hotlinking images on my site
We tend to get lots of plugins but at the end of the day fail to utilize it. I guess it’s just a bad habit when visiting the wordpress plugin repository
Just follow the steps above and you’ll be fine =)
It mat be a good habit to look through our plugins every so often and see if there are any plugins that are no longer relevant to our site and go ahead and delete those.
Yea, those would be helpful
“You learn something new everyday”
Which is what I am doing right now
haha yeah, it is a good idea. I had quite a few plug ins that really weren’t necessary at all. It’s important to remember to delete the files as well as opposed to just deactivating them
Another way is using the hosting service. You can change the setting in your hosting, I think
You don’t have to worry too much about the speed. Pretty sure it wont decrease less than a second.
One plugin I recomend is smush-it. Its really helpful
Using less Images on Homepage can make the Blog to load Fast.
Can you delete post revisions individually via a plugin? For some posts, I like to archive the older versions, but for others, I don’t care about previous revisions.
This is a very useful article. I use a lot plugins, and now my blog loads faster.
I want to make my site faster. Will you do the job for a fee?
This is a very helpful post. Thanks for writing it up!
You mentioned about WP Super Cache Plugin, but I prefer using W3 Total Cache Plugin. I heart it is better than WP Super Cache Plugin.
All my sites have already loading faster after using W3 Total Cache Plugin. What is your opinion on this plugin?
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this is a very helpful post, i already included it on my bookmark thanks
very helpful post…. your blog also load like a cheetah…
Thank you so much for this advice i have now made my blog super fast i have deleted all my unused plugins and this was a great help