How to Speed Up Wordpress
posted 18th October 2011 | by Xagga Hosting
We all love the simplicity of using Wordress as our blog, or as our web site. What we all hate about Wordpress is it's slowness, especially when our sites get busy. Today I'm going to share with you some top tips on how to speed up your Wordpress site in just a few clicks. Let's go supercharge your site!
Plugins
One of the biggest causes of Wordpress slowness is the amount of plugins enabled. Many of us use plugins to add extra functionality to our sites, however in general the more plugins you have the slower your site will perform.
You should go through your plugins list and disable as many plugins as possible. Of course, most of the plugins we're using add functionality to our sites or blogs, so it's not beneficial to get rid of them all. Do remember, though, that there are thousands of plugins available – and lots of them do the same functions as each other but faster, or are easier to work. It might be worthwhile you browsing through to find plugins that are faster, or more suited to your needs.
Images
Nobody likes to visit sites that are dull and boring without images. In the same way, nobody likes to wait an age for sites to load because there are too many images. But what if you could keep lots of images yet have your site load quickly?
Image optimisation is the key! It’s shocking to think over 50% of the images found online are not correctly optimised, some not optimised at all! Today we’re going to share a few tips on how you can make your images as small as possible while still retaining optimal quality.
If you have Photoshop installed on your computer, you can open your images/photos in there, then “File” and “Save for Web & Devices”. With this function you have a variety of image formats and qualities to choose from. Have a play with them and find out the best format for your image. Typically, JPEG’s are used for photos, big images, or images with lots of colours. PNG’s are usually used for logos, icons, menu items and such like.
If you do not have Photoshop installed, there are some free-to-use web sites that allow you to optimise images just the same. Check out these two:
http://www.imageoptimizer.net
http://www.webresizer.com
Caching
Wordpress caching is so commonly overlooked, but is absolutely the best way to get your site loading quickly. In general computing terms, caching content, or “to cache” content, simply means placing your most frequently used data in the fastest place available. Web caching works in a similar principle, and typically pre-generates the most frequently requested information and stores it ready to send instantly.
With Wordpress, each page or post needs to be processed and generated every time a visitor requests it. This method ensures the content is absolutely up-to-date, but can make your site slow to load, especially when there are multiple requests. We’re going to explain to you today how we can pre-generate every page in your site or blog, then save it as a static file, so page requests are instant.
The first thing you want to do is locate and install the “WP Super Cache” plugin (it’s free). Once it’s installed, you want to view it’s settings. You’ll have multiple tabs to choose from – “Easy / Advanced / CDN / Contents / Preload / Plugins / Debug”. Choose Advanced. You want to tick all the boxes as shown in this screenshot. Once you’ve done that, hit “Update Status”, then scroll down and hit “Update Mod_Rewrite Rules”.
What you’ve just done is set up a basic level of caching on your Wordpress site – easy peasy!
Now we want to set up the Preload cache, so that your pages and posts are made in to static files ready for quick loading. So, click on the “Preload” tab, and again tick all the boxes as shown in this screenshot. Now hit “Update Settings” and then “Preload Cache Now”. Sorted!
The values used in the screenshots are the ones we use for various sites including VPSnodes.net. Some of you may feel the need to change or tweak some of the settings, but we’ve found these ones generally work well for all sites.
Theme
Quite often, it can be your choice of Wordpress theme causing slowness for your visitors. If your theme is glorified with heaps of high quality JPEG's and PNG's, this will cause unnecessary slowness for your visitors. If your theme is badly coded, this too will cause a slowdown. It is recommended that you try out multiple themes and test for speed, and when you find a theme you're happy with you can always attempt to further optimise it for more speed.
A good tool we've found to test the loading speed of your Wordpress site is Pingdom Tools' Full Page Test. This test will load all of the CSS files, images and embedded content on your web site, then draw you a pretty chart showing how long each element of your page takes to load. Very handy!
We also need to take in to account the speed of Internet connections. Just because you have a super-fast broadband connection doesn't mean all of your visitors do. In the UK, in one extreme a visitor may have a 1Gb/s fibre connection directly to their home, yet another visitor may only have 0.5Mb/s mobile broadband. You need to choose a theme that will work quickly and reliably for both of these extremes.
Hosting
An important factor to consider is the quality and location of your web host. For example, if your primary visitor target is the UK and your blog is hosted in the US, this is going to slow down access to your site and will decrease your search engine rankings. You should always choose a web host that is located as close to your core audience base as possible for maximum loading speed and best search rankings.
You should also consider the quality of your web host. Many web hosts promising “Unlimited” web space and bandwidth are often oversold, which can result in severe slowdowns and performance issues, especially during peak hours when everyone wants to view your web site.
Finally, if you’re seeing lots and lots of traffic to your Wordpress site or blog, you may wish to consider moving to a VPS or Dedicated server. Hosting your site on a VPS or Dedicated server will get you more CPU and RAM resources, which are critical for maintaining a speedy site. When your site experiences bursts of traffic, VPS and Dedicated servers will cope much better with the load, thus the impact on loading speed will be minimal.
Adverts
And finally! Unless you rely on income from adverts on your web site or blog, it is always the best policy not to have any at all. From a user perspective, over 90% of web surfers find adverts highly annoying, and many of those 90% said they are not likely to re-visit web sites that use pop-up or pop-under adverts.
Aside from this, using adverts on your web site often slows down loading, especially during peak Internet hours where the advertising network's web servers are busy. Therefore, where possible we recommend not to have adverts on your Wordpress site.
Et Voilà!
So there you have it! We hope you enjoyed this blog and the tips & tricks we've shared with you help you get a speedier Wordpress site! Don't forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with our blogs.
*Any statistical figures listed are from the results of our own investigations and surveys.
We take no responsibility for any problems or errors encountered as a result of following the steps made available in this blog post.
