WordPress Optimization for Better Performance and Speed

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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 personally 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

  1. I use YSlow Firefox addon to measure the page load time of a site. YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. So to use YSlow you will have to get the Firebug addon and then install the YSlow addon.

    website-optimazation

    The site in question takes about 23 secons to load which is not a very good page loading time. Some optimization could help!

  2. The number of database queries a webpage makes to load the page have an effect on the page load time. You can use the following piece of code in the footer of your theme to find out how many database queries a page is making:

    <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries in <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds.

    Make sure the webpage is not making any unnecessary database queries.
  3. You can use the website speed tester to find out how fast your site loads.
    Website Speed Tester

    speed_test

  4. 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 (How to Add far future expires header).
  • Don’t use ETags unless you are taking advantage of it (How to configure ETags).
You can use the PHP speedy WordPress plugin which takes care of few of the tips mentioned above. The Plugins to Speed Up Your WordPress Site article is also a good read.

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