In this tutorial i am sharing a Tips & Tricks How to Speeding up and optimizing your wordpress site is not an easy process, it take a bit of time to make the changes properly and safely. But its worth if you can spend the time. The time taken will depend on your expertise in WordPress.
WordPress is a good CMS solution and even better blogging platform, but most sites using WordPress are not maximizing its potential. Performance is one of the important factor of a successful website. In this article we have compiled a list of useful tips, tricks, hacks, and plugins that can be used to speed up WordPress and boost it’s performance.
However If you are running a WordPress Blog here are top 4 must install plugin to optimize your site performance and make it load faster.
I am sure that if you can implement these steps properly it will definitely speed up your wordpress blog by a great amount.
Note: As always, with everything, you should backup your WordPress installation before making any code changes.
So lets start the Ultimate Guide To Make Your Site Super Fast
Install WordPress Plugins to Speed up WP Blog
1. WP Super Cache -Download WP Super Cache
Caching of files in the server is the best way to optimize a WordPress blog. This plugin generates a static HTML file from your PHP files and store in in the server. When a user visits your site, he will be serve with the static HTML file instead of heavy and dynamic PHP files thus making the process comparatively fast.
How ever do note that when you are in a process of applying any new modification to your blog like a new theme, widget or plugin don’t forget to disable the caching.
2. WP Minify – Download WP Minify
Minification is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size thereby improving load times. The plugin reads all the JS and CSS files in your blog and pass it through the Minify engine and returns a consolidated, minified, and compressed script or style for WP Minify to reference in the WordPress header.
3. DB Cache -Download DB Cache
When ever a user loads any page in your blog he not only access the PHP and HTML files but also query your database from the serve for information. Thus to make this process fast this plugin caches every database query with given lifetime. Not only your blog will load faster it will use low server disk space and CPU resources.
4. WP Smush.it – Download WP Smush.it
Images are the element which take highest amount of time to load on a page. We can not strip down all the images but surely optimize them to gain significant load time.
Smush.it is a very popular Yahoo service for web developers which optimizing images online by various methods like ripping meta data from JPEGs, optimizing JPEG compression and converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs. This plugin uses the Yahoo API to optimize it in your blog itself.
25 Tips and tricks to speed Up WordPress
1) Remove Unnecessary PHP Queries and Database Access
Removing these avoidable php queries will lessen your server load and also make your site faster.
2) Remove Inactive Plugins
Its better to remove all those inactive plugins that you dont use. Also check for any plugins that you have activated but not using, these can eat up resources simply. So make the plugin directory clean and tidy. If you feel that you might want to use those deactivated plugin later on, then make a text document in the plugin directory with the list of plugins you need later and you can safely delete those plugins which are not needed now.
3) Using a FREE CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Using a CDN network will improve your sites response time to a great extend. But normal users find it difficult to afford a CDN service. But there is a free alternative.
CoralCDN allows us to take full advantage of a powerful CDN without spending a dime. How to use it? Well, basically, just append `.nyud.net` to the hostname of any URL, and that URL will be handled by Coral.
4) Keep Your WordPress Version Up To Date
So its very necessary that you need to upgrade to the latest wordpress version to get the performance improvements and new features.
5) Compress the CSS Code
Compressing your CSS Code will make it’s size small and your browser can render it faster and that results in faster page load times. Compressing the CSS can be done in two ways.
6) Optimize the WordPress Database
- For optimizing the wordpress database of your site, visit the cpanel of your hosting provider.
- Use phpMyAdmin to optimize your database: Log in to phpMyAdmin, select all the tables, and then repair and optimize.
7) Compress & Combine Javascript Files
Try to reduce the javascripts as much as possible.
Javascript Compression Services
8 ) Reduce Image Sizes
The images can be compressed to a level without much loss in quality. You can use the WP Smush.it plugin for wordpress to compress the images. It will compress the images to a good extend and your site will load faster now.
9) Disable Hot Linking
his happens when others link your sites images in their articles and this puts load on your server. This not a big issue if one or two sites directly link your images, but if multiple sites uses this then it might create a headache.
10) The WordPress Super Cache Plugin
It has much better compressions and caching options than the super cache plugin and definitely save your websites bandwidth and improve your sites speed.
11) Combining Javascripts and CSS Files with PHP Speedy
HTTP requests can speed up the site greatly and the php speedy plugin will help you further by combining all the javascripts into one single file and all css files into a single one. Therefore in total the there will only be two files that are being requested.
12) Preloading the Page Contents
This is some thing that doesn’t improve the performance much but it enhances the page load by loading the page progressively. Move the css file link near the title in the header.php file.
13) Flushing the buffer
When users request a page in your site, it can takes around 200 – 500 milliseconds for the backend server to put together the HTML page. During this time the browser remains idle. The flush() function in php help you in loading the partially ready html response to the browser and it can start fetching the components, while the backend server is busy with the rest of the contents.
To inset the flush() function in your wordpress site, Open up the header.php file and find the</head> tag and insert the <?php flush(); ?> function right after it. You may see the eg below.
14) Using CSS Sprites Technique
It simply means combining all the images in the site into a single big image containing all of them and the browser loads the single big image and display the different images by usingbackground-position.
15) Add Header Expire To Static Contents
Adding an expiry time to static images can reduce further HTTP requests when loading other pages in the site. Adding an expiry time to the images in the site help in loading the pages faster.
Copy and Paste the Following Code in your .htaccess file.
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif A28800
ExpiresByType image/png A28800ExpiresByType image/jpg A28800
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A28800
16) DB Cache Reloaded Plugin – Download DB Cache Reloaded Plugin For WordPress
The DB cache plugin works differently from the super cache plugin by optimizing your database alone. It caches WordPress’s MySQL queries to a file. This results in less space being used for caching and faster performance from the WordPress blog.
17) Choose a Good Web Host
This might seem like a very obvious one, but a lot of the times people try to save a few bucks and compromise quality. It is not worth it. Pay the extra few dollars and get a better web host. One that is reliable and have strong servers. We have a beginners guide at WPBeginner where we help you choose the web host for WordPress.
Some good and affordable web hosts:
17) . Split Long Posts in Several Pages
It is best that you split the post into multiple pages, so each page loads much faster, and you increase your pageviews. This is very easy and it is doable from the WordPress admin panel if your theme already has this function. When writing the post you just have to enter the following code when you want to split pages:
18) Use Excerpts and Limit the Count of Posts Displayed on Blog Page
You should never show full posts in the main blog page because you have 5 or 10 total posts on the same page. If each of your post is a list post and it is displayed in full text mode, then it will be very inconvenient for your users because the page will take immense amount of time and server resources to load. Therefore you must use excerpts and limit the count on how many posts are displayed.
In order to display excerpt, you must visit your index.php and find:
<?php the_content(__(‘(more…)’)); ?>
Then replace this with:
<?php the_excerpt(__(‘(more…)’)); ?>
19) Reduce the Use of External Websites and Scripts
Try to avoid relying on external scripts whether it is directly or through the plugin. Some plugins like MyBlogLog and others can take a lot of time to load depending on the server connection. They can often be the reason for page not loading properly if you are experiencing high traffic. To display widgets from top directories, alexa and others in your sidebar only slows your site down. Try to avoid it as much as you can.
20) Split Comments into Pages
Every site has few articles that went viral. These article generates tons of comments and they can consume enormous amount of server resource upon each visitor loading the page. Or maybe your blog is already popular and you are getting a good discussion going in your posts, then it is recommended that you paginate the comments to increase your site loading speed and save server resources. This can be done by going into Settings > Discussion in your WordPress Admin Panel.
21) Reduce the Number of Database Calls
Database calls make WordPress so dynamic, but sometimes you can live without it. By replacing simple text, you will be able to increase your WordPress speed. To give an example look at your header.php code which looks something similar:
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<head profile=”http://gmpg.org/xfn/11″>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”
<?php bloginfo(‘html_type’); ?>;
charset=<?php bloginfo(‘charset’); ?>” />
22) Cutting Down the Size of MySQL Database
When writing posts, now WordPress actually autosave which even after the post is saved, the revision articles stay in the MySQL Database. Bigger database also bring the site load time down. If you are not using Revisions then you can remove them by adding the following code to your wp-config.php
define(‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 500 ); // seconds
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false );
23) Display Page Loading Time and Queries
In order for you to track how well your site is doing, it is wise to add this code in the footer. If it is a low number then it means your site is at its potential. Just paste this code in order to display page loading time and queries:
<?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries in <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds.
24) Caching
Utilize WordPress Object Cache
By inserting this simple code into your wp-config.php file, you can set WordPress to begin caching database queries rather than initiating new server requests on each load. You don’t have to understand why this works, it just will.
1. // Enable the WordPress Object Cache:
2. define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);
Read more on this topic:
By reducing the number of queries, you’ll both increase the speed of your site, and reduce the server resources that are consumed each time you receive a visitor. As a result, you’ll find that it will make your web host much happier in the event of a huge traffic spike.
25) Keep Your Code Clean
You can validate your code using the W3C Validator. It might seem snobby to have “standards” on the web, but the truth is, there are standards for a reason. If everyone met the standards, browsers would always know how to display the information they’re given. Use the tool at W3C to validate your code and fix any errors. This can be a painstakingly long process but it’s well worth the end result.
Coding errors will slow your load time, especially if images that are referenced but don’t exist. Use a bug tool like Firebug to identify coding errors and fix them.
So, if you know more ways to speed up wordpress, then please do share it, by commenting below.
Cool. That’s seems good.