13 Great WordPress Speed Tips & Tricks for MAX Performance
- Posted in WORDPRESS
- 156 Comments »
Performance is a key factor for any successful website. And since WordPress is becoming more popular than ever, it will only be at its best when raised in the proper conditions. Here are a few things to try if you find that your WordPress site is not performing as well as it could be due to high traffic or hidden issues you don’t know about.
Some Basic & Simple Steps
1. Upgrade to latest WordPress release
WordPress 2.7 have manny performance improvements over previous versions. So you better upgrade to latest release to make use of this.
2. Remove unnecessary Plugins & upgrade current ones
Remove any plugins that you aren’t using. Deactivate them and physically delete them from your web server. Deactivated plugins will affect the speed of a site because the Wordpress checks to see if they are activated or not. Also you must stay up to date with the latest versions of the plugins you are currently using. Developers release new versions because they’ve modified the code in some way to make the plugin work better.
3. Minimize PHP and database queries
I read about this great tip on Wpcandy’s simple ways to speed up WordPress post. It makes a lot of sense, cutting down on PHP and database queries. Each time a page on your site loads, if your browser has to execute any PHP queries, it adds to the load time. If you replace the PHP queries with static HTML, every time a page loads, your browser just reads the HTML.
4. Optimize and Repair your Database from myPhpAdmin
Every week or so you should login to your myPhpAdmin and optimize your db. Locate your Wordpress DatabaseTables, check all the tables in the Check Boxes, select the Optimise Tables Option and repair. You would be surprised how well this trick might work, it saved more than 10% of my current database size.
Take a good care of your Images
5. Use Reliable image hosting service
Try moving the common web images, CSS, JavaScript and other static files to Amazon S3 Storage service and you will notice the average CPU load / memory requirement of the web server will be reduced a lot. Read this step by step guide.
You can also try this WordPress plugin, WP-Offload will boost the performance of your blog by seamlessly offloading static content like images, documents and movies. This will greatly reduce bandwidth consumption and the number of HTTP requests issued to your web server. Additional features such as remote image manipulation and thumbnail generation are provided.
6. Optimize your images with this great tool
Shrink O’Matic is an AIR application to easily (batch) resize (shrink) images. It handles JPGs, GIFs and PNGs. Simply drag and drop images and they’ll be resized as you wish! Options allow you to choose the output sizes, names and formats.
Great Advices for better performance
7.Install WP Super Cache Plugin
I guess many of you know why we always insist on using this plugin. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts and will not actually load any content from the database at all therefore the post will load faster with less stress on your server.
8.PHP Speedy WP
PHP Speedy WP can quickly and easily speed up your WordPress site and improve your blog’s response time without too much effort on your side by allowing us to automatically combine all JS and CSS files into only two files – which in turn helps greatly with page loading times. CSS Background Images are automatically converted to data URIs. This is useful in reducing the amount of HTTP requests even further. And, importantly, it’s compatible with Internet Explorer, even though it doesn’t support data URIs. Unfortunately, PHP speedy comes with few flaws out of box that need fixing: Combined JavaScript is placed at the top of the page instead at the bottom, it does not work with WP Super Cache. In order to get this two working like we want them, you have to check this great article by Prelovac to make few adjustments to both plugins.
9.WP CSS
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. A cache expiry time can also be set. You can also add CSS files to a specific page or post and putting all of them into one file.
10.DB Cache
This plugin caches every database query with given lifetime. It is very fast and uses small disk space for caching.
I didn’t try this plugin yet but I’ve read many reviews recommending it. Let me know what do you guys think about it so we can update this post with correct information about its performance.
11.Speed up access to your favorite frameworks via the AJAX Libraries API
The AJAX Libraries API is an attempt to make Web applications faster for developers in simple ways by becoming a content distribution network and loading architecture for popular javascript libraries including:
You can either link to the source code directly:
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js"></script>
Or you can use Google’s API:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">google.load("prototype", "1.6.0.2");</script>
By using the google.load() method, your application has high speed, globally available access to a growing list of the most popular, open source and up to date JavaScript libraries.
12.Display page loading time + number of queries
Here is a simple code to insert on your template to know how long it took for your page to load, or how many sql queries were executed. This tip is very good for knowing how well is your WordPress blog is optimized.
<?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries in <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds.
13.Optimize DB
MySQL is a great database, but it doesn’t clean itself up the way it should sometimes. This plugin runs an optimize table command on your WordPress tables, effectively defragmenting it. This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated. The interface is very simple at the moment: just one button: Optimize Now, and some info on how much space will be saved. It looks like this:
Must Read Resources & References
- 15+ Tips to Speed Up Your Website, and Optimize Your Code
- 5 Tips to Help Your Slow or Sluggish Blog or Web Site
- 4 Simple Ways To Speed Up WordPress
- The 3 Easiest Ways to Speed Up WordPress
- The 3 Easiest Ways to Speed Up WordPress
That should do it for now. Hopefully, a few of these will help to make your WordPress perform in a much faster way. What are some of your favorite tips? Leave a comment below and let us know!
nice helpful wp tips and tricks, thanks a lot..
Great tips & recommendations, been thinking about going to Amazon so they can load my pics recently also.
nice post! I would try some of them
Great Tips!
Let’s try…
Thanks for great tip. Good luck !
Thanks for the tips and resources, will definitely have to try all of it and see which ones work and which one do not.
Thanks for a nice article. I had no clue about #4. I’ll definitely give it a try. I’ve been looking into #7 lately but I’ve read about a few issues with it so I’ve kind off kept it on the shelve at the moment. Will be playing around with it locally before implementing it on my live blog. #10 seems interesting too.
Thanks!
wow..it’s so great..i can optimize my website now..
Thank u.
nice tips … going to use it or my upcoming blog… thnx for sharing …
These is good content! Thx for the tipps. I had problems with the performance of my site – now it is much better!
Found you on digg. Great article. Thanks a lot.
Wow! Nice, realy nice.
Messing up with database is quite cumbersome. But its worth it!
very useful!
Very nice tips. BUT… About library includes: wordpress have his own way to include external libraries (enqueue_script() or smth like that) so you have to change stuff in wordpress files (not only themes).
And unless you know how to do this, this step is kinda… useless :)
Great advice, thanks.
Wow, that is some good stuff dude, well done!
Nice article, very informative thanks for sharing and keep up the good work!
You can also use a php opcacher such as xcache to cache compiled php scripts which will dramatically decrease the load time of any php app
Nice article, this can really help. Thank you very very much.
I don’t even know those database optimization tricks. Thanks a lot!
Really good stuff.
compress css
great tips, tonight i’m gonna try some of them on my website….
Wow! Great post. I don’t need to use all of them yet at my blog isn’t that big, but I’ve noticed a huge change after deleting my inactive plug-ins!
Thank you!
Great post. I am using many solution for speed but i will try these solutions. Thanks : )
I would actually argue #1. I know a LOT of people, myself included on a couple of my blogs, that have suffered from large amounts of slowdown when upgrading to 2.7.
If you search Google for “wordpress 2.7 slow” you’ll actually see a lot of people are having that as an issue. It’s not an issue for everyone, however the latest is not always the greatest.
I have heard a lot about the slowness issue but really this wasn’t the case with many of all the users. Upgrading to the latest release is a must, WordPress developers always work on enhancing many issues related to performance with every release.
You might need to troubleshoot your theme or something and find out what is making it slow with the new version.
Cleared plugins and themes on one of my installs that went slow and still had the issue. Kind of hoping the next update will end up fixing it but only time will tell!
I used to have devsnippets on dreamhost and was acting very slow when i updated it to 2.7 but once i moved to media temple the site was pretty fast. I am not sure if its a hosting issue or a configuration the host is doing that affects the performance. You might need to digg into this as well.
Very useful info. I don’t what to do to speed up my blog before. When I upgraded to WP8 it became slower, made me want to downgrade and back to WP7. But now I realize there are some other things influencing.
Awesome
Along with point 9 (WP CSS) goes WP JSS from the same maker
and there are many more plugins available for speeding up the loadingtime by using stuff like sprites etc.
By using twice the same optimalisation (as mentioned in the text) the site even slows down!
Wow, this is so cool. Especially for a noob in wordpress like me. Thank you so much for this article.
Personally, I’m also a fan of the ‘CleanOptions’ plugin. It finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_options table. If you’ve been using WordPress for a few years and try a new plugin or theme every now and then, it helps you clean up those old settings.
I have tried ‘CleanOptions’ plugin before and it worked great. Removing unwanted records from the wp_options fields will certainly be good. Thanks for the tip.
Great great article.. I was looking for something like this..
thanks.. :)
Great info. Regarding item 12 and displaying the page load time — i inserted the code in a page and the result was “queries in seconds.” without any stats. I do not know php and do not want to take the time to learn it right now just for this, so i was wondering if someone could enlighten me as to what to do to get the stats….does this simply mean that there was no sql? i thought it said that i should get both sql queries AND load time…. thanx for any help
If you contact the author of this snippets he will sure be glad to help.
Great tips, except I’m not sure if I have enough savy to implement them.
Another great article & useful tips you share here as usual. Thanks for the wrap up!
thanks, didn’t know about some of the plugins!
Really cool tips :-)
thx.
I came here with the intention to read this article.. But after waiting 3 minutes for the page to load I decided against it.
You just came here while i was making some changes to the theme folder. Sorry you experienced this delay.
Absolutely brilliant. Whilst I know the need to do these things, my knowledge has perhaps limited my ability. This post has encouraged me to try the things I need to do. Thank you.
Great tips. Thank you for the article.
The Shrink O’matic seem to be a Windows only. Can someone recommend something similar for Mac?
Umm: “if your browser has to execute any PHP queries”…
Browsers don’t execute PHP queries. This article tells you some of the basics, but honestly there is more more that can be done. Explore opcode caching and MySQL caching to really speed up WP..
I just wish there was a plugin to simplify using Google App Engine as a CDN rather than having to upload files using their Python utility everytime. Great list of tips!
wow… very nice article
thats what i needed !!!!
im about to launch my new Bloggong website !!
and this is the post i’ve been lookin’ for !!!
thx Noura !!
good luck
Extremely useful post. I know some of the “tweaks” but most are new to me.
Hey, thanks for the share…good stuff here to know about and implement!
Thanks for the tips, this will surely come in hand.
I have been displaying my database queries and time on my blog for sometime now. I always want to know what the details are to ensure that my site loads as fast as possible.
#2 is partially wrong. Deactivated plugins don’t slow down your website at all. WordPress doesn’t even know about them unless you visit your plugins management page.
Check out
wp-settings.phpfor the proof (around line #500). It grabs the list of activated plugins, checks to see if each activated plugin exists and is valid and if so, it then includes it. It doesn’t do the reverse as you suggested (grabbing all plugins and then seeing if each is activated or not).Deactivating plugins you don’t use though is of course valid, although the performance impact will vary greatly depending on the plugin (for most, it’ll be negligible).
great Tutorial ..thanks a lot :)
Brilliant article. Helped my cut my page load time. Cheers.
Thanks so much for this excellent article. I have already implemented some of these tips after reading this post and it certainly has seemed to help speed things up. I really appreciate your posting this information!
Thanks for the great tips and resources. You can never actually have enough things to speed up your personal work through wordpress. My partner won’t stop with the Shrink O’matic with her photography images.
Awesome article. Btw. I created a german translation of this article (and changed/added some things) which can be found on my Blog ;-)
wow nice article about wordpress
nice, really nice!
Thanks for this, I’ve been working to improve the performance of my site as of late and I found this to be very, very helpful. One plugin I found useful that isn’t on the list is the Cache Images plugin. It will cache external remote images locally. If you have a blog or website with a good amount of imagery this is a HUGE help. Here’s the official plugin page if anyone is interested:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cache-images/
Great Tips ;)
so thanks
Great tips and some that I have been meaning to do for a long while. I’m giving myself a virtual kick up the backside to go and do them now! Thank you.
Don’t 4 and 13 kinda serve the same purpose, while Optimize DB is much faster and easier to use? Great article overall, however css sprites are worth mentioning too.
,..] http://www.noupe.com is another useful source on this topic,..]
Everything on this list is so useful. Thank you. Now back to speeding up my site. :)
Really Helpful Tips&Tricks
Thanks,
Very helpful, thanks for the Information!