:: Anything Goes Blog ::

I have been experiencing slowness with my wordpress blog. I don know whether to blame my web server or from wordpress cache. So i try to figure it out by finding a solutions and have these tips from many sites. These tips have been proven on helping me a lot to increase my site speed. However if this slowness situations continuously emerged, then i'll consider moving to a better host.



My intentions on creating this post was simply to help people improving their site speed into a lot of better, so here i'm going to explain from steps to steps, phase to phase on what you should be doing


Phase 1: Analyze Your Site Speed

We can't decide whether your site is really having problem with the speed until you're doing a test

1. You need to test your site speed with Website Speed Test from iWebTools. Do multiple test since the results can be inaccurate due to fluctuations in your internet connection speed.

2. Use Pingdom to get a detailed analysis of your site's loading time and performance.

3. Another Tools which i myself have been doing to determine my site speed is YSlow from Yahoo. It analyzes your web pages and tells you the reason why they are slowing down based on their rules for high performance web sites. You can also use YSlow directly from your Firefox by installing Firefox Addons

You can also see this presentation from Yahoo that covers their 14 best practices to optimize your site speed and 20 more best practices for faster web pages that were categorized from server, content, cookie, javascript, css, images, and mobile

Phase 2: Things to Consider In your Wordpress

There's the thing you need to consider with your Wordpress blog, including:

1. Always Update Your Wordpress Blog

Its important to always have the latest version in fact it is more critical. They usually have a lot of improvement from their previous version. The developer wont release it for fun, they are doing it to improve the code in way to make things better. This include your wordpress blog version and the plugins as well.

2. Remove The Unused Plugin

When you have decide to use templates and never had intentions to change it in short period of time, then remove the unused plugin. I know that there's a certain template which require you to install certain plugin however if you have so many template and each of those template require you to install different plugin and you did install those plugin but never activate it, so why you should keep the inactive one? There's also a list of plugins that you should not install

3. Optimize Your Image Files

When you decide to give screenshot image in your post and the image size is rather large then you should consider reducing the size a bit more. The image size can be compressed using The Following Application. Why does it matter? because each time you post picture, the more size and dimension your images has, the more the server will have it load and kills your server bandwidth speed.

4. Clean up your theme

According to Yoast.com and WPCandy, There's a code that needs to be cleaned including decreasing whitespace, using external scripts, using shorthand CSS, modifying header.php from

[html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >

[head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

[meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="

[?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>;

charset=[?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />

into something like

[html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr">

[head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

[meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

and you can also make your stylesheet URL's static, make your pingback URL static, make your feed URL's static, you can remove the blog's WordPress version, make your blog's name and tagline / description static

5. Do Not Upload Something Big

If you have any intentions to upload something really big like video, audio or uncompressed files such as RAR and ZIP, then you should consider not to upload it on your own server. Use File Hosting sites instead such as Megaupload, Rapidshare, Depositfiles, or if you intends to streaming your audio and video, use Imeem, YouTube, Veoh, etc

6. Compress Your Javascript - This online tools can compress and reduce file size by 60% as it removing and shortening the unnecessary script

7. Try to Validate your code at W3C ensuring that you don’t have any major errors that slowing down your page

8. Configuring Apache for Maximum Performance or Use phpMyAdmin to optimize your database by Log in to phpMyAdmin, select all the tables, and then click "repair" and "optimize."


Phase 3: Installing Wordpress Plugins

1. WP Cache and WP Super Cache - The best plugin that will make your blogs page load more faster than ever before

2. PHP Speedy - is a script that you can install on your web server to automatically speed up the download time of your web pages.

3. WordPress Plugin: Fix Database - This Plugins will check all the tables within your database and fix any error that were found. Once its done, it will optimize the tables. or simply use Optimize DB Plugins to optimize the table of your database

4. WP-DBManager allows you to manage your Wordpress database, optimize it, repair, backup, restore, delete backup, drop/empty tables and run selected queries.

5. CSS Compress WordPress plugin - This plugin simply automatically removes comments, new lines, tabs, and gzip compresses (GZIP) any CSS file called with ""

6. IFrameWidgets can stop slow loading JavaScript widgets from breaking your page.


Another Tips that you could follow

• 15+ Tips to Speed Up Your Website, and Optimize Your Code!


• WordPress on Speed: 17 Tweaks to Accelerate your WP


• 5 Tips to Help Your Slow or Sluggish Blog or Web Site

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