Speed Up Your WordPress Blog

Last week I was again struggling with server issues and downtimes on all my sites which made me look at ways to reduce the load on my poor server. I currently have about 50 wordpress installations and some 10 php based sites on the server.

Though wordpress is considered to be a efficient script, having 50 of them at the same place can be a problem, or so I learnt! Going through the “ways to speed up wordpress tips” across the google results on the blogosphere, I noticed the regular tips like

  1. Upgrade wordpress to the latest edition
  2. Delete unused and unwanted  plugins
  3. Use Cache plugins for wordpress
  4. Yada yada blah blah!

One particular practical tip I liked was the one to reduce server requests. If you use a free wordpress theme, it is highly possible that you are violating this rule. Following are the places which you might want to check and replace if you are looking for ways to reduce load times and server overloads.

If you open up your header.php in wordpress theme editor, you will see something like the above. Each time your page is requested, there is about 7 php queries requested already in the header.php! It might not be very intensive, but if you get a lot of traffic, they can quickly add up.

To speed up load times, simply replace the above requests to absolute destinations and you just saved some micro seconds of load times! What other tips do you have on speeding up your scripts? Thanks to Lorelle.


Comments

10 responses to “Speed Up Your WordPress Blog”

  1. Hey Anand,

    Yep, reduce the plugins used – that is very important. There are many plugins out there, and we feel like installing everything! The plugins automatically insert filters and actions for every page.

    I feel that, in most cases the HTML will get downloaded to the browser faster. But to render it the browser takes a lot of time, especially when the HTML elements are not well formatted. Even though we all say that the theme is XHTML Transitional, when you check it out at validator.w3.org you will find that there will be many errors. The simpler and cleaner the code is, the faster the browser render it for the visitor.

    Clean XHTML along with Super Cache and less number of plugins will make a WordPress blog faster, provided you have enough hardware support for it.

    For example, my blog teck.in is fully XHTML transitional validated (except for a few old posts), and have super cache. Now it is much faster than before.

  2. Yes, I agree with you sree, better validated, better it renders.

    I was actually able to reduce load time by 2 seconds to less than 5 secs now. I am looking for more ways to reduce load times and Xhtml validator is next 🙂

  3. As a newbie at WP, I think this is a good tip for me. Upgrading the latest version is one thing I have not done yet, and I am also scared about plug-ins as I got used to Blogger which I found easier to load.

    But thanks to Daily Blog Tips as I found you there.

  4. Thanks for the tip about reducing the queries – I thought the data will be cached when calling those functions. I will remove them from my templates and use static text instead.

  5. This post is like ANSWERED PRAYER for me!!! Thanks so much for sharing!!!

  6. This is awesome dude. I found it very cool to get these new tips. Keep it up.

  7. Very useful tip. Thanks for that man.

  8. Nice Tips …… 🙂

  9. Super-Duper site! I am loving it!! Will come back again – taking you feeds also, Thanks.

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