Speeding Up Your WordPress Part 1 – Tips And Tricks

A blog and also in WordPress is always good. But some of the high traffic bloggers as well as some of medium traffic bloggers always have some problems with there site’s loading speeds. So, by reading title you may already have known that I am going to give some tips about speeding up a wordpress blog, don’t worry I am not going to give some useless tips like upgrading wordpress to latest version and you should delete unused plugins, etc as they are really common things and of course all of us do that. So what I am going to tell? I am going to give some really good tricks of speeding up your wordpress blog in two parts in first one I will give tricks to speed up blog and in second I will give a big list of plugins you should use for speeding up your blog. So, let’s start now without wasting more time in intro.

1. Removing useless PHP Executions as well as Database Access

We will be using some good themes and also some of them will be paid, but do you know that those high quality themes free or paid always have a High PHP bloat. This will make your site loading slow and slow. All of these themes have generic code in them to allow easy installation in any blog. And generic code always uses high CPU load as well will load your site slowly.

This generic PHP code can be replaced with some static HTML in order to save CPU processing time and database queries, and under load this can make a big performance difference.

You can do this easily, just open your wordpress admin and then Open Theme Editor, and choose Header.php (as an example), it will have code like this:

<title>php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> php bloginfo(‘description’);?></title>
<link rel="shorcut icon" href=" php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/favicon.jpg" />
css" media="screen" href=" php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’); ?>"/>
css" media="print" href=" bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/print.css" />
rss+xml" title="RSS .92" href=" bloginfo(‘rss_url’); ?>" />

You can that PHP code and can easily turn in simple HTML, this will load your site 20% faster then earlier it was. After you are done you will have code like this:

<title>YOUR BLOG TITLE HERE</title>
<link rel="shorcut icon" href="favicon link here" />
css" media="screen" href="Stylesheet (CSS) file link here."/>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="Print Stylesheet Link here" />
rss+xml" title="RSS .92" href="RSS Feed Link Here." />

This will save your 5 PHP executions which are always useful in speeding up. Now, check Footer.php like this and you would surely find things which should be converted into HTML.

2. MySQL Query Settings

As we all know that WordPress uses MySQL databases for every pages that loads on your blog. For something like queries for logins, post content, categories and so on. It is possible that data didn’t change since the last request so we begin with enabling the cache within the MySQL server. Simply, you just need to enable it in the my.cnf or my.ini MySQL configuration file with setting query-cache-type variable to 1. The query-cache-size variable is size of the query cache in MB, you can set it to something like 20. The query-cache-limit variable sets limit for cache, you should change it to something like 2. But for editing configuration file you need server’s root access, many of shared hosts don’t allow you to do so.

3. PHP Cache Compliers

WordPress is a PHP Application so every request results in a call from the web server (like Apache) to the PHP interpreter. This program reads the script and files and complies them to a code which can be executed. This process may need some time, depending on the size of your script. PHP Cache compliers saves them into compiled state in the memory which allows the PHP engine to execute it directly without compiling again which makes the execution about three times faster. Well known cache compliers are APC and eAccelerator. You can check further details on there site, like how to install them and others. You will need root access for this.

4. Trimming Server Requests

Every single item on your page creates, that includes HTML page, the CSS page(s), javascripts, images, movies, and any other item.

As servers can only handle certain number of requests at a time, you should try trimming down the number of items or off-loading content to a second server can dramatically improve performance. Like if you are several images in your post you can have them hosted on Image Hosting or on Flickr, etc. and then embed them to your site. That way, when visitors come to your site the images are being served up by those Image hosting site’s giant servers which can easily withstand the load.

The same thing applies to video hosting as well many hosts do not allow video hosting at all and many bloggers now are already using site’s like Youtube, Google Videos, Vimeo, etc.

Conclusion

They were some useful tricks that can help you increasing your blog’s speed drastically. In second part of this post I will share useful plugins which are important in speeding your wordpress blog.