Increase speed of the Wordpress blog

Author: admin | Files under Blogging tips

We all want that our Wordpress blog would be as fast as possible. We want pages to load really quickly, don’t we? I have told you about new policy of the Google company that faster blogs will get a bonus distributing Pagerank. That is why speed of the blog is important so I will give you several tips to optimize a blog and increase its speed.

Important note: Never experiment without doing a database backup. Here is very valuable plugin to make backup of the database and no additional steps are required to do. It is called Wordpress database backup. To download it just visit an article about “Plugins for bloggers“.

1. Use important plugins only. To reduce page loading time it is better not to use plugins that are not very useful and important. The less needless plug-ins the better page speed.

2. Get rid of widgets in sidebar. PHP coders say that pure code is better to use than a widget on the right side of the blog. Widgets take time to load so it may also reduce blog’s loading time. If you want to get maximum just replace all the widgets with the pure code.

3. Turn off post revisions. When you edit a new post, a new row will be created in wp_posts table. More edits more new rows. We don’t want that because post ID will be huge. To disable this function add the code in wp-config.php file.

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

4. Remove unnecessary tables in Wordpress database. Default Wordpess database table structure has default tables so there is no need to have additional tables that has been created by plug-ins. When you install a plugin a table is created but when you uninstall it a table remains. Just remove them but just in case make a Database backup before doing it. By the way, there are default tables that you should know:

wp_comments
wp_links
wp_options
wp_postmeta
wp_posts
wp_terms
wp_term_relationships
wp_term_taxonomy
wp_usermeta
wp_users

5. Wordpress DB should be clean. I hope you wonder how to clean Wordpress Database? There is a very special plug-in called Clean Options. I hope you know how to use a plug-in like any other plug-in. Just install it, use it and disable it. Or you can remove it.

6. Repairing and optimizing Wordpress database. To repair Wordpress database go to phpMyadmin, select all the tables of the database and select repair. Then do the same with optimize function.

7. PHP code vs. HTML. This tip is very important so I will try to explain what to do with that. All PHP requests are slowing blog down. So sometimes it is better to change php requests with html.

Example:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” href=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>” />

this code can be change to:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” href=”http://your-domain-here.com/wp-content/themes/your-theme- folder-here/style.css” />

There are many more things that can be changed to static.

8. Use WP-Supercache plug-in. This is a new and well known plugin that speeds up blog very noticeably.

Use all these tips to optimize your blog and you will notice that your blog’s loading speed is much faster. You may also use other tricks that are not mentioned in this post. Don’t forget to Digg or Stumble it
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