Posted on August 13th, 2010Google has announced that it decided to take into account the speed of a site to determine search results ranking, in addition to 200 other factors. This decision makes us all worry about the speed of our websites. Optimizing loading time not only makes Google happy, but it makes your readers feel more comfortable with your site, making them more active, plus saving bandwidth and hosting costs.
There are many different ways to optimize the speed of a WordPress blog:
1. Choose a Quality Hosting
This is obvious, but do not expect your site to run like a meteor if it is hosted on a shared server with poor quality. When choosing a webhost, you must be very careful, because it affects the speed of your site and satisfaction of your readers. Read reviews on good web hosting services.
2. Update Your WordPress Installation
Keeping updated with the latest version of WordPress is very important. In each update, there are usually some performance enhancements. WordPress developers do not release new versions just for fun; with each update, WordPress gets better.
3. Eliminate unnecessary plugins
If you’re using more than 25 plugins on your blog, then you need to check whether you really need them all. If you don’t, delete some of them. Also make sure you keep your plugins are updated.
4. Optimize your Database
You will be surprised how much loading time you can reduce, by simply optimizing your database. You can do this manually or you can do it with plugins. If you want to do it the easy way, install WP Optimize DB. If you want to do it manually, do the following:
1. Open PHPMyAdmin.
2. Select your databases.
3. Click “Check All” at the bottom of the page.
4. Choose “Optimize table” in the drop-down list next to it.
5. Done!
5. Cache your Database
Queries to the database are made every time a person visits your blog. Cache is vital to reduce the number of requests and also increase the speed of your blog. To minimize your database queries, you can install “Cache DB Reloaded” plugin.
6. Disable Post Revisions
Post revisions are available from WordPress 2.6, but they are only useful when a blog is managed by several authors, it is used to view changes to a post and show the date of the exchange also to return a post to an earlier version. However, this will make your database is full of redundant posts, making it more sluggish.
8. Use a Cache Plugin
Use a plugin, like WP Super Cache to create HTML (static) versions of your most visited pages. This greatly increases the loading speed of your website.
9. Optimize your images
If you edit your images in Photoshop, always use the “Save for Web” to find a balance between quality and size. You can also use:
Online Tools:
* PunyPNG
* Smush.it
* Online Image Optimizer
* Image Optimization SiteReportCard
Desktop Tools:
* Shrink O’Matic
* RIOT
* PNGGauntlet
10. Optimize your CSS and JavaScript files
CSS and JavaScript files can be optimized to reduce their size, for example, by eliminating blank lines and CSS classes. By optimizing these files, you can effectively reduce the server load and save space on your hard disk.
To compress the CSS, you can use several tools:
* WP CSS plugin
* CSSOptimizer.
* CSS Compressor
* Clean CSS
To help you optimize your JavaScript files, use:
* JavaScript Compressor
* Another JavaScript Compressor
11. Use CSS Sprites
CSS Sprites are multiple pieces that form a single large image. With CSS you can select the piece of image you want to show or reload. This is good because it requires fewer requests to the server.
12. Save your images on another server
When you have a popular site, it tends to use lots of bandwidth. To reduce bandwidth usage and make your site loads much faster, one popular solution is to store the images or other files on another server. Many services allow you to upload your images on their servers, but here are two of them:
- Amazon S3: It is a premium service, it costs 15 cents per GB of storage and 20 cents per GB of bandwidth
- Flickr: Provides a free account, limited to 100MB uploads per month or a premium account for $ 25 a year.