Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

WordPress is, in my opinion, one of the finest blogging and content management solutions there is. It is loaded with cutting edge features that are very important in giving your blog or site the flexibility that users have come to expect these days. WordPress has somehow managed to package it's super awesomeness in a way that is both accessible to the average user and, in my opinion, great fun for a developer to work on.

Flexibility and a long feature list often come at a price though. Loaded down with forty different plugins and dressed up with a theme that loads three different javascript libraries and seven CSS files, your beautiful WordPress site can sometimes bring a user's browser or your server to it's knees.

What's a Blogger to Do?

First things first...make sure your theme isn't totally and completely over the top. Check your web site at Web Page Analyzer to see where it stands as far as speed is concerned. If your site is loading in at half a megabyte per page view you really may want to consider getting a new theme and making sure images in your posts are properly optimized. Make thumbnails of images instead of scaling them down with HTML attributes and CSS rules. You can then link to the full image from the thumbnail ensuring visitors are prepared for the extra load time.

Time to Talk About Caching

Caching is storing pre-rendered pages for quick retrieval. Serving a cached page instead of a dynamic page means your server doesn't have to go through all the PHP processing and MySQL queries to build a ready-to-serve page for your users. This saves your server alot of processing power and RAM and may trim a few milliseconds off the time it takes the server to dish the page to your client's browser as well.

My favorite plugin for WordPress caching is WP Super Cache. It's highly configurable and has a couple of extra options, like site lock down, that can really help out if your site hits the front page of Dig or some other similar situation. Many popular plugins are compatible with WP Super Cache by design and others just work naturally. Caching is one of the best things you can do for your server besides decreasing your web page's actual size.

Next Up...GZIP Compression

GZIP compression simply means that the server is using a file compression algorithm on the files before handing them over to your user's browsers. This can decrease the size of the files by up to 60%...greatly reducing the time needed to download your web page. The easiest plugin I've found for WordPress and GZIP compression so far is GZIP Output.

Just installing the plugin should have your WordPress site dishing out GZIPPed versions whenever a user's browser has the capability.

Other Things We Won't Talk About

It is very possible to serve your CSS and Javascript files with GZIP compression as well. If you're looking for the bleeding edge of bandwidth optimization you can combine multiple CSS and JS files into single files and then run a code compressor. Sending the compressed code via GZIP will give you the best possible results without re-factoring the code as well.

I'm not going to go into details on these things. I have yet to find decent WordPress plugins for doing this and the only other ways I know of combining, compressing and GZIPPing CSS and JS files is to work it out with straight code and server directives or manually combine and compress the code. I'm not going to go into browser caching and cache control via server directives as it's a bit out of the scope of this article.

And the Results Are...

If you managed to follow along with this article and implement caching and GZIP compression along with a streamlined theme chances are your web site is much faster than it was...barring hosting problems that is. Faster sites will be more snappy for your users and may actually earn you some extra points with the search engines.