7 tips on how to speed up a WordPress blog

WordPress is one of the most popular blog platforms out there. It is the basis of the majority of the blogs that you read each day. And this is mainly because WordPress is so easy to work with – when you see it, you just know what to do. And it’s also easy to install – for example, you can select it from our order form at signup and it will come pre-installed with your web hosting account. Today, we will present you with 7 ways to speed up your WordPress blog.

1. Monitor your plugins

Always mind the number of the plugins that you are using – they may not seem active at the moment, but too many activated plugins can noticeably slow down your website. It’s best to keep the number of the plugins low – around 10, but don’t go over 20.

2. Keep track of your database

WordPress relies strongly on the use of a MySQL database – this is where all the posts and comments are stored. This means that each time a visitor opens the site, several queries are made to the database. This is why it’s important to keep your database in order. There are two ways you can do that – you can use the WP-Optimize plugin, or you can manually optimize your database. While the plugin will do the work for you, you can learn a bit more about MySQL and how to manage it if you do the job yourself. Here is how you can do it:

1. Inside your web hosting Control Panel, locate and open PHPMyAdmin – you can find it in the Database Manager section.
2. Once logged in, select your database.
3. Click “Check All” at the bottom of the page.
4. Choose “Optimize table” in the drop-down list next to it.
5. Done!

3. Cache your Database

As we’ve already said, posts and comments are kept in a database, which is constantly used. You can speed up the page load time by caching your database. The most simple way to do that is with the DB Cache Reloaded plugin.

4. Don’t use Post Revisions

Post Revisions have been a part of WordPress since WordPress 2.6. They allow you to keep track of changes made to a single post – you can restore an older version of the post at any time. This feature is useful if you have several people working for you and one of them messes up – a restore is just a click away. However, in other cases it’s best to disable them – they will create multiple entries for each post, clogging up your database.

5. Use a Cache Plugin

A quick way to speed up your site is to use static HTML pages for the blog posts, instead of relying on database connections. This is best done with a plugin, but keep in mind that you should cache only the most visited pages of your blog, since they are the most resource hungry. Also, be careful with the plugin – a cache plugin can cause overconsumption of allocated CPU power, they are quite resource hungry.

6. Mind the size of your images

Most blogs use images – in the posts, in the layout, etc. It’s important to use images of a smaller size – this way they will load much faster. If you are working with Photoshop on your desktop machine, you can use the “Save for Web” function it is offering – it will save an image with a balance between size and quality. If you don’t have a copy of Photoshop, you can also use other tools.

Online Tools:

PunyPNG
Smush.it
Online Image Optimizer

Desktop Tools:

Shrink O’Matic
PNGGauntlet

7. Optimize your CSS and JavaScript files

Last, but not least, it’s time to look at the code of your blog and optimize it too. If your website relies strongly on CSS or JavaScript, then you can reduce the size of the files by using several online tools :
To compress the CSS files:

WP CSS plugin
CSS Optimizer
CSS Compressor

To optimize your JavaScript files:

JavaScript Compressor