Speed up WordPress engine
A lot of WordPress powered sites tend to run slower than others, especially those that receive tons of traffic everyday. I’m sure no one in the right mind would mind about slow loading website, even though the traffic is not huge. Not only will this result a bounce back rate, it may also over using your CPU usage, especially the PHP queries. I personally did a lot of WordPress websites, my blogs, clients sites and some e-Commerce sites too, they all need to optimised correctly to cut down the PHP queries and loading speed.
Delete unused or inactive plugins
Most people doesn’t care about the plugins, doesn’t matter how many unused plugin on their list, as long as they did not activate it, they thought it would be fine. Which is not really, because each time you load your WordPress, it will go through all the script in the engine so it won’t miss anything out to load. The listing is taking time, and resources on your CPU. Consider to delete them, install them again if needed, some how, WordPress 2.8 has a nice built-in plugin search and installation with a few clicks.
Clean up the template CSS
Seriously, I find this funny too. Each spacing is the key of cleaning up the template code. Both CSS and PHP template always has lots of space between lines and columns. Delete them or use shorthand code.
Code like:
#div {
font-family: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, San-serif;
font-size: 1.2em;
font-weight: bold;
font-style: italic;
}
Can be shorthanded into:
#div {font: bold italic 1.2em Arial, Verdana, Tahnoma, San-serif;}
Spacing and long winding has been cut short for easier loading.
Clean up the template PHP
While you’re cleaning up the CSS, you should consider about the PHP too. Just take a look into header.php, there are too much code that is not necessary, if you know your site well.
Things like:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<?php wp_head(); ?>
Are not necessary, if you know your website well. Language and charset, instead of asking to query the PHP again, it is always best to fix it yourself. Normally the language set to en-US and charset is UTF-8.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
Of course the wp_head() are mostly SEO friendly meta tag. SEO can easily archived by a plugin, I normally delete the line too.
WP Super Cache really helps
I ended all my WordPress sites with WP Super cache plugin. I can’t deny the power of gzip compression it created to help cutting down the load of WordPress. WP Cache will create a static HTML files for certain pages, instead of query the PHP and your database again, it will show the static HTML to the rest of the visitors, which it doesn’t query any PHP at all.
I believe it’s not all yet. Those are what I normally do to cut down my sites and host load. Recently my host provider has a problem with high load server. The thing is m,y host provider is WPWebhost, a WordPress specialised hosting provider, I’m pretty sure there are bunch of account with WordPress sites did not optimise their WordPress.
ZhngSuiSui – Blog Archive » Speed up WordPress engine…
Speed up page load and trim down CPU resources for WordPress powered site….
Thanks for this tipps! WP Super Cache is awesome.
It sure do
Thanks for the information. Good Thought – I have bookmarked your blog.
Web Optimizer, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/web-optimizer/ , is as good for client side acceleration as WP-Super-Cache for server side. With these two plugins you can forget about any performance-related issues for your weblog.