Blog Design Studio

So you want to create a high-traffic site? It’s so cool to have all those plugins too. But will WordPress be sufficient for your high-traffic site? Will it survive tons of heavy traffic every day? Well the answer can be yes as long as you take care of few things. Here are some tips on how to speed up your WordPress site. Before you go ahead with this blog post, you should go ahead and read the following post as well – Unclutter your blog.

Stay up to date with the latest WordPress version and plugins

Staying up to date with the latest version of WordPress is really a must do. Make sure always to stay updated with the latest release of WordPress in order to boost performance of your blog. This is not just for fun, in every update, there are many upgrades that will enhance the performance of your blog but also you will prevent your site from security risks. You should do exactly the same with WordPress plugins. Keep them up to date, it’s as important, and for the same reasons.

Turn off, limit or even delete unused plugins

One of the biggest issues that causes WordPress sites to slow down is leaving too many plugins active even when you’re not using them. If you are using more than say 15 plugins on your blog then you need to check to see if you really need all of them. Some plugins can have many scripts and code. So if you’re not using a plugin disable it and give WordPress a break or maybe delete it. Keep the plugins that are really necessary for your site to run and than disable the ones that aren’t needed. You can lower the number of plugins during heavy traffic times by turning off a few WordPress Plugins temporarily and than you can reactivate them again after the heavy traffic volume has died down a bit.

Be careful with the server requests

All of the items that you have on your page like html page, the css page, javascripts, images, movies, and any other item will generate separate requests for each of them to the web server. Having in mind that the server can handle a limited number of requests at a time, you should try to make things easier for it and reduce the number of items to a second server. First are the images. Your embedded images can be uploaded to an image sharing site like Flickr and by that use the big Flickr servers which can withstand the load much easier. The same for videos, upload to YouTube, Google Video or any other video hosting site and then use their embedding function from their servers within your own page.

Clean up and compress your code

Compress your CSS, i.e. get rid of the white space and get everything neat and clean and than put JavaScript into a single file and load it at the bottom of the page in footer.php. This way the styling will load first and than the JavaScript. Optimizing your code this way actually can do a lot for your load time. At first you might not notice any difference, but it will make a huge difference to your blog speed. White space like indented tabs, line breaks, etc. which you use for better readability are slowing down your blog. Decrease white space and be sure to use shorthand and will be able to speed up your site’s load.

Page Speed is a wonderful Firefox extension that has been released by Google to help webmasters to optimize their blogs and websites. This plugin minify’s the javascripts and even tells you that how one can optimize the performance of the scripts and thus overall improving the speed of the blog.

One another way to speed up the blog’s performance is by using few of these plugins -
1. WP-Super Cache – This plugin creates a cached copy of the dynamic pages and thus doesn’t load up the server with dynamic requests. Find out that why using this plugin is such a good idea and why it makes to our top plugins for wordpress list.
2. Optimize DB – This awesome plugin will optimize the tables of your database and thus improving the overall performance of the blog.
3. Shrink-O-Matic – This is not a WordPress plugin, however an Adobe AIR based application that reduces the image size and eventually speeds up the loading time of the blog pages.