Eight easy ways to speed up your Wordpress blog

Firas is a staff writer on Mike’s Life, and you can find out more about him here.

I always receive different questions about how to make Wordpress blogs lighter and faster. I have realized that after this question is answered either by me or by anyone else, the person who is asking remains clueless and still doesn't know what to do! Most probably the answers for this question are deep technical answers and I believe that people, who would understand those answers, will never need to ask this question to start with. Therefore, I will be sharing some tips to speed up your Wordpress blog, very easy to do tips that do not require any technical knowledge.

Image: vegadsl / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

1- Know what you want:

You should know how fast you need your blog to be, you need to set a goal that you want to achieve by doing all improvements. At some point, you might realize that your site is cool and doesn't need any improvements.

2- Delete unused plugins:

One of the best features of Wordpress is its HUGE plugins directory, but this cool feature would be a nightmare if you keep downloading plugins without using them. This could affect your blog, by making it vulnerable if you miss new updates.

3- WP Super Cache Plugin

What this plugin does, is that it caches all static files and pages of your blog instead of loading them each time a user visits a page, and therefore it improves the speed of your blog and saves some bandwidth as well.

4- Stay updated with the latest Wordpress versions

Newer versions of Wordpress always contain security updates and code improvements, and code improvements have big effects on your blog’s speed.

5- Use images that are made for web

Many people when using images within their posts, on their sidebars, or where ever on their blog, obtain the image from any image directory (flickr, Google Images, iStock, etc…) or save them using Adobe Photoshop and upload them. Instead of doing so, they should save them for web using Adobe Photoshop or any other application, by doing this step they will be getting the same quality of image but with a smaller size that is suitable for web usage.

6- Depend on yourself

Do your best not to place objects with external links from other websites. Instead, host all objects locally on your server so you won’t need to wait for their server to respond and therefore your blog’s speed won’t be affected if the other server has any problems.

7- Minimize PHP and database queries

All Wordpress themes include different database queries within the code, and changing them into static code will also help speed up your blog. As I mentioned in the introduction of the article, the tips I will be sharing are very easy, so don’t worry.

By default you might find the following code in your header.php file:

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php bloginfo('description');?></title>

<link rel="shorcut icon" type="image/x-ico" href="&lt?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/favicon.jpg" />

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>"/>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/print.css" />

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />

You should be replacing the above with the following

<title>Your Blog Title – Your Tag Line </title> 
<link rel="shorcut icon" type="image/x-ico" href="http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/theme-name/favicon.jpg" /> 
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href=" http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/theme-name /style.css"/> 
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href=" http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/theme-name/print.css" /> 
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS .92" href="http://yourdomain.com/feed" />

Note: replacement should not be exact copy/paste, you should compare each line from both sections and realize what we have done and do the same.

8- Choose a proper hosting provider

Choosing your hosting provider is not an easy task. Never go with the cheaper or the one with the better offers! Read the reviews and ask your friends and colleagues where they are hosting their blogs and what they think about their hosting providers. Please don’t go with the cheap ones just because they are cheap!

As well as being a staff writer on Mike’s Life, you find Firas at his own blog Steitblog and on Twitter @steityeh

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2/ A blogger’s day

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