WordPress Tips – Speed Up Your WordPress Blogs Or Websites

This blog post is geared towards those just starting out with WordPress. If you’re new to blogging or web hosting with WordPress, this post will show you how to make your blogs perform better.

WordPress, out of the box isn’t optimized for speed. It’s a great content management system, but not necessarily configured for speed.

If you envision your site being popular and attracting many users, you may want to optimize your WordPress site to handle the increased web traffic. This brief tutorial is going to show you something you can do or install to help.

This post is not a complete guide to optimizing WordPress, but it’s a start. It will get you started with preparing your WordPress site for heavy page loads.

Before we get started, there are some things to take into consideration when it comes to web hosting. There are many parts involved here. From the actual physical servers to the web server application and scripts. All of these components play important role when hosting a WordPress blog or website.

To get better service, make sure to sign up with a better host provider. Companies that host your web sites are known as host providers or web hosts.

A better host provider will plays an important role in speeding up your Websites.

When a host is selected and WordPress installed, the first thing to do is install a caching plugin. Caching plugins are there to help cache your site’s content.

If you site is being visited by many users, each of these visits will submit a new request to the web server application to return a web page. The many requests that are submitted, the slower the web server may reply to them.

That’s where caching plugins come in. They help by caching your site’s content so that subsequent requests return pages that were recently requested, and not resubmitting the same request to the web application.

Doing this reduces the load on the web server application and also serves pages quickly to the web clients (users).

 

W3 Total Cache

 

 

One of the many Caching plugins for WordPress is W3 Total Cache. This plugin is the most popular and works on many WordPress installations.

To get started installing it, logon your WordPress admin page and go to Plugins –> Add New plugin. This will bring the search box to search for it.

Then type W3 Total Cache in the search box and press Enter. On the result page, select to install the plugin.

 

 

Wait for the plugin to get installed. After the installation, active the plugin. The activation page will show up immediately after the installation.

After the activation, look at the left side and a new page should be added called Performance. This is where you configure the plugin.

 

 

Now click the General Settings page. There you will want to enable the following and accept the defaults.

 

• Page Cache
• Minify
• Database Cache
• Object Cache
• Browser Cache

if you’re using shared hosting, you may select either Disk or Disk: Enhanced to store the caches.

The default settings should get you started and work across all WordPress installations.

For more advanced settings, we’ll write about later.

Enjoy!