The Best Ways to Speed Up WordPress

Over the past few years, I've written various articles about tackling the inherently slow output speed of WordPress. This is my attempt to combine them all into something coherent and useful. In order to get you on the right track, I'll try to start from the beginning (after WordPress installation) and bring you up to speed, no pun intended. Both WordPress and the supporting plugins have come a long way since I started using WordPress.

Select Permalinks

If your web host uses anything but a Windows server, you should be able to set your permalinks while adjusting the WordPress settings. Even with a Windows server, there are workarounds, but I can't point you to them (it's been too long since I read about it).

One of the WordPress developers specifically mentioned, at some time in the past that I can't quite remember, that the permalinks need to start with a date parameter of some kind because performance is hindered otherwise. Well, I think a lot of improvements have been made since then and it's not enough of an issue to worry about. Just use the custom structure of /%postname%/ and be done with it or you'll be kicking yourself later.

Select a Theme

As I alluded to in the article about the Catalyst Theme, it's not always the theme at fault. In fact, it's usually what you do with the theme (and other components) that makes a difference.

WordPress comes bundled with a nifty default theme that simply works. It's not the prettiest theme and it may not suit your purposes, but at least it's there for you to tinker with until you find a theme you like. Be extremely wary of any theme which uses a lot of images to make the display nice and pretty. Since 99% of the presentation can be handled by CSS elements, it just doesn't make sense to use those themes. Since every image requires an http connection from your web browser and your web browser can only handle a few at a time, it's reasonable to assume that multiple images will drastically slow down the output.

Put Widgets in the Sidebar (or other Widget Locations)

One of your first inclinations would be to add content to the sidebar and that's actually a good idea. What you select may not be such a good idea. Almost any widgets already built into WordPress should be fine (at least, at first). Before you stick those archives widgets up (date-based, category, tag cloud, etc.), think about the value to the visitor. In my experience, people rarely click on them, so why waste that space?

I obviously can't tell you what to include, but please refrain from using any JavaScript-based widgets or widgets with pictures in them. These are the culprits, when connections to their servers are not doing so well, which can make your website grind to a crawl.

Minify JavaScript, CSS and HTML

When it comes to these three things, size actually does make a difference. Smaller sizes transfer over the web faster and that's all you really need to know. I'm particularly fond of one specific plugin that does all three, although one of the caching solutions I'll next be mentioning includes it as one of its components.

It's called WP Minify. I tried several, similar sounding plugins that didn't work so well. This one is the one you want.

Use Caching

There are some good caching solutions available as plugins. Some are designed for the more experienced website owner and some are designed for the least. It's up to you to decide which solution you want to use, but you need to use at least one of them. You see, WordPress queries the database on every page view when no caching is used. Caching saves the compiled form during a specified time period in order to mitigate this constant database thrashing.

These are the best caching solutions, in my opinion:

• Quick Cache – This plugin requires minimal configuration in the options panel and does exactly what it claims to do. It's a very good solution for a beginner and it's what I use (and I'm no beginner).
• Hyper Cache – This plugin requires minimal configuration and works similar to Quick Cache, but without all the options. It's inferior to Quick Cache, in my opinion, so I can't recommend it unless nothing else works.
• W3 Total Cache – This plugin includes the minify component I mentioned. There are A LOT of configuration options and setting it up the first time can be quite overwhelming. This is something you'd want to switch to when you get A LOT of website traffic. I'm sure I'll eventually switch to this one.
• WP Super Cache – This plugin bypasses PHP in WordPress and is not for the weak of heart. If you don't set it up correctly, it will take your WordPress blog completely down and without hesitation. Again, this is something you'd want to switch to when you get a lot of website traffic.

All of these caching solutions are available from the plugin installer within the WordPress admin options.

GZip your Pages

If your website is on a shared hosting account (usually less than $10 a month), GZipping is not likely to be an option at the server. If you can find WordPress-specific web hosting, however, that option (usually called deflate on the server) may already be turned on. Of course, that hosting isn't going to be less than $10 a month either.

Of all the caching solutions I mentioned, only one of them does not GZip the cached pages (optional) and that's Quick Cache. The author believes, as I do, that compression belongs at the server. GZipping cached pages only works for the subsequent visits to one of your pages and not the first one whereas GZipping at the server affects even the first one.

Summary

These are the things I believe to be the most important and best ways to speed up WordPress. I'm sure there are other, less important tweaks that can be used to make things run faster and you're more than welcome to point them out.

None of this is extremely important at first. The importance doesn't become apparent until you start getting more than a hundred visitors per day. Even then, you can get by… until your website traffic starts rising daily.

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• The Ultimate Cache Solution for WordPress on a Virtual Private Server
• The Ultimate Cache Solution for WordPress Just Got Better
• A Good Reason to Turn Off the MySQL Query Cache
• Setting up NginX FastCGI Cache to work with WordPress
• A Secondary Cache for Quick Cache