One of the features touted about the latest WordPress 3.2 release is that its lighter and faster.  So why is being lighter and faster important? Because having a lighter and faster website makes it easier for your blog visitors stick around. Just think about it, who likes slow websites anyway? If your site takes too long to load you run the risk visitors will quickly navigate to another site. So here are a couple of simple ways to optimize  WordPress.

Reduce Your Plugins

Yes we all love plugins and there are quite a number I can’t live without. But if you are trying to optimize WordPress you want to make sure you reduce them as much as possible. Why? Because  plugins have the potential to impact your blog performance. They will sometimes draw extra (http) requests as in the case of some social plugins. Personally I try not to go with more then 20 or 30 plugins but bit for some others that might even be too many.

If you have your own hosted WordPress blog it is very important to back up WordPress. It may not happen often but things can and do go wrong. Your host might fail, your WordPress installation could get hacked or you might have made an error and need to roll things back to the way they were before.  So just to be safe back it up. Its easy to do and doesn’t cost anything so there is no reason not to.

Here are some tools to make it easier and carefree:

WP-DBManager

Use this plugin to back up, restore and optimize your database. Optimizing is a great feature because it will help your WordPress blog run faster and more efficiently especially as your blog grows larger in size. You can schedule your backups and have them stored on server or emailed to you. Basically this is a set and forget type of solution I like. I’m sure you will too. Additional features include things like dropping and emptying tables are also available, but use these with extra caution and always use the backup feature first.

So you figured out or heard you can play with WordPress

on your computer eh? Well here are some instructions on

how to install MAMP on your Mac (Mac OSX).

1) First, download MAMP from the Mamp website. The free

version will work just fine. You do not need the MAMP

pro version.

2) Second, download the latest WordPress version from

WordPress.org

3) Go the Applications/MAMP/htdocs folder. From here you can

create a directory for your WordPress installation.

Unzip WordPress if it isn't already and move it in its

entirety to the htdocs folder. If you want, you can also rename

the WordPress folder to whatever you want to call this test blog.

I'm going to rename mine "test" for this example.

3) Now launch the MAMP program by clicking the MAMP application

within the Applications/MAMP folder. You should see a screen

like below:

If the lamps next to Apache Server and MySQL server are red then

the servers are not running (pictured above).

You can easily start and stop the servers by pressing the

appropriate button. The lamps will turn green once the servers

are up and running.