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.
Use a Caching Plugin
Use a caching plugin like like WP SuperCache or W3 Total Cache. Both of those plug-ins are designed to to cache your WordPress blog and make it faster for your visitors. If I had to pick between the two I’d pick W3 Total Cache because it has cutting edge features that most of the other caching plugins don’t have and does better on benchmark tests.
Use a CDN (“Content Delivery Networkâ€)
Sign up for and use a content delivery network like Max CDN or Akmai. CDNs are relatively inexpensive services that will host images, videos, and other parts of your site from servers around the world. In this way your visitors receive those parts of your website from the web server closer to them which makes your site a lot faster to load from their vantage point. In fact, W3 Total Cache works very well with CDNs including Max CDN so I encourage you to give it a try.
Optimize Images
Optimize any images you use in your posts so they load faster. I use a number of tools to do this but if I’m lazy about it, I’ll just let a WordPress plugin like Smush It do the work for me.
There’s plenty more you can do if you really want to get serious about it, but tips I’ve mentioned before will put you on the fast track to an improved WordPress blog. If you want to learn more I highly recommend this very helpful video called Working Backwards on the WordPress.tv website.
