Are you getting complaints that your website is slow or are you noticing that your bounce rate is increasing? Are you approaching the limits on your hosting contract? Your WordPress website might need to be optimized. Following these 10 steps will take you a long way toward improving your site performance:
Use Firebug and Yslow
You’ll need to strike a baseline to determine what the speed is before you begin to optimize so that you’ll be able to determine if what you’re doing is making things better or worse. Using Firebug in conjunction with YSlow will provide you detailed information on how long it takes to download your website as well as how much bandwidth it uses up. Use the Blog Workbook from the your 7-Day Blogging eCourse to record your bandwidth and disc space usage.
“Smush” the Pictures
When you take a digital picture a lot of information is stored with that picture such as type of camera, the lens that was used and lots of other information. You want to use the highest quality images you can with the smallest file size without losing quality. The best way to accomplish this is to save bandwidth and thus decrease your loading time by removing the unnecessary information from pictures. SmushIt is a WordPress plugin that automatically decreases the size of images, without losing any quality, anytime you upload an image to your blog which dramatically increases your blog speed.
Upgrade WordPress
Upgrading your WordPress version is just a good move because upgrades usually include several performance upgrades, security enhancements and fix issues which could slow down your server. WordPress is great about notifying you when there’s an upgrade available and you can set it to upgrade automatically for you.
Pick the Right Web-host
Your webhost is where your website lives. The equipment that the webhost uses will determine how fast your website is served up to your readers. I have had many compliments on how fast my websites are delivered to my readers. I offer webhosting at Monetization Magic for very modest prices. My hosting is built on the same type of backbone as HostGator. HostGator is the only other hosting service that I can reasonably recommend. Use Coupon Code “MonetizeMe” to receive a discount of $9.94 off the package price. Coupon codes will not apply to domain names or any service which is not a hosting account.
Reducing the Number of Plug-ins
Obviously this is an essential step to decrease the load time. Every WordPress blogger uses lots of plug-ins but are they all really needed? Just ask yourself whether a plug-in adds value to your blog. If it does than keep it running, otherwise get rid of it. Basically run a clean, well maintained machine for best performance.
Optimize your Database Every Week
Optimizing your database is important because it reduces the load time. You can either do this manually or just use a plugin, either way should work fine. If you want to use the plugin then download the Optimize DB plug-in, upload it to your blog and activate it. Then go to Tools ? Optimize DB and click on Optimize Now. If you want to do this manually then go and log into phpMyAdmin. Find your WordPress tables and select all of them by clicking on the check boxes. At the bottom of the page you should then be able to choose the Optimize Table and/or Repair Table option. This will reduce the database size.
Delete Blog Post Revisions
Blog post revisions are the snapshots of the blog post every time you publish. If you’re like me, you will create the initial post, review it, revise it and then republish again. Repeat until satisfied with the outcome. There have been times when I revise a blog post 30 or more times before I’m satisfied! All the earlier versions where I wasn’t satisfied with them simply aren’t necessary. They are just cluttering up the database. To remove them, login to your control panel and use phpAdmin to access the database. Then enter this query to delete post revisions:
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;This command will delete all the revisions while keeping the actual current blog post intact.
Prevent Content Scrapers from Consuming your Bandwidth
There are a lot of content scrapers these days. What they usually do is to visit your website and simply copy some of your content. They then go ahead and paste this content onto their own site. The problem is that they usually also copy images which link back to your site. Every time a user takes a look at their copied content your server will have to serve the image which consumes bandwidth. This is also refer to as hotlinking. In order to prevent this add this code to the .htaccess file in the root directory and replace the blog and image URL:
RewriteEngine On #Replace ?mysite.com/ with your blog url RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+.)?mysite.com/ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ #Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your “don’t hotlink” image url RewriteRule .*.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]That should prevent content scrapers from hotlinking.
Use the Right Format when Saving Pictures
Some people make the mistake of using the wrong image formats when saving pictures. The three most popular image extensions are .png, .jpg and .gif. Each of these formats has different advantages. A picture image taken with a camera and without a lot of writing is best saved with the .jpg extension. Simple images with only a color background and some writing, without any fancy effects are best saved as .png or .gif. The best way to learn the correct format to use is to simply go ahead and save pictures in all three formats. Then take a look at the file size and the image quality. That way you will get a feel for when to use which image format.
Host Your Own Code and Images
Whenever you include a script, image or something similar from another website, the browser has to perform an additional DNS query for that website in order to find out its IP address. This additional query adds to the response time for your website. Note to Affiliate Marketers: Whenever you are deciding on promoting a product as an affiliate, don’t just copy and paste the code that is given to you on the affiliate page. Around 80% of these banners have a bigger file size then they should have. Be sure to download and optimize the pictures using Smush.it before uploading them to your blog. Sometimes also changing the image format helps to reduce the size of the banners.