Speedup wordpress with caching

Have you been checking your blog’s page loading time? Well, you should. Google has announced that a website’s speed is one of the many factors used to calculate you PageRank, although it is not that heavy on the scale, it still can pull you down badly if you have a significantly slow website link mine. I have just recently finished speeding up my wordpress blog and I decided to share what I did with you.

Being slower than 88% of the websites is definitely bad. And this must have to do with the fact that most of my pages with ranks 3 or 4 got lowered to pagerank 1-2.

So before you start the speedup process make sure to collect some data about your wordpress blog so that you could appreciate the work you’ve done later. You can use services like WebSiteOptimization.com to get an analysis of your current loading time.

How to speedup wordpress?

First things first, let’s cleanup our installation.

Remove all unnecessary plugins to speed up your wordpress website.

Plugins are nice, but good things always come with a price. Poorly made plugins run a lot of SQL queries, generate unnecessary CSS, and sometimes load external images and scripts that require DNS lookups and loading time.

Make sure not to leave more than one plugin for visitor stats. Also any plugin that need to look up within all posts for every page loading, like the “related posts” plugins.

Reduce your header size as much as possible.

Some themes and plugins write a lot of stuff to your header, CSS data, scripts, or even comments! Remember that nothing is displayed for your visitors until the headers are fully loaded. If you have some skills, try reducing these, using external files, if not. You may consider to change your theme and plugins.

Speedup wordpress by using caching plugins.

There are many plugins that can cache your pages into HTML files and load them to visitors later without having to regenerate the page again. This process is very efficient for websites with a lot of search engine traffic.

I would recommend W3 total cache . Not only it will take care of the caching, but it will compress your html, JS, and CSS files. So far it is working very well for me on a networked wordpress installation on a shared hosting (hostmonster).

The only downside to caching on shared hosting is the number of files. Caching will generate html files for each and every post and page on your blog. So if you have a huge number of posts, you may reach your host’s file count limit and risk account suspension as a consequence. But that is probably not your case.

The following are my results. Before and after I optimized my blog and used the caching plugin.

Before the wordpress speedup process.

After:

This test was perfomed on one of my biggest pages, so the loading time is relatively large. Anyway the results of my wordpress speedup are around 30% improvements; the java scripts are considerably smaller, and the load on my server is much lower.