22 Ways to Load WordPress Faster
Speed is now becoming a big new topic for webmasters. Web speed overall helps to boost up lost revenue due to bad connectivity and can essentially widen your potential target audience internationally. Simple clean ups or configurations can be the difference from a 6 second page loading time to a 2 second page loading time.
Essentially, this movement is for the better because overall it creates a great browsing atmosphere for your readers and can even lower your web usages, which means, you can be saving money.
1. Compress all CSS & JS into individual documents. Although this may sound like a hard task, it is quite easy with the help of a few plugins. If you are using Wordpress, I recommend downloading one of these plugins to combine all your CSS and JS files in one dedicated document for each.
2. Install Firefox with a few helpful extensions. With the help of great developers who made web optimizing tools for Firefox possible for webmasters to track their web performances through a waterfall diagram, enables webmasters the ability to experiment.
3. Incorporate web caching. Web caching is necessary and SHOULD be incorporated in any website because it can reduce unnecessary web requests by 80%, which means, a faster loading time. If you use Wordpress, downloading and keeping one of these plugins updated is essential.
4. Remove white space and lines. This is pretty straight forward. All you are really doing is trying to remove all the whitespace or line breaks possible to reduce the file size.
5. Compress pictures WP-Smush-it. Wp-Smush-it is a new type of plugin that simply compresses whatever picture type file you upload to your server and automatically compresses it in the background.
6. Gzip CSS and JS files. Gziping and compressing as many possible files as you can, can drastically reduce web size and improve site performance. Yahoo has reported that Gziping your files can reduce up to 70-80% of the original file and still be able to serve the same effects as it was uncompressed.
7. Optimize database tables. Optimizing the database tables is not the most effective way to optimize a site for better web speed, however, simple repairs can add up. To optimize your database tables, you can either A, do it though a Wordpress plugin or B, go to your phpMyAdmin account and manually optimize your database tables.
8. Install Google Libraries. There are sure various reasons why not many people would want to install Google Libraries. 1 being, if you switch to Google Libraries, you switch out from your local version of jquery.js. This means, if Google’s hosted version of jquery.js ever goes down, which they promised they would never, some data may be lost.
9. Use a sub-domain to deliver images or JS (CDN). CDN means Content Delivery Network. When you are considering on improving web site speed, you always want your files to be downloaded by users in parallel. This is so by the time other scripts and files are being downloaded, by the time those files are finished, your images and other files are done as well. A good example of CDN being used is Google.
10. Turn off post revisions. Every time you save a post, a post revision is written into your database. Overall, the post revisions can really build up and cause some distortion in web performance. Removing this unnecessary functionality, can somewhat improve a site’s performance.
11. Turn off RSS pings and pingbacks. This will probably be the easiest adjustment you will have to make that will somewhat conserve your web performance. Disabling the option under Discussions, named “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)” can undoubtedly improve web performance compared to when it is checked.
12. Remove badly coded or unused plugins. Just removing unused plugins can conserve disk space. Ideally, deleting disabled plugins is a good practice because it ensures there will be no further conflict with other plugins. Badly scripted plugins or unmaintained plugins can be devious for Wordpress.
13. Minimize the number of HTTP requests. Did you know that most of the time, 80% of a site’s response time is due to too many site components on a single page like Flash, images, stylesheets, scripts, videos, and etc? Reducing the amount of unnecessary HTTP requests, can drastically improve website speed.
14. Lower DNS look ups. Before a site’s content is viewable to a reader, the domain name must be looked up.
15. Compress all your content using Apache .htaccess. Compressing your content as much as possible is necessary to squeeze the most performance out of your website.
16. Create expire headers. Adding expire headers is a good way to keep client requests to a minimum. Without them every time the client’s browser requests a file the server has to serve it. Adding expire headers, in this case to the .htaccess file, keeps a cached version of the requested file on the client’s computer in case it is requested again.
17. Put CSS on top and JS on bottom. It has been proven that putting your CSS on top and putting JavaScript on the bottom, has the best performance. It is as simple as that. This improves parallel downloads from your web host.
18. Use short hand CSS. Incorporating short hand CSS when possible, is a efficient way of reducing file size. Although it may not sound like much, overtime, it add ups and can essentially improve your website performance.
19. Consider using CSS sprites if possible. Basically what a CSS sprite is one huge image that contains all the general elements of a blog theme. This includes icons, buttons, styles, and more. Using CSS sprites when possible, is a significant way of reducing HTTP requests because every time you pull an image directly from the source, it count as one HTTP request. With a CSS sprite, it only counts as one no matter how many times you use that particular image to pull out images. And to get the proper image you want to display, you use css background-position, to dictate what to show for a particular image.
20. Clean your HTML code with W3 Validator. Make sure that your HTML validates and is cleanly coded is recommended to ensure the best performance with the HTML code your site contains.
21. Stop hotlinking. If another person hotlinks an image or anything is being pulling more requests from your web servers, it is using up your site’s resources. Good thing it is really simple to disable people from hotlinking from your web servers.
22. Stop spammers. Just like with hotlinking, if a spammer visits your website, it uses resources.
Source: mooladays