If you’ve been running WordPress for a while, you’ll have many posts and a bunch of plugins installed. You might notice a slowdown in performance. Your users might have to wait a little longer before the frontpage appears and you might have a hard time getting anything done in the admin interface. Here are 2 tips to help you on both sites.
There are many tips and tricks out there to speed up WordPress. Most of them require some inside knowledge of how your theme and/or WordPress works. These two right here, require no knowledge to install and only very little attention to use:
- WP-Super-Cache is probably the best caching plugin for WordPress. What it does is keep a copy of your generated pages. Usually when a user view your website, the pages will be created on the fly, which could take a while if you have many plugins. WP-Super-Cachhe only creates the pages ones each hour (the time is configurable). Read the documentation carefully, because there are a few cases where it won’t work too well, but the results I have seen are truly stunning. From 10s loading to under 1s. Tip: If you have activated the plugin, don’t forget to turn on the caching on the Super Cache configuration scren.
- Use the Turbo mode that is available since WordPress 2.7. This one will only benefit you while you are using the editor. First you will need to install Google Gears, which allows websites to store data locally. Afterwards, just click the turbo link in the top right corner and everything will install automatically. Tip: Google Gears also runs on other sites, only allow them access if you trust the site.
Get ready for at least one more list posts. I might do a few more in February. I’ll keep them short, so only real quality items get in and you can actually try out all suggestions. I really hate those 100+ lists, by the time you reached item 5 it’s already clear that it’s just a bunch of random links that wasn’t researched too well. I hope to do a little better.
Feel free to post any other easy WordPress speed tweaks in the comments.