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One of the challenges with web pages is maintaining an acceptable load time while still having enough immediately displayed content to keep your target audience interested. When I first loaded Wordpress as my preferred blogging back end and proceeded to customize the theme, load all the widgets, add a photo gallery, some advertising… you get the picture, a standard Wordpress blog, I was unaware my blog had become slooooow…..
It’s interesting that as you work on your blogs theme to get it just right you actually become unaware that your blog has become so slow that people probably leave before the page finishes loading. The back end also becomes frustratingly slow, it generally takes someone to bring it to you attention, before you realize it’s an issue.
This was first brought to my attention by Surgey from Hello Monsters. In fact my blog was taking over 10 seconds to load which after being made aware of it I decided I need to take action.
Ok, now I know what the problem is how do I go about fixing it? Well I have found a few easy ways to speed up your Wordpress blog without requiring any special skill and can be done very easily and quickly.
The first this I did was to install the Firebug Firefox Plugin . If you are not using Firefox I suggest you give it a try. With the Firebug plugin you can see very quickly how long each part of your web page takes to load.
Upon investigation I noticed that a bunch of plugins were being loaded even though they weren’t active in my blog… hmmm… time to clean up the unused plugins. What I was doing was loading a plugin, testing, deciding I didn’t like and de-activate it. I should have also deleted the plugin as this is a major cause of slowdown on the Wordpress blogs. So delete all unused widgets from your Wordpress plugin directory.
The second cause of slowdowns I noticed were text widgets that were not in use but contained code. So for all the unused widgets that can accept code, make sure they are empty otherwise they get processed and slow down the page loading.
Pretty easy right… but that’s not were it stopped for me. Although with the two simple changes above reaping great rewards I still wanted to bring the load times down further. As a programmer I know the importance of Cache, so I found a nice Wordpress plugin that gives server side caching functionality, Wp Super Cache. Not only was the name catchy it did actually reduce load times and didn’t require the reader to do anything.
Ok, were still on some pretty easy stuff here and if everybody followed the above recommendations then your blog would definitely load faster.
Now it’s nearly unavoidable to rely on external resources to provide some form of content on your blog, i.e. adsense, mybloglog, adtoll… etc.. etc.. the list goes on.
So how do you optimize these? One strategy is to make sure your content loads before the external links, so one thing I did was put the mybloglog code in the footer.php. Now this may be beyond some peoples ability so be careful. The advantage I have with the mybloglog in the footer is that my blog loads before all the little mybloglog thumbnails have completed loading, and I have a lot of them!
Now generally blogs have some some advertising, so there are two things you can easily do here. Make sure images include height and width attributes. This will allow the browser to allocate the image space before the image is loaded, and for code based advertising place the code in an iFrame so your page continues to load regardless of what the iframe is doing. Both these tips are very effective.
Now it appears that the average persons ability to wait for a page to load is 8-10 seconds, anything longer and you risk losing your audience, and with the above tips hopefully your blog will load it’s main content within this time frame.
There is one more tip I have but this is not for the faint of heart. You can compress your .css files to reduce data that needs to be loaded. Now .css files are beautifully formatted so they are man readable, but your web browser doesn’t care, so you can save up to 30% of load times for .css files by removing all the lovely spaces, pagination, tabbing etc in the .css files that make them man readable. There a many utilities to compress your .css files and give reports on how much the file size is reduced. e.g. Icey. As I said this is not for everyone though.
I hope you can all reduce load times and feel free to leave more tips in the comments for all to learn.
Have a Safe and Happy New Year.
ことしもありがとうございました
-Paul
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Nice tips, Paul.
I use YSlow myself and as you know, I’m thinking of redoing my blog design as well… it just seems so… blah.
I also read on Yahoo Developer Network about Best Practices for Speeding up Your Web Site. I would love, love to design my own blog template but geez, too much on my plate. I’d probably get the book too if I ever decide to do it.
yeah, I agree with making our own templates to get exactly what we want..but no time, so much beer and only one mouth 
Thanks for the link, maybe I can squeeze some more speed.. and of course share with the community.
Can ICEY compress ANY HTML type files? If you don’t compress on blogspot, anything other than pure text can come out looking like garbage.
Anyways, thanks for an excellent, very helpful, article.
Sam
Your blog was still slow when I accessed it. One thing you might consider is changing host. Also if your sql isn’t configured correctly can also cause slow load times. There are so many things that cause the problems it is hard to lay down any one single solution.
I use a couple of these plugins myself and have the very useful for server load time and bandwidth usage.
Hey Sam, my tips were aimed at wordpress not blogger and Icey is only for .css files, not html. cheers
thanks Chris, I still sometimes see slow loading but generally it is ok, and as you pointed out I definitely need a new hosting service, I think I am stuck on their 486-100mhz server in their back shed … definitely a task for the new year !
Can you please post some specific example code in a textarea box?
“Now generally blogs have some some advertising, so there are two things you can easily do here. Make sure images include height and width attributes.”
David, I emailed you direct.. cheers
Thats a plugins (widgets) developer fault. Wordpress has various build-in methods/functions for managing external files (js/css)on specific case and task i.e: is_active_widget(id) || is_?(?) || get_option(’active_plugins’) ||add_action & add_filter ). Unfortunately not all used it thought. I found a good theme (suprise) that cleverly apply this methods. Its only load the external files if the widget or plugins is active on the request page. its even combine-hash-gzip all the external as single files (js/css). You can view it on my blog for demo and check how it hook openid & wordpress default widgets external files.
Now Sporting Wordpress 2.3.2…
Please clear your cache! I’ve installed the latest version of Wordpress and made several theme tweaks and additions. I’m pleased to announce that all of the plugins I now have are compliant with Wordpress 2.3, I hope this cycle time continu…
[...] How Fast Is Your WordPress Blog? Some great tips to speed up your blog. I didn’t know that unused plugins can slow your blog down! If you liked this article: Subscribe by RSS Subscribe by email Stumble it! Related Posts: [...]
Great article. My wordpress is loading slow so I hope the tips you suggested would make it load faster.
Fantastic, certainly helped my site improve significantly. I am going to refer people across with a post of my own. Thanks and keep the great tips coming!
[...] cards I often find some great articles and tips. The latest little gem is a real corker. It is the How Fast is your Wordpress Blog. It came in very handy for me as I was noticing increasingly slow load times on SCHWOIT. However, [...]
Thanks everyone for the comments, feedback and links. I am sure this will be continuous activity for me, so I will be sure to keep posting anything I find that does speed up the wordpress engine.
-Paul
well i just lost my comment since when you hit tab it doesn’t go to the submit button…
so here is the shorter version.
Thanks for the tips. I was unaware of the text widget issue.
after compressing the css files we did that with the js files as well and then changed the .htaccess file to send gzip’d versions of those files if the browser supports it.
I recently became aware of 2 problems that severely impact your WordPress blog performance and slows down your blog.
NOTHING impacts it more then bloated database! The tables of your database “wp_options” can grow pretty large and bring your blog to a c-r-a-w-l.
It forced me to look at bigger issue as in process of cleaning I discovered that all plugins I have ever installed and even a couple themes managed to leave entries in very same table contributing to the total size and slow load times.
All the plugins and even some themes use wp_options to set its setting and as such contribute to the size of the table. It is very same table used by WordPress to store ALL settings related to your blog and every time you open any page it has to be read and processed.
When you deactivate plugin or decide to switch theme (assuming it stored its settings in wp_options) – it NEVER cleans behind itself.
You have to login to your phpMyAdmin and open database for your blog and Browse action for wp_options table and go through it record by record.
It may take hours…but your blog speed and users will Thank you for it.
Hmmm….I hit submit and went to the top of the page?
My short version is… All the plugins and even some themes use wp_options to set its setting and as such contribute to the size of the table. It is very same table used by WordPress to store ALL settings related to your blog and every time you open any page it has to be read and processed.
So….You’ll need to login to your phpMyAdmin and open database for your blog. Click on Browse action for wp_options table and go through it record by record.
May take hours but your blog and users will Thank you for the increaed speed.
I have tried to post a valuable comment twice…and I float back to the top of the page after clicking submit. Guess you don’t want anymore comments…but then you should close the comment box.
Hey Cheryl, your comments made it through, don’t know what caused the issue. sorry about that. Good tip about the database, I may be brave enough to give it a try. cheers
-Paul
very interesting.
i’m adding in RSS Reader
[...] in December I blogged about “How Fast is your Wordpress Blog” Having done a lot more research into this subject I have come up with a few more ways to Speed up [...]
I found firebug helps fix a lot of these problems. Well at least it shows you where the problems lie. I will have to give these a try.
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