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.