<Disclaimer>
The following tips to speed up Wordpress are certainly not for the faint of heart, and I suggest you only attempt these with a good disaster recovery plan in place.
</Disclaimer>

One of the first and most successful techniques is to optimize your database.
Working daily on very large Oracle Databases I certainly know the importance of a well tuned database. Since pages are served dynamically, every page load in Wordpress results in a Mysql Query, and as stated in my first post on speeding up Wordpress the WP-Cache plugin helps to reduce these queries but it’s also important to make sure you have the Query Cache optimized for maximum performance.

To activate the Mysql Query Cache:

1. Find your mysql configuration file my.cnf
2. Find the setting query-cache-type & change the value to 1
3. Find the query-cache-size & change the value to 20M
4. Find the query-cache-limit & change the value to 2M

You will need to make sure your host allows root access to the server in order to do this tweak.

The next tip to try is using PHP Compiler Cache

The PHP Compiler cache saves scripts in their compiled format on the server so that they’re not getting recompiled every time you call them from Wordpress. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. It typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

Here are links to a couple of PHP Compiler Caches APC & eAccelerator

The final tip I have for today is to make sure you select the correct hosting company.

Unfortunately I initially selected one of the most incompetent hosting companies in the known universe for my personal blog, and I have had nothing but grief, angst, argument and downtime since joining….. The name of the worst hosting company in the world is ’smartyhost dot com dot au’, I won’t even link to them thanks how much they suck.　In spite of their total incompetence and lack of support and b-grade service I have still managed a reasonably fast Wordpress blog. I am saving all the problems with the worst hosting company in the world, for another blog post, and I will make sure I get the keyword SEO just right to ensure it gets 1st position on Google….. rant over….

The two hosting companies I looked at and reviewed are bluehost.com and micfo.com, but keep in mind micfo.com doesn’t accept credit card payments so you have to use paypal or wire transfer…. I elected to use bluehost.com. After this weekends Photo Hunt competition I will redirect my DNS to my new host with migrated blog and hopefully everyone will see another speed boost….

がんばてます

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