Every one loves wordpress and they enjoy working on it . However using a custom theme and plugins most of the people suffers slow loading and high sever load.This leads even to suspension if you are using shared hosting which will be frustating to you and your host as well .so let us learn optimising WordPress Blog and reduce cpu load and speed up your blog
Installing Caching :
Installing a cache plugin will almost reduce your server load and speed up your blog up to 10 X times time faster and servers the pages to the user very fast. There are two plugins you can prefer to use , one is most trusted w3 total cache and other is wp super cache
I prefer you to use w3 total cache than using wp super cache as w3tc is very much fast and it also saves nearly 80 % of your bandwidth via minify and html compression and if u still want to use super cache, use it along with db cache reloaded
Optimizing Images :
Images are one thing which makes the site load slow and a step to optimise them is needed .Install Yahoo WP Smush.it Plugin which is developed on basis of yslow and it optimises each and every image uploaded to your server.Also try to use smaller images than using larger ones .
Updating WordPress :
Regularly update wordpress and wordpress plugins when a new version is released, as the developers may fix a bug or add things which make your site go good and its good security measure as well
Killing Plugins :
Disable and delete the plugins you really dont need , also identify the plugins which is causing heavy load and try to replace them with a better alternatives,you can ask your host on this. If you are experiencing heavy server load , use greg high performance seo than all in one seo as well as remove yet another related posts plugin and use wp related posts plugin
Cleaning Un Used Tables :
Even after disabling and deleting plugins , there exists some tables in database , install clean options plugins and identify orphan tables and delete them and after deleting remove this plugin as well, as you will not need it all the times.Use it on a regular basis say a month
Restricting through robots.txt :
restrict the un necessary directories to be indexed by search engines , you can use below lines in your robots.txt
User-Agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Disallow: /wp-content/ Disallow: /wp-
Cleaning Up Header and Footer :
Header is the file which is called each and every time and its good to make it call less queries as much as possible.For example you can
Find things like :
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="
<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>;
charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
And replace them with :
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr"> <head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
This will reduce three queries and in same way you can :
- Make your stylesheet urls static
- Rss feed url static
- Favicon and pingback urls static
- As well as remove wordpress version tags
Also replace <?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?> with your direct path like http://yoursite.com/wp-content/themename/ and also replace <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> with your blog name
Also add your image url and home url statically
If you are a bit confused , look in to your site source file , compare to it and make changes
In the same way edit your footer and remove all crappy calls
This steps will not only reduce load but also increase your site speed by atleast two times
Combine css and js :
Combine your css and js to one single file .
First make a back up of all your css files and open a notepad and copy paste all the css contents to it one after other and save it as single.css and upload it to your server .
In the same way do for js files and if u messed up with any thing upload your backup files
Note : you need to add below line to your header file
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”your style sheet url” type=”text/css” />
replace your style sheet url with your the path you have uploaded your style sheet
Optimizing Sidebars and Ad slots :
Make a habit of calling your queries directly editing sidebar than using widgets and also place your advertisements directly in theme files
Say Not To flash :
Flash is one thing which makes much time to load , avoid flash as much as possible and also reduce your adverts as well
Locate error_log and delete it
Using your favourite file manager or favourite FTP client and find error log file and delete it as this affects the server process much more.
Minimise 404 erros :
Identify 404 erros and rectify them , you can look at your web master tools for list of crawl erros
Database optimization :
Using database administration software like phpmyadmin , select your wordpress sql and select all tables and repair them and optimise them
And also delete spam comments,trackbacks using akismet plugin and avoid rank widgets kind of things in the sidebar , these are no way useful to you any ways
I hope these tips will help you in minimising cpu laod as well as speed up your wordpress blog
