DIY WordPress: 5 Ways to Speed Up Slow WordPress Blogs

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

So your WordPress blog is loading slower and slower? Some good news: 90% of all the performance issues you need to know about with WordPress are easy to solve.

Here’s 5 ways you can speed up your slow WordPress blog:

1. Uninstall all unecessary plugins. Delete them.
2. Install Lester Chan’s DB manager, repair and optimize your database.
3. Check your page loading times in Firefox using Firebug and YSLow.
4. Check for particularly slow plugins, like Bad Behavior.
5. Clean out your options table

All of these steps will “fix problems.” You can even more performance by installing a caching plugin, which is left as an exercise for the reader.

Clean up your plugin directory

WordPress has to scan your plugin directory on a regular basis, whether or not the plugins are activated. If you have a large number of plugins, make sure you really need and use them. Otherwise, deactivate then delete the ones you don’t really need and aren’t using. You will notice a performance gain, small, but real. At the least, you won’t be overwhelmed when you examine your list of plugins.

Optimize your wordpress database

This is so easy to do there isn’t much to write about… but first…

Now install Mr Chan’s WP-DBManager, select the “Database >> Optimize” menu, and click “Optimize.”

Check your network performance

I mainly use Google Chrome browser because it’s fast like lightening, and Firefox when I need to dig into web development. It’s smart to check your blog in different browsers too. If there is a lot of difference in speed, that is probably a browser problem.

When WordPress is running too slow, use Firefox with the Firebug and YSlow addons to investigate the problem.

Firebug shows you the structure of the entire page as served by WordPress, while YSlow keeps track of how long each element of the page takes to load. YSlow also “grades” your website according heavily tested Yahoo web design principles using an “A”-”F” scale. You want to get an “A.” It’s not that hard. Every element of Yahoo’s grading procedure is thoroughly and plainly documented.

Check for slow plugins

A few months ago, one of my blogs was crawling. It was taking over 30 seconds to load after I saved posts I was editing. After a little bit of digging around, I found out some people that were having trouble with the Bad Behavior plugin. Now, Bad Behavior is actually a really good plugin to eliminate spam. It works really, really well at reducing bad, spammy behavious, catching comments that Akismet would let through. Unfortunately for me (and a few other people), it was just running too slow. I need to be able to save edits very quickly and keep on writing. Speed there is more important to me than eliminating that last 1/2 dozen spams. Hopefully in the future, the Bad Behavior plugin will get faster, because I would like to use it again.

You may find other plugins that slow you down. If you do, leave a comment here so others can benefit. Thanks.

Check for residual options

A WordPress plugin may or may not leave options in the options table. It depends on the how the plugin developer wrote the code.

Some plugins give you the option to completely remove all options when you deactivate and remove. The default is to leave the options alone, so even if you delete the plugin files, their database entries are still present.

There are reasons why leaving plugin options can be a good thing. There are reasons why it’s not so good. WordPress has no official policy that I know of.

Can you add to this list? Do you have a WordPress “performance tuning secret” you would like to share? Please, leave a comment!

Tagged as: Optimizing