WordPress platform is perfect for everyday blogging, it’s easy to install and use, but only until your posts begin attracting public attention. As soon as your blog becomes popular, it takes more and more time for the pages to load and of course your readers don’t like this. Gradually you start hating all the shiny features that WordPress usually boasts of.
At this point you become concerned about your blog performance. Good news – there are many things to tune in WordPress to make it work faster. Today I want to share several tips that will make your blog perform better.
First, let’s talk about WordPress plugins. The first what you have to do is disable all unused plugins. They consume RAM and CPU and leave less to your visitors. That’s why, disable everything you don’t need.
Next step, we are going to edit the holy of holies of WordPress, “wp-includes/functions.php”. Open the file in your favorite editor and find this line:
is_blog_installed()
Add this line just below:
return true;
I.e. your function will look as follows:
function is_blog_installed(){
return true;
This allows to avoid checks whether WordPress is installed or not. Usually these checks are done with every accessed page and you absolutely don’t need them after the blog’s been installed. The line we add says to the blog engine: Hey, this blog is already installed, don’t waste your time on re-checking this.
Now it’s time to optimize your database. Our little helper is WP-Optimize plugin. This is what the plugin does:
- It removes unnecessary wordpress post revisions;
- Removes all the comments in the spam queue;
- Removes all the unapproved comments;
- It can rename one username to another username (this feature can be used to rename default “Admin” user to something more secure;
- Applies MySQL ‘optimize’ commands on your database tables without phpMyAdmin.
- It displays the database statistics. It also shows how much space can be optimized and how much space has been cleared.
You can find out more about the plugin on the plugin page.
The next rule is – never use plugins that do what can easily be integrated into your template. Even super-easy plugins make several database queries, which slow down your server. Therefore don’t complicate your life, think about WordPress optimization at the same time when you install the blog.
In my next post I’ll tell you how to boost your web site performance, this information will be relevant to WordPress as well and is recommended as the next step in improving your WordPress performance.
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