Five Ways To Make Your WordPress Blog Way Faster

After two years playing with a blog based on the popular WordPress platform, I can definitely say it is very powerful and gives the blogger a huge power to fully customize the blog’s behavior and look&feel. In addition, the ability to install external plugins to add new functionalities to your blog is a great value added which offer infinite possibilities of customization.

At the same time, plugins can become your worst friend when it comes to keep your blog fast and easily navigable. The point is that everyone can easily develop a WordPress plugin and there is not much control to make sure the quality of the plugins’ code is fairly high. Moreover, the tons of available widgets and snippets to add cool and interactive add-ons to your blog are another potential source of problems.

That said, after my post about three must-have plugins to increase your pageviews, here are are five tips to keep your WordPress blog fast and highly responsive.

Lightbox 2 Plugin: Avoid

This is a very cool plugin which lets you display images in your posts with the “lightbox” effect. While it is very cool, having this plugin installed in your WordPress blog can lead to unexpected and annoying behaviors. Many reported that it can slow down your admin pages due to high delays while connecting to their servers to look for new updates. I noticed that disabling and uninstalling this plugin made the admin area of my blog much faster.

MyBlogLog Widget: Avoid

I love this widget, but it’s a major cause of slow page loading. Since I disabled it, the blog performances improved noticeably. I’m sorry about that, but I have to discourage the usage of that plugin.

TwitterCounter Widget/Counter: Avoid

Same reason of the MyBlogLog widget, but it could be even worse, since it is not loaded from a Yahoo server Again, I have to discourageits usage, despite I liked it a lot. When you have the time to take the screenshot below while  your blog is loading, it’s not a good sign.

Heavy Image Header: Avoid

As you may have noticed, I changed my 250KB big header with text + an icon. This is a good improvement for slow connections, even if it is not fundamental. I tried to make it lighter but I was not happy by the results so I preferred to switch to this solution. Not bad, right?

External Images / Code

If your homepage, header, sidebars are full of images or javascripts loaded from remote servers, this means that the loading time relies on those servers. If, for whatever reason, there are problems on their side, your blog will be affected by very long delays. Download any image (as much as you can) on your blog’s folders and make the number of scripts used as low as possible. This will let your blog take a breath

For further tips, I would recommend to take a look at the following articles mentioned below. If you have other suggestions or  tips, please feel free to leave a comment down here, it will be helpful for the other readers.

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Tagged as: Blogging, performances, plugins, speed, wordpress