WordPress Made Easy

How many people do you know have Attention Deficit Disorder? According to some studies, it affects up to 12% of people living in the US. According to MY study, 100% of web users have it. How long do you wait for a webpage to load before you get ticked off and leave? 3 seconds? 2 seconds? half a second? For me, if it doesn’t show up almost instantly, consider me gone, off to another webpage. I only have 24 hours in a day. After sleeping, eating, drinking and blogging, I really have no time to wait for a webpage to load. I’m sure you’re the same way (minus the drinking part).

Do your readers a favor. Speed up your WordPress and don’t frustrate them with slow pages. They pay a pretty dime for high speed internet. Don’t let your site make them feel like they are still on dial-up.

There are a million different things you can do to speed up your WordPress. Some thing require knowledge of MySQL, Apache and PHP, not always easy. Start with these few easy steps and I’m sure you’ll notice a difference right off the bat.

1. Find yourself a good reliable hosting company.
   Not only does the hosting company need to have good uptime, they need to be fast. Lots of bandwidth and fast servers are a must. See our post on WordPress Hosting Recommendations.
2. Cache your WordPress pages with the WP Super Cache plugin. (Download here)
   Every time a link is clicked, WordPress makes a request to the MySQL database and renders the page using PHP. Nice design, but it can get slow if there are a lot of requests at one time. This plugin creates static html pages once a page is requested. The next time the page is requested, it gets delivered through the static html page, rather than making another request to the databse and regenerating the page. Simply upload the plugin to your plugins directory and activate it in your WordPress Admin page. Go to Settings, select wp-cache and click the ‘Enable It’ button.
3. Do some house cleaning on your plugins.
   Plugins are one of the best things about WordPress. They are Open source, free, and widely avaiable. They do slow down your WordPress a bit. The more you use, the slower you’ll get. Some are more optimzed than others. Go through each plugin you do use and ask yourself if the plugin is really needed. If not, deactive it and delete it from your Plugins directory.
4. Resize your images.
   Do you have a lot of images on your site? Check the file sizes of the images. Shrink the file size down buy saving your JPGs with more compression. Any photo editing program will do it. Get them as small as possible without the image becoming visibly pixelated.

WordPress, Made Easy…