How to: optimize wordpress blog for maximum speed

Today, the website speed is one of many factors that affect your Google ranking because like Google was talk: “Speeding up websites is important, not just to site owners, but to all Internet users” . So I’m very excited to share what I have learned about web performance (especially Wordpress) with you and how to speed up your wordpress site in this article. First of all, there’are many, many ways you can do to speed up your website, but “optimization” is just thing harder to evaluate, for the easy example: you can make your website faster, but you may loose many visual effects to visitors or some website functions, the small website like a personal web-blog will be optimized easily but it’s NOT for the bigger website with many images, css file, javascript… so that, to suit your needs, you must keep it balanced, some-tricks you can follow, but the others, you shouldn’t (sometimes it’s because the limitation of your host like: your host doesn’t support nginx, xcache.., hard to add alias subdomain or doesn’t support mod_rewrite…).rnHow fast do your website runs? Before we start, you should test and make records of your current website speed via this services: * http://tools.pingdom.comrn Pingdomrn * http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ websiteoptimization How to: optimize wordpress blog for maximum speedrn * http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_testrn * http://www.webpagetest.org/ And then download Yslow firefox addon and Google Page Speed tool, this is 2 must have tools to analyse and optimize your blog (Firebug addon required).rnGoogle Page Speed and Yslow In the picture above, i’ve made tests on one of my client website before optimization.rnAnd after optimization:rnWebsite after optimizationrnWebsite after optimization Another way to make a test is using ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool by downloading WampServer and install it, after that start cmd in your windows, locating to the Bin folder of Wampserver apache, in my situation: D:wampbinapacheApache2.2.11bin and type in the command line:rnview plaincopy to clipboardprint? 1. ab -n 1000 -c 10 http://www.example.com/index.php ab -n 1000 -c 10 http://www.example.com/index.php This command will send 1000 requests with 10 requests at a time to http://www.example.com and then returned back result to you:rnApache HTTP server benchmarkingrnYou only need to concentrate on requests per second, time per request and transfer rate figures.rnAll of the results above is just for reference, they will different when compared with each other so when perform testing you must use an individual way to compare.rnOk, so let’s start:rn1. Choosing a reliable web hosting company You couldn’t make a great website with the bored web-host; on the internet, many host provider companies can offer you a great service, I recommend Dreamhost.com to you but a Dreamhost’s control panel may make you confused when using it, others great company are: Bluehost, Hostmonster, Site5, Hostgator…. Another new web hosting company offer a great optimized server for wordpress is: WpWebhost.rnBut before purchasing any host-plan, besides the price, you should consider carefully their Term of services (CPU and Ram consumption, copyright content policy…), reading reviews on the internet (like and also dislike opinions) and take some quick tests about their speed. (I prefer using Nginx than Apache server to render html, do you know WordPress.com used Nginx technology?)rn2. Decide which functions you need, and which you don’t I’ve visited many wordpress blogs and saw that many people put on their blog some functions that is not necessary for them like guest-book, chat-box, visit counter…. (Sometimes they must take something to put on sidebar). If you want your blog run faster, please keep it clean and well structured. In your wordpress blog you can disable unused plugins (some of them create many css and javascript request when enable, even create database tables in your database). Use only the plugins you really need, and delete the rest. http://www.intenseblog.com/wordpress/optimize-wordpress-speed.html