WordPress Optimization - 5 Ways to Clean Up and Speed Up Your Blog

The beautifully streamlined WordPress 2.5 is officially here, and that makes it the perfect time to do some back end reviewing of your blog. Besides, it’s Spring! I can’t think of a better time to do some deep cleaning. :) While it’s true the latest release has made great strides, there’s still a lot we can do as individual bloggers to optimize the performance of our sites. Reevaluating the need for a particular plugin, inspecting server load times, and tossing out scattered database remnants helps to keep things humming along.

First, some Diagnostics

One quick way to figure out how many queries your blog is making is to insert this little snippet somewhere in your footer:

<!-- <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries -->

After uploading, refresh and view source on whichever page(s) you want to check. The number of queries will be variable. My homepage has 41 queries for example, while most other pages have 10-17. That at least indicates where I need to make improvements.

For a more comprehensive look at your site, get YSlow. It’s is a terrific little Firefox add-on which runs analysis checks and reports back with suggestions for improvements. Also ties right in with Firebug.

Purging Code

There’s always some new blog thingamajiggy being released. If you get excited about widgets and plugins, then just as quickly get bored and uninstall them - don’t forget to remove the snippets which call the functionality!

Do you use multiple stats programs? You might consider picking one or two, then removing the excess javascript for the metrics you abandon. The header.php and footer.php files are the two biggest culprits for user added, load-bearing code… and they’re easy to forget about. Deleting unnecessary tags from your header may also be beneficial.

Maintaining a Healthy Database

How long has it been since you opened up phpMyAdmin or took a gander at your database? If you install/uninstall a lot of plugins, it might be in need of a tune-up. Clean Options can help with that task. Basically, it sweeps up orphaned data from the Options table. It has limitations, but it’s a great start.

Out With the Old

One word - Categories. Do you have way too many? How about reeeeeally old posts which are not only irrelevant now but possibly riddled with broken links? And what about plugins you were using prior to the release of 2.5 which are now (or will be) deprecated? Things like Search Everything, Click Tags and most Avatar plugins come to mind, because the functionality for each is now supported in the WP core. Remember, even deactivated plugins just sitting on your server can bog down load times!

A Need for Speed

Geekery is a wonderful thing (especially the Wordpress flavor), and thanks to people way smarter than me there are plugins like WP Super Cache, which will help tremendously if you have a large database, or take a Digg hit.

Tags: site-management