Speeding up WordPress: Some findings

Thought some out there might find this interesting….

Recently I noticed a HUGE speed difference between various client’s WP installs. It had me stumped, with one client even complaining, as all of them sit on the same server and as I know the provider, I can make sure that the server is running as well as can be… which it is.

So after some poking around I discovered various articles that offered differing suggestions, many plugin related and some suggesting turning php requests into hard coded HTML, namely in the header file, which I did easily enough. Another, which I also did, was to have Feedburner handle the RSS feeds for the sites, which is not a bad idea in anyway to help ‘spread the word’.

While doing the code bit and making sure there was no uninvited junk was easy enough, as was dealing with Feedburner, the results were still a little mixed. Yes there was some response increase but not across all installs. So I poked around some more and here’s what I found…

Plugins are the main killer.

The temptation is there to load up all sorts of ‘stuff’ into your WP install thinking that they’ll make it more functional. I certainly had a default set of plugins I installed over all sites, builtup over a period of time. In going through them and looking at how I and my clients used WP, I discovered that many of the PI’s were actually redundant or not needed at all. Dumping them from the system sped things along.

The next step was to look for double ups or better ways to deal with various ‘features’. Anti spam registration and comments is a big one and there are quite a few PIs available to help out. Akismet is a given, but what about the rest? I killed several by installing wp-recaptcha and signing up to the ReCaptcha service. It’s simple, works and does not load your server or need you to mess with the template; rather it inserts a nice ReCaptcha box for comments and or registration and does what several other PIs did not so well.

Loosing other PIs that really added next to nothing was next, and that came down to really objectively looking at what they offered vs. an actual need.

The speed increases were amazing, one site near tripled! But there was still some that did not have the same response. So I looked through all the installs and discovered the common element – ‘lightbox’. Yep, it pains me to say it, because I love what Lightbox does, but ditching it from the lineup provided an across the board speed increase that was significant. While I have deactivated it, I have not removed it as there might be instances where using it is a must but until then, I’ll be working on ways to not use it…. do pics really need to pop up like that? Is there a better version of the same thing?

So, to all out there that might be wondering about the speed of their WP install, have a good look at your plugins first. I did and sped near tripled!

Hope this helps some out there.

Cheers!