How To Speed Up WordPress

As a side note, these are not ordered by importance or any criteria, I’ve just gathered everything I’ve learned about speeding up page loads on WordPress and compiled them here.

I guarantee that using even a few of these will drastically speed up your site.

1. Choose a good host

While starting out, a shared host might seem like a bargain (“Unlimited page views, wowie zowie!”), it comes at another price: incredibly slow site speed and frequent down time during high traffic periods.

If you plan on doing awesome stuff (aka the kind of stuff that creates high traffic periods), you’re killing yourself by running your WordPress site on shared hosting.

The stress of your site going down after getting a big feature is enough to create a few early gray hairs: don’t be a victim, invest in proper hosting.

The only WordPress host I continually recommend is below… (drum roll please…)

WP Engine
My sites are always blazingly fast, never have downtime when I get huge features, and the backend is stupidly simple.

Last but not least, support is top notch, which is a must when it comes to hosting… take it from a guy who’s learned that the hard way!

Head on over to the WP Engine homepage and check out their offerings, you’ll be happy you did.

2. Start with a solid framework/theme

You might be surprised to here this, but the Twenty Ten/Twenty Eleven “framework” (aka the default WP themes) are quite speedy frameworks to use.

That’s because they keep it the “guts” simple, and light frameworks are always the way to go to have a speedy site.

From my experience, the fastest loading premium framework is definitely the Thesis Theme Framework (aff).

Whatever you might say about it’s SEO abilities (I prefer to use plugins and my own edits), it is definitely a solid framework for quick page loads, I’ve always had this experience as have many others.

3. Use an effective caching plugin

WordPress plugins are obviously quite useful, but some of the best fall under the caching category, as they drastically improve page loads time, and best of all, all of them on WP.org are free and easy to use.

By far my favorite, bar none, is W3 Total Cache, I wouldn’t recommend or use any other caching plugin, it has all of the features you need and is extremely easy to install and use.

Simply install and activate, and what your page load faster as elements are cached.

4. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

All of your favorite big blogs are making use of this, and if you are into online marketing using WordPress you won’t be surprised to hear that some of your favorite blogs like Copyblogger are making use of CDN’s.

Essentially, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all your static files you’ve got on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.

I personally use the Max CDN Content Delivery Network on my WordPress sites, as I’ve found that they have the most reasonable prices and their dashboard is very simple to use (and comes with video tutorials for setting it up, takes only a few minutes).

There is a plugin called Free-CDN that promises to do the same, although I haven’t tested it.

5. Optimize images (automatically)

Yahoo! has an image optimizer called Smush.it that will drastically reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing quality.

However, if you are like me, doing this to every image would be beyond a pain, and incredibly time consuming.

Fortunately, there is an amazing, free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. No reason not to install this one.

6. Optimize your homepage to load quickly

This isn’t one thing but really a few easy things that you can do to ensure that your homepage loads quickly, which probably is the most important part of your site because people will be landing there the most often.

Things that you can do include:

Show excerpts instead of full posts
Reduce the number of posts on the page (I like showing between 5-7)
Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (include them only in posts)
Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need
Keep in minimal! Readers are here for content, not 8,000 widgets on the homepage
Overall, a clean and focused homepage design will help your page not only look good, but load quicker as well.

Read more: http://www.anatech.com.ng/speed-up-your-wordpress-site/

Am on another host, how do I move to wp engine?
.
.
.
Please my downtime is everyday
Biko