Simple Steps to Speedup Slow WordPress

There are plenty of methods to speedup wordpress. You can find a lot of information on how to speedup wordpress on the Internet however most of those methods are either complex or impossible to achieve due to various limitations.

Since most of us host the wordpress on 3rd party hosts which give us very less scope to tweak mysql server as such so we are left with optimizing the WordPress code itself.

One of the most sluggish blog which I’ve handled is Australian Open. It used to be tremendously slow in the past. I’ve applied most of the following methods in it and now it seems to be quite fast.

Following are some of the methods which I follow.

1) Hard coding some of the dynamic code

In header.php file you will a lot of dynamic calls which you can replace by static text.

E.g.

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”<?php bloginfo(‘html_type’); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo(‘charset’); ?>” />

Replace above line with followings, it will get rid of 2 function calls.

<meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=UTF-8” />

<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>

Replace

<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>

by the Blog Title Australian Open Tennis in <title>..</title>

Replace the http absolute reference by relative reference

E.g.

Replace
<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?> by
/wp-content/themes/Australian Open Theme

Replace
<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>
by the title of Blog
Australian Open Tennis

Replace <link rel=”pingback” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘pingback_url’); ?>” />
by
<link rel=”pingback” href=”xmlrpc.php” />

Replace

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Australian Open Tennis RSS Feed” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>” />

by

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Australian Open Tennis RSS Feed” href=”http://www.australianopen4u.com/feed” />

2) Install WP Super Cache Plugin

3) Get a good web host

BlueHost, Hostgator, DreamHost are notoriously slow for WordPress.

In my experience 1&1 seems to be the best host for WordPress.

Visit Web hosting Review to find out the best host for wordpress.