WordPress is an amazing platform but sometimes it is on the slow side in terms of speed (or page load time); at list this is the case for kevinleary.net. I’ve decided to experiment with a few plugins to try and improve the speed of the site. These are my findings so far:

Before The Addition of Plugins

• 2.02 seconds of DB queries.
• 10.415 seconds of page load according to YSlow

Plugins Used to Optimize for Speed

• WP Super Cache – Digg proof your site to handle massive rushes of traffic.
• WP Widget Cache – Cache your sidebar widgets, something not included in WP Super Cache.
• DB Cache – Speed up those requests to the Database
• Cache Images – Cached 516 images
• Optimize DB – Reduced my database by 52KB
• Filosofo GZIP Plugin – Boasting a “30% reduction of total page size—including images, ads, etc.”

Performance Results After Adding Plugins

• 0.89 seconds of DB queries.
• 9.752 seconds of page load according to YSlow

Intially this seems to be working a bit, I’ll try doing some bandwith / load tests to confirm. Does anyone else have any suggestions for how to improve the speed of WordPress? I’d love to hear them.