Speed Up Your WordPress  Blog

I’ve re-written a far better guide to WordPress optimization for speed. Most of what you see here is a bit out of date.

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.

Meet the Author

Kevin Leary, WordPress Consultant

I'm a freelance web developer and WordPress consultant in Boston, MA with 17 years of experience building websites and applications. View a portfolio of my work or request an estimate for your next project.