LwEEs.com

Slim Down Your Wordpress Install

When I first uploaded my Wordpress files into my host server, I went crazy with all the great functionality provided. There are hundreds of plugins that allows you to do everything you can imagine, adsense, photo galleries, and YouTube implementation to mention three. What I didn’t realize at the moment was that my website size was getting out of proportion. At some point it weighted around 250k in file size, taking over 50 sec. to load.

I started looking for things I did not use to eliminate them, I should point out that most plugins create MySQL tables that remain on your database after uninstalling the plugin. Here is my first tip, if you are not sure about a plugin, do not install it in the first place. You can easily create a second installation of Wordpress using a different database for testing purposes. You can also read the forums or do a Google search for that plugin you are interested to see if it would work for you or not.

My second tip is about your theme, there are hundreds of themes available on Wordpress.org and around the web. Please choose carefully, some themes are too big making your website slow from loading big chunks of CSS style sheets. There are also options like widget features, header rotators, different layouts inside a theme, etc. than can make your experience the best one you would have.

I was able to slim down my website from 250k to 129k, and from a loading time of over 50 sec. to 3 sec. Similar plugins can give you different options to implement the same idea. Each will add different size or bytes to your homepage, test out or pay attention to the size of the plugin you are interested in. Scripts and images are going to always be the heaviest on you website, except for some CSS style sheets. Be aware of Scripts conflicts, those can make your website run slow too.

There are several tools to measure speed, size, and get speed tips on the web. One of my favorites is Web Site Optimization at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/index.html. This tool is the most detailed one I have ever seen, there may be others but for some reason I trust this one. It gives you the file size first, then, the objects file size totals, download time from different speeds, and a detail of whatever the page objects are. Then it gives you a short analysis and recommendations for making your website snappier. Other good performance meter site is OctaGate SiteTimer, try it out and keep looking if they do not gives you what you are looking for.

Another way to speed up your site is by using cache. A plugin called WP-Cache gives you some control over the speed of your site. Be very careful if you do not install this plugin properly, your Wordpress install will suffer. Another way to achieve cache functionality on Wordpress is by adding some code to the config file. You can find more information about doing this on http://wordpress.org. My experience is that none of them works like slimming down you site do, wp-cache gave me so much headaches, never go it to work right. As for adding code to the config file made my site faster sometimes, other will just hang out forever until a MySQL error popped up.

My final tip is read, read, read. You cannot possibly read too much when dealing with this concept on your Wordpress install. If you know html you are ok, but for the rest of us that cannot afford a developer, you better do your homework. Email me at lumencreativegroup (at) gmail.com for whatever question about Wordpress you have, I do not know everything but certainly can point you in the right direction. Check out my round-table forums for questions and answers, thanks.