WordPress is without a doubt the definitive blogging CMS out there. Being the best has a price, a hefty one. WordPress themes and customizations are good until they bring your blog’s performance down and make it nothing more than a memory hog on your server.
In this tutorial I’m going to go all out on WordPress Performance issues and how to make them better. I’m going to be talking about some of the most important steps needed to make any self-hosted WordPress blog faster, more secure and more reliable. Make your WordPress site less of a memory hog and give your server some breathing room. If you’ve noticed a gradual downfall in Google ranking or a decline in traffic altogether, you’d need to spruce up your blog a bit and do some housekeeping, this article will help you how, read and follow the steps below to stop with the frustrating speeds and move on to better blogging.
Step One: Realize The Current Condition Of Your Blog
The first and most important step you need to take is to figure out, off the bat, the score of your blog on PageSpeed and YSlow. The former is Google’s official speed analytic app and the latter is Yahoo!’s. Now once you see the result, you’ll know whether to move on to the next steps or not. If your blog ranked somewhere in the “B” grade on PageSpeed, that is from 80 to 89 percent score, you’re good to go. 83% is the average speed of websites so you have nothing to worry about. YSlow is going to give you dramatically low scores as compared to PageSpeed, that’s because Yahoo! has different algorithms than Google, they determine the ranking of websites through different means and methods. I tried making them both happy but it’s not gonna happen. If you could just get up to a “C” on YSlow, you’re awesome!
Now the next steps are IF YOU DON’T GET A “B” IN PAGESPEED.
Step Two: Your Blog Sucks At PageSpeed, Now What?
No need to panic as yet. Every blog has a number of plugins and theme extensions that people keep installing and become plugin hoarders in time. First of all, REMOVE UNNECESSARY PLUGINS. See if the plugins currently active on your blog are actually needed or not. Disable as many plugins as possible. For most blogs, using ten plugins should be enough, just make sure you’re using the most important plugins, I will write up an article on the most viral plugins for WordPress soon be sure to follow up on that.
Google PageSpeed: Click Here
YSlow: Click Here
Step Three: WHAT? YOU DON’T HAVE A CACHE PLUGIN INSTALLED?!
I’ve blogged about this enough in the past and emphasized on this one point more than once, having a cache plugin is VITAL for every blog. You can make your selection from three of the good ones, Super Cache, W3 Total Cache or Hyper Cache. I’ve written a long enough article on the cache plugins here, give it a read and come back. Now that you have a proper cache plugin of your choice installed, go grab a cup of coffee, the next step is kinda lengthy.
Step Four: Pick Out Your CSS Files And Clean Them One By One
Now that we’re done with all of the above, we need to get into the nitty gritty details of it all. We need to take the CSS files you have, also known as Cascading Style Sheets, and smush them into smaller and lighter files WITHOUT damaging the theme’s exterior. If you’re using Thesis framework or Whiteboard Framework, make sure to make a full backup of your /themes/ folder before you go on with this change. Now run the PageSpeed test from Google, see which CSS files are required to be shortened and find the codes that are not being used in them and just lying around gathering dust.
There’s a much easier way of doing this, by using Unused-CSS.
The Easy Way To Step Four: UNUSED-CSS
Unused CSS is one of the best and free services I’ve seen. Most of the CSS cleaning tools cost a fortune to work, this one gives you one totally free cleaning with no strings attached. Sign up for a free account and have your site’s CSS cleaned up. It takes five minutes and they email you the cleaned files to place over your older ones. The work is admirable and the change is surely noticeable. The premium account gives bigger sites the ability to scan deeper levels of their sites. The premium account costs around 24 dollars PER YEAR! Go check them out.
Check out Unused-CSS: Click Here
Step Five: Yahoo! Smush.It
Yahoo! Smush.it is one of the most famous plugins for WordPress. It takes your images and makes them as optimized as possible. The new version of the plugin even has the option of Bulk Smushing, it might take some time on bigger websites but it’s definitely worth the wait. Smush.it for WordPress is called WP Smush.it. Your new uploads will automatically be “smushed” from the time you activate this plugin.
Yahoo! Smush.it Online Tool: Click Here
WP Smush.it Plugin: Click Here
Step Six: Never Look Back
Do not change your theme to another one right after doing this cleaning. You need to get your ranking up, make Google happy by showing them your site isn’t a resource hog and it’s not all just for show. Keep checking your PageSpeed and YSlow results every week, if the ranking goes down, see what’s causing it and fix it. If you decide to change your blog’s look again, make sure it’s designed by a well-known developer, most of the big theme developers out there are very careful about their code and treat them like works of art. I recommended some awesome WordPress Theme Developers in my article here. TechDeville.com, after optimizing the blog, scored 89% on PageSpeed, which is pretty awesome.
Some Downloads
Download the latest version of WordPress: Here
Download All-In-One SEO Plugin to keep things clean: Here
For Further Assistance
If your site is still showing bad scores after this entire process, comment below with your site’s URL and I’ll have a look at it. Thank you for reading, God-Speed. If you want to read our other helpful tips on WordPress, go here.
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