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Google has recently confirmed that they will start taking page load time into consideration when determining the rank of sites in their search results. Here are a couple of tips to speed up your WordPress-powered website.

Caching and Offloading

One of the easiest things that you can do to improve the performance of your WordPress site is to install a good caching and performance plugin. My favorite is W3 Total Cache. Install it and activate it. The first thing this plugin does is cache the html generated by your posts and pages of your site, eliminating the need for resource intensive database lookups and PHP processing. Another feature allows you to easily push your static content to a CDN or Amazon S3. With this enabled, visitors to your website will hit the CDN for images, stylesheets and javascript files instead of your webserver, speeding up the user’s loading time. Check out the official W3 Total Cache for detailed installation and configuration instructions.

There are other good plugins for caching and pushing your assets to a CDN, but I have found W3 Total Cache to be a great all-in-one, easily configured plugin.

Remove Unused and Unimportant Plugins from Your WordPress Installation

This tip won’t have as huge of an impact as caching, but is still worth doing. Delete unused plugins from your site! Consider disabling and deleting plugins that are not really that important to your site. Every plugin could do a lot of processing and potentially database lookups. Don’t use them if you don’t have to! (It’s easy to use the WordPress dashboard to go into the plugins area and disable and delete plugins).

Upgrade Your Hosting

The default, low-cost hosting solutions that most people use for their websites are “shared hosting” accounts. This means the machine running your site is shared with many users, with little or no segregation of system resources. All users can be punished when one customer on the same machine starts using tons of resources.

These types of accounts can be fine for moderate traffic websites. I have been particularly happy with a HostGator business plan that I use for some sites. But if your site starts to get significant traffic, it is probably time to upgrade to a VPS or other heavier duty hosting solution. Most VPS solutions today let you start with a relatively inexpensive moderate amount of RAM and other resources and seamlessly scale up (or down) as needed. (I have had good success starting with the Turnkey WordPress Appliance Image on a VPS account).

Other Optimization Resources

The official WordPress website has lots of tips on optimizing your installation. Check them out:

• WordPress Optimization
• High Traffic Tips For WordPress
• WordPress Optimization Cheat Sheet
• WordPress Optimization/Caching
• WordPress Optimization/Offloading

Users prefer speedy sites. We now know Google really cares too! So take a little time this week to speed up your site!

The image in this post is by Luis Argerich