Written on October 23rd, 2009 at 04:10 am by Darren Rowse
5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast
This is a guest post by Sid Savara, whose main passion is personal development and personal productivity. Follow Sid on twitter @sidsavara for motivation, inspiration and just chatting
If a tree falls in a forest, I don’t know if anyone hears it – but when your blog crashes or takes forever to load, I guarantee you nobody is reading.
When you work hard on your content, but aren’t able to capitalize on the attention because your blog takes too long to load you are throwing away hours of hard work and thousands of visitors. I know because I’ve been there. I’ve had multiple performance issues over the past year where SidSavara.com was unable to handle some of the traffic spikes that came my way – and believe me, it is soul-crushing to see your site doing well on social media sites, and knowing that many of those readers will leave before your article loads. It’s not every day you get 250,000 visitors to your blog.
Optimizing WordPress is a thankless, but necessary job. When your site is running quickly people don’t notice – but if your blog is down or slow, visitors will complain or worse (and much more frequently) just leave. In fact, if the very first page a visitor sees takes even a second too long to load, they are likely to leave instantly without reading anything – on to the next shiny thing that has caught their interest, and on to someone’s blog that is optimized.
I recently decided to dedicate some time to deal with this. After trying out many plugins, crashing my website a few times due to plugin incompatibilities and reviewing my results here are my recommendations – and it’s easier than you think.
5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast
- WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh- A very fast caching plugin for WordPress. This is what has been saving me from traffic spikes. In a normal WordPress install, every time a visitor comes to your site WordPress builds the webpage for them from scratch by pulling information out of the database and processing a variety of things in the software. The bottom line is, this is time consuming – and usually after you’ve published a blog post, it doesn’t change very much except when people comment. When a page is loaded, WP Super Cache caches a static (one time generated) copy of that webpage, and then every time a new visitor comes, it preferentially gives them the cached version of the page. This is much faster, and has totally saved me when a rush of people come from one of my posts going viral.
- GZIP Output by Austin Matzko- This plugin automatically compresses CSS, Javascript and HTML output, allowing it to travel faster from your blog to a visitor’s browser. According to Best Practices On Yahoo! Developer Network: “Gzipping generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip.” This is a simple change that will not affect what your readers see at all – except that it will load in their browser faster.
- WP Minify by Thaya Kareeson- This plugin uses the Minify engine to combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time. Like the previous plugin, it also automatically shrinks the size of your files without you having to do anything.
- W3 Total Cache by Frederick Townes- If I was starting a brand new blog today, this is what I would use on day one – and then go with a more complicated set up (like I have currently) after it grows. This plugin is amazing. It includes minify capabilities, caching (but less aggressive than WP Super Cache) and GZip compression.
- Free CDN by Phoenixheart- If you have static files (images, javascript, css) taking a long time to load and slowing your site down, you may benefit by installing Free CDN – especially if you have large images. Briefly, a CDN is a content delivery network. Static files are cached on the CDN and pulled from their servers instead of your own – which means that your server has to do less work, and potentially can serve more people at once, faster.
- Bonus: Upgrade WordPress! This isn’t a plugin, but every time a new version of WordPress there’s a good chance they’ve optimized the software so it runs faster than before. Be sure to test your blog after you upgrade to make sure everything still runs smoothly.
Firefox Plugins To Test WordPress Performance
You can check for yourself how fast your WordPress blog is and instantly get recommendations on what you can do to improve it with some free software. I use Firefox with the Firebug and YSlow plugins installed. The YSlow user guide is excellent and will give you all the tools you need to see where your site is slow, and what can be done to improve it. Darren has also previously written about 5 Methods to Enhancing Page Load with some best practices for ensuring your blog loads quickly for visitors.
This is a guest post by Sid Savara, whose main passion is personal development and personal productivity. For new email subscribers, he is offering a free copy of his new ebook The Little Book of Big Motivational Quotes.
114 Responses to “5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast” - Add Yours
Roger
October 23rd, 2009 5:29 am
Want to mention that “DB Cache” works nicely as well.
Harsh Agrawal
October 23rd, 2009 5:29 am
Very useful post but I guessed you missed one that is wp.smush.it . This is from Yahoo service. That compresses the images and thus make your page load faster. I hope you will consider adding this plugin in the list..
Pavel Harfa
October 23rd, 2009 5:37 am
thanks for these, we are now deploying 4 new sites on WP, so this is very timely
DB Dan
October 23rd, 2009 5:38 am
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t using blogger…
I glaze over a little bit with most of the WordPress articles I read, but am trying to get a handle on it. I help someone with their blog WP 2.9 Beta and am beginning to understand what I am missing!
solar panels
October 23rd, 2009 5:44 am
Ok, thanks for share, i will try it out withn one of my blogs,.
BlogInterface.net
October 23rd, 2009 5:45 am
My blog doesn’t have so many visitors (250,000) but it is good to know for these plugins. Honestly, all these plugins are new to me except WP Super Cache. The reason why I like such a type of article is that there is a very high number of plugins for WordPress and is hard to decide which one to use. Getting concise information about them makes you easier to decide which one to integrate in to WordPress.
Mike Skel
October 23rd, 2009 5:53 am
I think using many plugin also slow down wordpress blog load time. I have not tried WP Super Cache, but not tried yet. I think I am going to use it now.
Ted Goas
October 23rd, 2009 5:53 am
Nice post. I’ve had problems with GZipping because I’m on a shared server. I’ve since been given advice from my host, but do you have any advice dealing with server settings for those on shared servers?
Ryan
October 23rd, 2009 5:56 am
Another firebug plugin that is great for testing performance is “page speed”, I find it more powerful than YSlow and provides great hints and suggestions that are easily analyzed and red
It was developed by Google about 6 months ago, and in google code:
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
Nicholas Z. Cardot
October 23rd, 2009 6:10 am
I use WP Super Cache at my site and I can vouch for the fact that it is a very aggressive caching program and it absolutely works wonders. I love it. It has improved the load time of my site by a lot.
Living with Balls
October 23rd, 2009 6:10 am
Thanks. Great advice. I haven’t even thought of this. My sight isn’t exactly getting thousands of visitors a day yet but if it does, these will be good to have.
Ben
October 23rd, 2009 6:13 am
I’ve got to try out wp-super cache. I’ve heard great reviews, but haven’t got round to using it yet. Thanks for the tips.
Dee Wilcox
October 23rd, 2009 6:17 am
I recently began using WP Super Cache on Creative Perch, and I have noticed a huge difference and highly recommend it! I now load it on all of my WP blog projects.
Antti Kokkonen - Zemalf.com
October 23rd, 2009 6:36 am
I’ve been tweaking and optimizing my blog lately using the Firebug and YSlow to analyze my pages. It’s been a load of fun and I’ve learned a lot.
I’ve tweaked the theme a bit to reduce the number of requests and added some clever .htaccess rules too, but the modular structure of WordPress with plugins and themes makes it hard to do some tasks (like combining and compressing CSS and javascript), but luckily there are these plugins that do the job.
WP Super Cache has become kind of a standard, but it’s great to see that new and improved optimizing plugins are being developed (and the best of old ones are still kicking too). So I gotta take a look at WP Minify and test out that Free CDN.
And here’s some advice from experiences: when putting new plugins into use — do it one at the time and make sure you configure the plugin correctly. For example, I had my WP Super Cache misconfigured for a long time as I installed it together with many other plugins and didn’t pay enough attention configuring it the right way.
Rilla
October 23rd, 2009 6:44 am
The Web Optimzer pretty much does all that apart from the CDN.
Website Promotion Blog
October 23rd, 2009 6:49 am
Speed is definitely a very important factor for web surfers these days.
Thanks for the nice information. I didn’t know that WordPress resumes loading all those elements every time a visitor navigates to another page!
Ms. Freeman
October 23rd, 2009 7:26 am
I was reading another post somewhere else saying that plugins slow down blogs and I am working on my speed. Currently I load at about 13 seconds, clearly way too long. Thanks for the tips. :)
Colleen Greene
October 23rd, 2009 8:14 am
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this post.
After reading other, less clear, blog posts about speeding up Wordpress performance, I have installed and activated a couple of these plugins. However, I only saw minimal improvements via YSlow.
Your post explains the purpose of these plugins in a much clearer manner. And I really appreciate the suggestions for compressing CSS and JS, because I get nailed for that big time by YSlow.
K. Praslowicz
October 23rd, 2009 8:24 am
Tried to install W3 Total Cache on two of my sites. Both attempts resulted in failed installs. :(
BWI
October 23rd, 2009 8:28 am
So did Darren write this or Sid? On top it says written by Darren, but in the post it says it was a guest post by Sid.
Ronblogger
October 23rd, 2009 8:59 am
I’ve got to try out the WP super cache,thanks for this very useful post
jennifer888 @ Negotiation Board
October 23rd, 2009 9:05 am
This is something I haven’t yet thought of, considering I have a long way to get to 250,00 visitors in one day! But I definitely can appreciate the advice for the future.
Joe Multiple Car Insurance
October 23rd, 2009 10:10 am
Wow, didn’t know that plug-ins were so vital to Wordpress performance. Very enlightening. Any input on SEO Platinum plug-in?
Dana@Online Knowledge
October 23rd, 2009 10:13 am
Really useful article especially for firefox plugin. I just know there are firefox plugin to check our blog speed load. Thanks.
Eric B.
October 23rd, 2009 10:31 am
Thanks for the list! I’ve been using WP Super Cache for a while now, and I’ll try out some of the other ones.
Darren Rowse
October 23rd, 2009 10:45 am
Sid wrote it – I published it to the blog.
Technology Slice
October 23rd, 2009 11:51 am
Thanks for the suggestions. I recently noticed my blog was slowing down and was thinking of ways to speed it up. WP Super Cache sounds promising.
kumo
October 23rd, 2009 1:23 pm
There are really very helpful tools. I personally hate waiting for pages to load. That is why I try to keep my blog as simple as possible so that pages can load fast. Thanks for introducing the tools. I’ll go ahead and apply it on my blog right away.
I think even if we applied all the tools above, there is nothing much we can do if some of our visitors are still using the 56k dial up modem.
Kris Malena
October 23rd, 2009 1:25 pm
My site doesn’t have 250,000 visitors yet but it will be ready because of this post. I’m wondering if there is a magic number that will slow down my site.
Ali
October 23rd, 2009 1:52 pm
Awesome..Really very informative list :)
Jessica Nunemaker
October 23rd, 2009 1:52 pm
Oooh! More fun toys to play with!
Thanks for pointing them out. I’m curious to see the results — hopefully it’s not too bad…my blog isn’t that old!
Himanshu
October 23rd, 2009 1:53 pm
Thanks for telling us such a nice plugins, also by making use of some plugin we increase the database size unnecessarily big. We should avoid these plugins, so that Wordpress can work fast.
Custom X Snowboard
October 23rd, 2009 1:55 pm
I don’t have “traffic spikes” yet, but when I do Super Cache will be ready to go. Awesome tip!
Drew Strojny
October 23rd, 2009 2:27 pm
WP Super Cache is the #1 way to speed up your WordPress blog, no questions asked.
I would argue that upgrading WordPress does not necessarily = faster. In fact, WordPress has slowed down some since version 2.5 with all the new features.
With that being said, you should never run an outdated version of WP unless you want to be exposed to security vulnerabilities.
Stephen Baugh
October 23rd, 2009 4:05 pm
Wow. I already had Super Cache installed but just installed GZIP Output and now my website flies. Thanks
Stephen
October 23rd, 2009 4:24 pm
Yahoo…..
Thanks for such great info.
Getting my blog to load fast has been my top priority.
I went to the extent of changing my web hosting company!
Jonny
October 23rd, 2009 5:04 pm
I have used WP Super Cache for a long time, very good plugin.
sandesh
October 23rd, 2009 5:14 pm
250000 visits per day is mind blowing.
I hardly get 50 unique visits a days. Mine is just a month old blog site.
Please feel free to review my blog site. I want some suggestions for improvement.
http://www.sandeshm.com
Home Minimalist
October 23rd, 2009 6:36 pm
Thanks Brother, I think I Should be use this plugin for my WP blog
ishan
October 23rd, 2009 6:39 pm
This is a really nice compilation. I have been facing problem of slow response since quite some time, and believe that size of my CSS files is to be blamed for that. I will try out these plugins.
ishan
October 23rd, 2009 6:44 pm
Here is a quick update to my previous comment. I just now installed Gzip, and the website has become blazing fast! Its absolutely amazing what this plugin has done. One of the most useful posts I have come across. Thanks.
Jakob Granqvist
October 23rd, 2009 7:38 pm
I’d say the best way to get a ‘Blazing Fast’ blog is to get a decent web host. Maybe you could write some host ranking post too?
Aaron Bradford
October 23rd, 2009 7:43 pm
Thanks for the tips, I don’t think anyone’s site could actually be fast enough! After reading this post I think I will be running a few tests and tweaking a plenty… Thanks again
Brent2
October 23rd, 2009 8:08 pm
Note that a lot of hosts don’t support mod_gzip. This is required for gzip compression (provided by Gzip Output). Cache plugins are pretty hard “not to support” though and I certainly have never heard of a host that wouldn’t encourage their use. So long as it’s within reason.
Tinh
October 23rd, 2009 9:34 pm
I love the WP Super Cache the most, the other suggested plugins will be tested soon. Thanks
Rajasekaran
October 23rd, 2009 9:45 pm
Thanks for the tips to speed up WP blog and also for the ebook offered by the author!
Gloson
October 23rd, 2009 10:10 pm
Hi. Just so you know, you can test the loading speed of a page by using the pindom full page test tool: http://tools.pingdom.com ;-)
Surfers
October 23rd, 2009 10:19 pm
My blog is faster now and It thanks you!!! So do I! your rock dude..
Surfers
October 23rd, 2009 10:21 pm
Sorry!!! I ment to say YOU ROCK not your rock.. thanks!
My blog is faster now and It thanks you!!! So do I! YOU rock dude..
George Fourie
October 23rd, 2009 11:38 pm
Nice, just what the doctor ordered! This is just what my site needs, thank you!
Q Ball, The 800lb Gorilla
October 23rd, 2009 11:50 pm
I will definitely try out WP-Minify. I use Super Cache, and I need to find a better practice dealing with Javascript. I once read it is best to combine the scripts, I THINK, in one folder. Any idea or clarity on this practice?
Jeff
October 24th, 2009 12:06 am
A quality hosting provider is incredibly important from both a usability and an SEO perspective. I recently moved my site from one of the larger, better known hosts because the load times were unbearable (one week I saw more than half of my traffic from Twitter drop off before making it to the site.)
Since moving, the crawl rate stats in Google are showing a massive increase, and I’m ranking for all sorts of keywords I’ve optimized to but never ranked for.
I’m looking forward to trying some of the things mentioned here to see what further gains I can make!
SW@Social Bookmarking Service
October 24th, 2009 12:08 am
Yes I also use few plugins which help to upload my page faster.
These are the main reason because of which I simply love wordpress and I am not the only one :)
work at home
October 24th, 2009 12:09 am
Unfortunately I can not use those plug in for my blogger blog. Thank you for all those plug in. I will build one new blog on wordpress.
Jacob Stoops
October 24th, 2009 12:39 am
Excellent list. I know you only briefly mentioned WP Super Cache, but I use that one and it’s great.
Tami Vroma
October 24th, 2009 12:46 am
Awesome post!! I am just learning wp so I am putting this in my tool box!
Gareth Coxon - Dot Design
October 24th, 2009 1:28 am
I look forward to reading through this in more detail as my blog seems to be slowing up recently, thanks for the info.
kaspersky key
October 24th, 2009 1:32 am
Great List and Thank you so so so so much for this.
Fakhrul Alam- Make Money Online Blog
October 24th, 2009 1:57 am
Thanks for sharing this awesome plug ins for wordpress and definitely I will try it..
Thanks
Alam
Mal Keenan
October 24th, 2009 2:11 am
Thanks for this, Sid. No doubt, user experience is extremely important. Funny, I was just checking my site load time yesterday and wondering about ways to optimize my blog.
I have installed W3 total cache and hope it improves site loading times..
Mal Keenan
DJ
October 24th, 2009 2:27 am
Thanks for all the useful plug-ins. One thing to keep in mind. I noticed that my site would not display if I had the free CDN plug-in enabled. Our sites REQUIRES PHP >= 5 in order for this plug-in to work. If anyone opens their blog up and gets a white screen, it’s because of the free CDN plug-in.
will
October 24th, 2009 2:53 am
Fantastic Post, I was just thinking about how I can make my blog faster to load. I’ll have to get these plugins installed today. I’m sure this will make a difference.
thanks,
Will
Suffolk Wedding Photographer
October 24th, 2009 3:30 am
Great article Sid. I’ve tried the plug-ins and saw a noticeable difference!
WP Minify didn’t work for me but maybe it can’t be used together with GZIP Output?
I also wonder GZIP Output improves performance when compression is already enabled in WP Cache?
Pat
PatB Wedding Photography
Brian
October 24th, 2009 4:41 am
I don’t have 250,000 visitors either, but I put W3 Total Cache on one site that was running pretty slowly and had a high bounce rate. It’s loading much faster today and I’m hoping the bounce rate goes down, too. Thanks for the suggestions!
Gabe | freebloghelp.com
October 24th, 2009 5:46 am
WP Super Cache looks like something I need to try. Thanks for the list, no doubt my site could use a little bit of a speed burst.
Sid Savara
October 24th, 2009 6:10 am
Wow what a great response!
First off, thanks for everyone for your suggestions, especially regarding DB Cache and wp.smush.it. I have tried using those two plugins specifically and had some issues with them, so I left them out of this article – but I have no doubt that they are useful to other users (YMMV right?)
Second, it’s true that some webhosts will not support some of these plugins. These have all worked for me. Great point though by a commenter above – install and test one at a time in case something breaks =)
It looks like there is some interest in SEO platinum/other SEO plugins – I use a few on my site, but Thesis (search problogger for the link) handles most (80%) of my SEO for me.
Thanks again Darren for giving me the opportunity to speak to your audience and share what I’ve learned =)
Internet marketing course
October 24th, 2009 10:01 am
This is a really useful post because I have some of these issues now. It also makes me ask if anyone knows of plug-in that stops others from scraping images from your site and chewing up bandwidth? So many of my images now are being stolen from some of my blogs I could almost stop providing them. There must be something out there…
Phoenixheart
October 24th, 2009 12:23 pm
Hi, and thanks for featuring my Free CDN plugin!
I would also like to mention Hyper Cache which I personally use, and it works fairly well.
Rita
October 24th, 2009 12:57 pm
I have TypePad. What to you suggest?
Rita blogging at The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide
Dave Doolin
October 24th, 2009 2:04 pm
WP Cache works wonders. Make sure to clear it and rebuild after you fiddle around with the site.
I’m thinking I need to move to a faster host.
I’d like to write and shop around some guest posts. For low traffic blogs (you know who you are!) I’m not worried. If one you high profile bloggers sent a bunch of traffic my way as a result of a guest post, I’d be worried the shared host would choose just that time to bog down.
JoshuaElliot
October 24th, 2009 2:28 pm
Thanks for the sharing.
webcam
October 24th, 2009 2:36 pm
Thanks for the info Darren!
I’ll be definitely adding a couple of these to my WP installs.
Kelvin Servigon
October 24th, 2009 3:09 pm
Thanks for the tips. I’ll try the Super Cache plug-in and WP Minify. :)
imergent909
October 24th, 2009 5:42 pm
Great article here! Very clear and informative; well written and I can see you put a lot of time and effort into it. Good job!
San Jose Carpet Cleaning
October 24th, 2009 6:04 pm
Someday I hope to have a post go viral. I did not know that wordpress was that slow. So Standard HTML sites are a lot faster?
Thanks
storesonline584
October 24th, 2009 8:02 pm
It just goes to show you how innovative and creative people can be. Thanks a bunch for sharing such useful post with excellent tips with us. Nice points really like this post. You hit a lot of thinks right on.
crazy blogger
October 24th, 2009 8:08 pm
BTW which plugin are you using? I have recently established my blog and in search of good plugin that would make my life a bit easier while maintaining. Thanks for the share. I love it when many things are explained at one place. Saves my googling time. He he.
Ryan
October 24th, 2009 11:22 pm
Sid, Thanks for sharing the plug-in’s. My blog could use some upgrades in this department.
r4 cards
October 25th, 2009 12:02 am
That is really great….Now i will do with my blog. Thanks for sharing this information with us.
Daisy
October 25th, 2009 1:39 am
Thanks for the tip on the YSLOW Firefox extension. I had never heard of it before or the Google plugin for firebug for that matter!
Eduardo Maio
October 25th, 2009 2:49 am
I’ve wrote a couple of articles to speed up Wordpress at my blog (but in portuguese), and I’ve done lots of testing on the cache plug-ins and on the long run WP Super Cache may do more harm then good if your website doesn’t have too many visitors.
Hyper Cache can achieve the same type of cache and gzip compression but it uses much less resources on the server.
Some of you may be on shared server hostings and won’t have access to this data, but the cpu and memory usage with Hyper Cache went down considerably, with WP Super Cache was the same with it activated or not.
It will be as fast as Hyper Cache but will use more resources.
Sid Savara
October 25th, 2009 10:32 am
Wow great discussion!
I looked at Hyper Cache as well. From what I understand, WP Super Cache is more aggressive which is why I like it for traffic spikes. I think Hyper Cache is an excellent suggestion however, and definitely one worth looking into. From my experience I have used WP Cache and WP Super Cache fairly extensively, and WP Super Cache is extremely effective for my site
Regarding Typepad, I don’t any suggestions unfortunately – my experience is primarily with Wordpress
Gerri - Ninety Niney Ways
October 25th, 2009 2:07 pm
Thanks for the post Sid. This is something I need to do on my sites and am going to to it right now. One of my blogs takes a bit of a while to load and I hope this does the trick or at least helps.
Shopper Girl
October 25th, 2009 3:02 pm
My blog is now… Greased Lightning! Thanks!
ZK @ Web Marketing Blog
October 25th, 2009 7:26 pm
@ Work at Home
I really surprised to see why you are not using your own domain to over come from these kind of problem.
You have good readers base and I think you should take the step now. Because you never know when blogger can banned your account.
Josh Building
October 26th, 2009 1:03 am
I just thought it was my computer that was slow sometimes at loading Wordpress blogs and websites. Thanks for the tips.
We Fly Spitfires
October 26th, 2009 1:06 am
Minifying CSS/JS and GZIPing your output are definitely 2 great things to be doing. Not sure about the caching though. It sounds great but I’m worried it would just break my blog! Is it trustworthy?
Srinivas Rao
October 26th, 2009 1:38 pm
Thanks for the post. installed all :)
James
October 26th, 2009 1:59 pm
You can find five more from here http://www.earth-org.com/blogs/2009/10/wordpress-performance-plugins/
Stillwater Real Estate
October 26th, 2009 5:31 pm
I’ve heard a couple of these plugins but will give them all a shot to see how much it speeds up my blog. Thank for the info!
Heather Villa
October 27th, 2009 5:00 am
Thanks for the post! I today’s fast paced society we are all looking for ways to speed everything up.
Craig Mullins
October 27th, 2009 9:28 pm
So I’m curious what plugins you actually use on your site? You don’t use all of them do you?
Why not just use wp super cache for gzipping & caching it does both, although it’s much more effective if you can turn it on thru htaccess or php.ini?
Also another one that used to be a pain… Is PHP Speedy WP. It now plays pretty well with wp super cache.
http://aciddrop.com/2009/02/02/php-speedy-wp-052-bug-fix/
Speeds up the display of your blog by combining your JS and CSS files, adding far future expires headers and GZIPing & some php caching
The Blog Is Mine
October 27th, 2009 11:14 pm
Ok, thanks for share, i will try it out within one of my blogs…
cadeau
October 27th, 2009 11:29 pm
Oh Darren thank you so much for sharing this information.. This post is really helps me a lot in my WordPress Blog Blazing, i really appreciate this post.. Now my WordPress Blog Blazing is running smoothly and speedily..
Sid Savara
October 28th, 2009 5:54 am
Hi Craig,
You’re right – this list is not all compatible with each other (for example, W3 Total Cache versus WP Super Cache). These are the plugins I’ve used over time on my blog.
I was using WP Super Cache until this weekend when I saw Hyper Cache mentioned in the comments, and also because I had an interesting discussion offline about W3 Total Cache. I’m experimenting with both of this week, but typically I use WP Super Cache and WP Minify.
Some people are not comfortable with *any* kind of caching, however in those situations I still feel that using gzip for example would be useful, hence the recommendation =). You are correct in that you could use .htaccess and php.ini, however I like to do as much configuration as I can through plugin UI screens – I am a software engineer and capable of editing the files directly, but I set up lots of blogs for friends. Using plugins is easier for most people.
Thanks for your recommendation for PHP Speedy WP – I remember using it and having some issue, I think specifically with JS files that used document.write. I may be wrong, and perhaps that has been fixed (it seems like it would be a very difficult problem to fix though, as that’s really an issue with my rogue JS file as opposed to the plugin). Since many plugins include JS document.write, I opted not to use it. WP Minify has a similar issue, but has an easy way to exclude rogue files in the UI.
Thanks for the excellent question and discussion. I don’t always get everything right, and if I’m wrong here please let me know – this is just my experience with the plugins, and I’m sharing it hoping to improve people’s websites, and the experience for their readers. I will perhaps give PHP Speedy WP another whirl down the road.
Allan
October 28th, 2009 8:18 am
Thank you for the plugins. I installed 2 more plugins from the link you have given and indeed it has a very good effect in loading the pages on my blog. Thank you very much!
Craig Mullins
October 28th, 2009 9:07 am
No problem, glad i could help further the discussion…
I’d love to see some hard data on how much speed improves, database call are reduced, & how long it takes the php to render on the server.
Here’s some code if anyone wants to play around. It tell s you how many database calls you are doing & how long it takes the php to load on your server (not how long it actually takes the page to render for your users):
queries in seconds.
Kinda fun for techies…
I’ve been playing around a lil bit.on my server. Some slow down my perceived load time (when I see something on my screen the first time by a second), Some spike my CPU severely, yikes…
r4 firmware
October 28th, 2009 9:42 pm
Hi Guy’s,
I have not tried WP Super Cache, but not tried yet.
Gloson
October 28th, 2009 11:49 pm
Oh dear. I installed free CDN and all my post titles were replaced by the homepage title, and didn’t noticed it until now. :-(
Lessons learned: Be sure to check if your blog is working correctly after installing plugins!
Mario Kohan
October 31st, 2009 12:19 am
I like it. For me SuperCache turned out to be one of the best plugins ever!
Iskandar
October 31st, 2009 9:18 pm
You forgot WP Smush IT.
With most premium themes started their life from a photoshop canvas, we’re starting to see huge themes.
I bought one that websiteoptimization.com said is around 600 KB (without any content at all).
I ran smush it on all my images folder. The result ?
80 Kb. A whooping 520 kB saved !
India Offshore Development Company
November 12th, 2009 9:27 pm
Thanks for the material. I am new to WordPress and this blog helped me a lot
Alan Mater
November 14th, 2009 3:08 pm
Thanks for sharing these plugins. I’ve had issues with my blog loading slow before, so it’s nice to know that there are plugins available that will speed things up. I certainly don’t want to be losing any readers simply because the page doesn’t load fast enough for them.
BloggerGirl
November 16th, 2009 9:31 am
Is there something similar for blogger?
SEO Mumbai
November 17th, 2009 12:47 am
Thanks for sharing this amazing WP plugin with us, I like SuperCache plugin.
chews-4-health
November 18th, 2009 3:54 pm
Google is your friend search for more great information you will find alot.
S Ahsan
November 18th, 2009 4:02 pm
Thanks for sharing Savara. Will check out your ebook as well.
Shahzad
November 22nd, 2009 5:53 am
Nice post buddy, iLike it very much. Plz inform about any ajax plugin which give nice interface,
thankx
Mike Arnold
December 3rd, 2009 1:55 pm
I liked this post very much. I recently started college and in need of some cash. This program seems very promising. It may be what I am searching for. I need to do some more research now on yahoo. Thank you again for this great post. I will check out the rest of your site
Shahab Khan
December 27th, 2009 7:09 am
I must say its a Amazing list of plugins ..really!
Thanks for sharing!
Tarah Benner
December 30th, 2009 9:12 am
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!
After trying several frustrating combinations of plugins to get the job done, I stumbled upon your website. After reading your book, I figured if I should be trusting anyone’s opinion, make it yours! And you know what? My pages load faster now! Not perfect, but faster. Check it out:
http://mockofshame.com
Daniel Johnston
January 1st, 2010 5:57 am
Aside from one problem, this list is great. I added WP Super Cache before I read this, and always wondered why my blog was so slow! It’s hard to find good plug-ins (in my opinion) since there are so many of them, which also means so many bad ones.
The problem that I had, however, was that WP Minify completely jacked up my blog. I don’t know why, but I just removed it and the site is running REALLY fast.
Thanks!
Joe Robertson
January 1st, 2010 5:02 pm
The easiest for me was using the W3 Total Cache… Frederick Townes seemed to have a couple of things to work out with last version. This one 0.8.5.1 works awesome.
David Morson
January 1st, 2010 9:30 pm
Hey Dude, I had the same problem of getting my blog taking a lot of time to load but now I will follow your tips to make my blog of wholesale faster.
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