Any ideas how to speed up a wordpress blog?

[Ali from The Office Diet]

Hi all,

(Apologies in advance if this is a bit of a "newbie" question. I've been finding hosting a "proper" blog as opposed to just having a blogger one a rather steep learning curve.)

I'm finding pages slow to load on my blog, The Office Diet

It's hosted with DreamHost, and I don't think I've got especially slow-to-load content... I try to keep pictures small (ones I've uploaded, at least). But when navigating round the site, it seems more than a tad clunky.

Could something I've installed -- perhaps the social bookmarking icons -- be causing this?

Anyone using wordpress had similar problems? Ideas for plugins or similar which would help?

Thanks,

Ali

[JimOfferman]

Could just be that your hosting provider has slow servers (or very heavy traffic). Could also be that your site is a little heavy on database queries (which can easily be achieved in WordPress).

Have you tried the WP-Cache plugin? It should bring down the server load quite considerably.

[tobyhede]

That loaded pretty fast on my connection.

You could try using the YSlow plugin to analyse the site:
YSlow for Firebug

YSlow is really useful and offers some very effective advice on improving both the actual and perceived performance of your pages.

wp-Cache is pretty useful too, and should come pre-installed on later versions of wordpress.

[Ali from The Office Diet]

Thanks guys!

Yes, I did enable the wp-cache a few days ago and seem to have seen some improvement. Maybe I'm just being unrealistically impatient! ;-) It may be that DreamHost is simply performing slowly (occasionally the site's gone down altogether.)

Cheers,

Ali

[yogesh sarkar]

You blog loaded a bit slowly for me; also I can see that in couple of images, dimensions might be small, but they are well over 100kb. This is some thing you need to optimize, irrespective of the fact, whether or not your server is fast/slow.

Also your CSS files are quite heavy and you seem to be using quite a few scripts on the page. Use this link to analyze the details about your site’s loading time.

[investorblogger]

I just tried the pages, although they were fairly snappy for me, I did note that your page when saved with everything was over 800Kb. That's fairly big.

How many plugins are you using? I do have some suggestions on speeding up Wordpress on my blog.

These are things I tried. Keep down the number of widgets you installed. If you have unnecessary plugins or javascripts or widgets, replace them with straight HTML code or eliminate them altogether.

I found originally over 30 plugins and numerous javascripts on my blog before I realized I had to do something to cut it down. Even now it's not very responsive.

Also, I'm beginning to suspect that DH isn't such a great host for blogs... I'm looking at other options, right now.

Kenneth

[Ali from The Office Diet]

Thanks Kenneth, those are really useful tips (and a great post :-)) -- definitely going to spend some of this weekend sorting out Plugins. Especially after one died spectacularly yesterday and took the whole blog down till I realised and deleted it altogether ... argh!

Best,

Ali

[investorblogger]

Another suggestion: if you're not sure which plugins are borked...

move the plugins folder to the root directory so they are not visible to Wordpress. Then recreate the plugins folder (empty of course) in the wp-content folder.

You can move them back one by one, turn each on, and make sure it works. Then try the next one.

Eventually, if one is borked you'll be able to figure out which it is.

Remove it. Look for an upgraded version if possible.

Also, I found that I had copied plugins carelessly to the plugins folder, and was surprised to see that I had several copies often of plugins - that doesn't help!

Kenneth

[jpfieber]

I found Dreamhost to be slow as well. I moved from the cheap option to there 'Private Server' option, which allows you to adjust the RAM and processor you're alloted. Didn't help a bit. I personally think they have overloaded MySQL servers, so throwing more RAM or processor at the problem didn't help. I've moved my main blog (http://itsvista.com) to Media Temple on there Grid system. It's cheaper than I was paying for the Private Server at Dreamhost. So far, I've had a few slow times, but overall it seems faster. I may still step up to their Virtual Server, which should resolve any issues since you're file server and SQL server aren't shared with anyone. Costs a bit more (starts at $50 per month), but may be what I need to be completely satisfied.

[Gene]

You may simply need to upgrade your hosting package to something with more power. I use a VPS at ServInt and periodically must still move to am more powerful server with them as my traffic grows and I need more resources.