Optimizing Your WordPress Site Pt. 1

WordPress, like many other web content management systems, rely heavily on the use of plugins, libraries, and dynamic server requests using PHP to serve content to its viewers, but with all of the calls to the server, and a massive amount of plugins running on the site, overhead for a simple page load can often times become tremendous. This post is the first part of a two (or maybe more) part series on procedures a person can take to decrease load times for their WordPress install. This post will focus specifically on the plugins I use to keep load times at a minimum for my site.

The Plugins

Plugins serve a wide range of purposes for any developer or designer, whether it is dispatching a tweet whenever content is published, or shifting/restructuring content on a page. While plugins are wonderful and can solve many problems and provide additional functionality, it’s ideal to stick with only plugins that are needed. For example, if you are testing multiple media player plugins for audio files, keep the one media player plugin that you intend on using and delete the rest. If there is a plugin that you intend on using, but haven’t applied it to your site yet, keep the plugin disabled until you use it, otherwise extraneous requests may be made to the server where unnecessary.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are some really neat plugins that can really assist in speeding up load times for WordPress.  Some plugins re-arrange code or optimize the database.  Here are some of the plugins I use for my site:

• Clean Options – This plugin is great for cleaning up orphaned or unused options and settings that may have been left in the MySQL database.  Use this plugin ONLY if you are proficient with WordPress and MySQL.  I ended up wiping out some options from plugins that I have not used and uninstalled.  PodPress, though, left two empty tables in my database, so I had to go into PHPMyAdmin through my host to delete them manually. I knew they were PodPress related because they contained podpress in the name.  I noticed that this plugin did produce a large amount of false positives for possible orphans, but before deletion, the plugin takes you to a page highlighting the values that are slated for removal.
• WP-Optimize – For a more robust alternative for Clean Options, this plugin also manages deletion for page/post revisions and comment spam/unapprove clean up.  Thanks for JortK for letting me know about this one! Check out JortK’s post about WP-Optimize here.
• JavaScript to Footer – A neat and simple little plugin that moves Javascript to the footer.  Here’s a wonderful article from Yahoo about development practices that goes more in depth about why JavaScript should be moved to the bottom or footer of the page.
• Revision Delete! – I love this plugin because of it’s ease of use and effectiveness.  When people are constantly editing or revising content, that can build up a lot of excess gunk in the database that manages WordPress content.  Pretty soon the database is fill with hundreds of page/post revisions which may cause poor site performance.  This plugin will automatically drop revisions older than the x amount of days an admin sets it to. I have mine set to 2 days, for example.  Less junk and more performance!
• WP Super Cache – This plugin is ideal for anyone wanting to add a little speed boost to their page because it renders a cached backup of a page as static HTML that is served to viewers of the site.  The plugin is relatively easy to set up and the required .htaccess mods can be written automatically from within the plugin’s settings. There are a multitude of options in regards to what an admin wants to be cached and how often garbage collection and cache deletion is run on the site. This plugin is by far one of my favorites!

Are there any plugins that you use that deserve to be on this list or an upcoming list for speeding up WordPress? Any alternatives that you recommend for the above mentioned plugins? Your input and insights are important to me, so please feel free to leave some comments expressing your experiences with optimizing WordPress using plugins.

Tomorrow’s post will focus on optimizing the header.php file that’s typically included in WordPress themes to increase performance.