Tips to speed up your WordPress site

I was working on my wordpress site this morning and lamenting how slow it was loading. My first thought was, “What is going on with the server?!” Sometimes the server does slow down and we are always looking for ways to optimize and deliver better performance to our web sites, but very often there are things you can do to speed up your own site. Here are some things that I have put in my mental checklist to workthrough when my site starts to feel sluggish.

• Am I embedding a lot of videos? WordPress makes it so easy to drop videos in that before you know it you can have a web page putting out requests for 5 to 10 videos which have to be answered and loaded before the page comes up. If you don’t want to get rid of these videos, a simple resolution may be to drop in an “insert more tag” before your video. Give people a short intro, then have them click to get the video. It makes your front page a little less interesting looking, but it will load faster.
• Am I embedding code or data from other sites? I have a latitude embed from Google along with RSS widgets grabbing content from Diigo, Docushare and Twitter. Similar to the last point, these each require that WordPress reach out and touch these sources to get the content. Consider each of your widgets that is pulling content from other sources and make a decision as to how important that piece of content is. If you have them on your site mostly because it is looks good to have there, you might contemplate removing them.
• Do I have plugins enabled that I’m not even using? I often activate plugins for no reason other than to demonstrate them then never turn them off. Many plugins can make a real impact in the load speed of your pages. If you have enabled some plugins that you are not using, turn them off.

Now, even with these things either resolved or at least understood, there is the matter of the server cache. The LPS WordPress server utilizes WP Super Cache in order to server web pages to visitors quickly. SuperCache essentially takes a snapshot of your web page when it is requested and if it is requested again simply delivers that snapshot rather than going back to the database and asking for your posts, widgets, etc. This does not mean that your page will always load super fast. First, Super Cache is not enabled when you are logged in to your site. Super Cache assumes that you are making changes if you are logged in and it doesn’t want to show you old content knowing that you are likely adding new content. Second, if it has been more than 15 minutes since your page was last accessed, the Super Cache version of your page (if one exists) is tossed out and a new one is created. Likely, most times your page is accessed it is uncached and a fresh version is served, but if you tell a class of students to pull up your page only one student builds the page and every other student would get a cached version, enabling them to all get your content with almost no wait.

Have questions or comments about caching or other ways to speed up your site? Fire away in the comments.

Updated June 22, 2017