After you’ve done all you can with step one and two of your WordPress Diet, have you noticed an increase or ran a speed check?
If you want to synch-up one more notch on your server belt, we’ll go over a few more things you can do to increase your WordPress site speed.
1. Delete Your Spam
As silly as this may sound to some, I’ve seen some WordPress back-ends bulging with spam comments. Even if these comments are marked as spam, until they’re deleted, their using database space.
Undeleted spam comments are empty calories!
Burn’em: Go into your Comments, click on Spam, and nuke those messages by clicking the Empty Spam button.
Now that you’ve removed the database fat, be sure to keep those calories off!
Take care of your spam comments at the same time you’re replying to your Recent Comments. In fact, on ChurchMag, I find real comments that are marked as spam. Another good reason to regularly check your spam comments. At the same time, be careful and double check links and users before approving them, since spam can be a little tricky. After doing it for a while, it’ll become quick and easy.
2. Detox
If you’ve been running your WordPress install for a while, you may have plugins that you’ve disabled and no longer use.
Remove them!
If you’ve gotten in a good habit of removing unused plugins, you still may need to detox. Consider using the WordPress plugin, Clean Options. Most plugins clean-up after themselves when you uninstall them, but plenty of plugins leave unused tables that can fill-up your database. Running Clean Options will find those tables that are no longer in use and will give you the option of deleting them.
3. Optimize Your Database
Remember defragging your hard drive? That’s what optimizing your database does. It removes the clutter and puts everything in its proper place.
WP-DBManager is a plugin that can help you do this without poking around in your phpmyadmin, plus, you can schedule jobs to run automatically.
Personally, I use TentBlogger’s Database Optimization plugin.
4. Use Multiple Servers
Run your WordPress install and front end files on one server and drop your database on another.
This is hardcore.
😉
Do you have anything you would like to add that wasn’t covered in steps one, two and three?
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Chris Langille says
I want to know how to do #4 so bad! Any pointers? I heard this really makes a difference in the speed.
If I could add one other thing,…I recently set up a CDN with Amazon CloudFront and in cunjunction with W3 Total Cache, and CloudFlare’s free service, it made a significant difference.
I was surprised actually. The site I run it on got a 96/100 on Google PageSpeedOnline, and Pingdom and YSlow gave me some props too!
It was super easy, and it’s pay-as-you-go, so if you run a smaller site, it’s literally pennies to use it.
Even if you’re running a smaller blog/site, it’s well worth the time to do it. It took me about 5 minutes to get it rolling (you need Amazon s3 first though) and it made a huge difference.
IMHO, CloudFront is every bit as good as MaxCDN, or any of the other CDN’s out there, and it’s dirt cheap!
Eric Dye says
Although I haven’t done it myself, use the define(‘DB_HOST’) setting in the wp-config.php file to specify the IP of the server the database is living on.