WP is one of the resrouces heavy script which needs meassures both at server admin as well as web master level to speed up its instalaltion and for faster loading page of word press. Here are some of the steps which can assist web masters to speed up the web pages of WP.
1. Use an effective caching plugin . WordPress plugins are obviously quite useful, but some of the best fall under the caching category, as they drastically improve page loads time, and best of all, all of them on WP.org are free and easy to use. W3 Total Cache is one of such plugin. Simply install and activate, and what your page load faster as elements are cached.
2. Optimize images (automatically) . There are several ways to speed up your blog by optimizing images. Start with the avatars. Most blogs use Gravatar to automatically display avatars in the comments — but a lot of users stick with the default silhouette avatar. Set these to “blank” and you won’t need to make pointless external calls for all those default avatars.
Next, make sure you choose the right format for your images. Simpler images that don’t use a wide spectrum of colors should generally be saved as PNG files, which are smaller and load faster. For photographs or more complex images, stick with JPEG. You can also automatically reduce the size of your images as you upload them with the
Yahoo! has an image optimizer called Smush.it that will drastically reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing quality.
However, doing this to every image would be beyond a pain, and incredibly time consuming. Fortunately, there is an amazing, free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. No reason not to install this one.
3. Optimize your homepage to load quickly
- Show excerpts instead of full posts
- Reduce the number of posts on the page (I like showing between 5-7)
- Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (include them only in posts)
- Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need
- Keep in minimal! Readers are here for content, not 8,000 widgets on the homepage
Overall, a clean and focused homepage design will help your page not only look good, but load quicker as well.
4. Optimize your WordPress database
Optimizing your database is another easy, but effective, way to ramp up performance. The first step is regularly deleting spam comments and post revisions. WordPress saves each change as a separate revision in your database. This is great if you need to revert to a previous version, but it can also really slow you down. This is another area where plugins are helpful. Try installing Revision Control, or if you need more comprehensive database optimization, try the WP-DBManager plugin as well.This can be done the very tedious, extremly boring manual fashion, or…
You can simply use the WP-Optimize plugin, which I run on all of my sites.
This plugin lets you do just one simple task: optimize the your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce their overhead.
I would also recommend the WP-DB Manager plugin, which can schedule dates for database optimization.
5. Disable hotlinking and leeching of your content
Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth “theft.” It occurs when other sites direct link to the images on your site from their articles making your server load increasingly high.
This can add up as more and more people “scrape” your posts or your site (and especially images) become more popular, as must do if you create custom images for your site on a regular basis.
6. Add LazyLoad to your images
LazyLoad is the process of having only only the images above the fold load (i.e. only the images visible in the visitor’s browser window), then, when reader scrolls down, the other images begin to load, just before they come into view.
This will not only speed you page loads, it can also save bandwidth by loading less data for users who don’t scroll all the way down on your pages.
To do this automatically, install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin.
7. Control the amount of post revisions stored
Use the Revision Control plugin to make sure that you keep post revisions to a minimum, set it to 2 or 3 so you have something to fall back on in case you make a mistake, but not too high that you clutter your backend with unnecessary amounts of drafted posts.
8. Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks
By default, WordPress interacts with other blogs that are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks.
Every time another blog mentions you, it notifies your site, which in turn updates data on the post. Turning this off will not destroy the backlinks to your site, just the setting that generates a lot of work for your site.
9. Replace PHP with static HTML, when necessary
This one is a little bit advanced, but can drastically cut down your load time if you are desperate to include page load speeds, so I included it.
10. Shared Hosting. If you are looking to go for somenthin real big, shared hosting is not ideal choice. Look for VPS Hosting.
Additional Reading:
http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/the-ultimate-quickstart-guide-to-speeding-up-your-wordpress-site/