Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
If you’re like me, then you run a WordPress website or blog. WordPress is a fantastic platform for building blogs and sites, but after a while, it can get very slow. So slow that people will just close the page leaving your bounce rate sky high. And we don’t want that, do we?
That’s the first reason why you should speed up WordPress, because people will just leave before they get a chance to read your stuff. The second reason is that the speed of your site directly affects how you rank in the search engines. Believe it or not, it is in fact part of Google’s algorithm. Site speed! Not a huge factor or anything, but it plays a small role as Google doesn’t want to send its users to pages that are going to take 10 minutes to load.
Are we all happy with why we need to speed up WordPress?
Ok good, here are 5 steps you can take to dramatically speed up your WordPress blog or website.
1. Cut Some Plugins Loose
Plugins influence the speed of your site. The more plugins you have, the slower WordPress will be. Plugins take up memory and slow down WordPress, so cut a few loose. It’s time to cut some plugins.
2. Caching
Caching allows WordPress to store database queries, reducing server requests. This increases loading times and reduces server usage. I personally use WP Super Cache, which works well.
3. Defeat Spammers
Spammers can slow down your site and take up bandwidth. You can use plugins like SI Captcha Anti-Spam, Bad Behavior, and WP-reCAPTCHA to manage comment spam, or create a blacklist of spammers via your .htaccess file.
4. Choose The Right Theme
Your theme impacts your site’s speed. The simpler the theme, the faster it loads. Avoid image-heavy themes to improve loading times.
5. Front Page
Your front page should be minimal. Reduce the number of posts displayed, keep images and videos to a minimum, and monitor conversions using analytics.
In prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below!
1. Chris September 18, 2011
I’ve been using WP Super Cache for a while now and it’s definitely helped improve my site speed. Thanks for the great tips, David!
2. Michael September 19, 2011
Great post, David. I’ve noticed a big difference in my site’s speed after following your advice on cutting down plugins.
3. Sarah September 20, 2011
Can you explain a bit more about caching? I’m not sure I fully understand how it works. Thanks in advance!
4. Steve September 22, 2011
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →The spam issue is something I’ve been dealing with for a while. Those plugins you recommended are lifesavers.
5. Andrew September 23, 2011
Any other tips on selecting the right theme? I’m having trouble finding one that balances speed and aesthetics.
6. Cassandra September 24, 2011
Great insights, David! I’ve always been looking for ways to speed up my WordPress blog, and these tips are really helpful. Keep up the amazing work!
7. Ethan September 25, 2011
Are you sure cutting down plugins really makes such a big difference? I’m skeptical about that. Do you have any data or evidence to support this?
8. Isabella September 26, 2011
I have a question regarding the theme selection. Do you have any recommendations for a lightweight yet aesthetically pleasing theme? I’d love to hear your thoughts on that!
9. Kevin September 27, 2011
Honestly, I feel like there’s more to speeding up WordPress than just cutting plugins or using caching. Maybe more advanced solutions like server optimization should also be considered.
10. Emily September 28, 2011
This was a very interesting read, David! By the way, how have you been? It’s been a while since we last caught up. We should grab a coffee sometime!
11. Sophia September 29, 2011
I had a similar issue with spam comments flooding my site. It was really frustrating until I installed WP-reCAPTCHA. It has made a world of difference for my blog’s performance.
12. Liam September 30, 2011
I’ve used WP Super Cache before, but lately I’ve been experimenting with other tools like LiteSpeed Cache. Have you tried it? I think it works even better in certain cases.
13. Olivia October 1, 2011
I learned so much from this post, especially about reducing plugins and choosing the right theme. Thanks for sharing your expertise, David!
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Cutting plugins is right advice on average, but nobody says how much speed you actually get back per plugin removed. I see this with small business owners all the time — they take drastic action on a rule of thumb, feel good about it, and never run a before-and-after test. Cut the five you don’t use. Don’t gut a site down to a theme and a contact form and call it discipline.
Even the post’s own examples have no numbers. ‘Dramatically speed up’ compared to what baseline, on what tool, under what load?
Yuki’s right there’s no baseline. I still just need to know which one of these five saves the most time tonight.
Yuki’s asking the right question pointed the wrong way. What the post circles without naming is server load as a queueing problem — plugins, spam, and heavy front pages all add processing time per request, and caching is the classic fix from queueing theory, not a WordPress trick. The gap isn’t whether caching helps, it clearly does. It’s how much of the bottleneck is server-side versus client-side rendering, which this post never separates out.
Sorry if this is obvious, but when it says ‘cut some plugins loose,’ how would I know which ones are safe to remove? I’m still learning what half of mine even do, and I’m scared of breaking something I can’t fix. Is there a way to test this without just guessing?
Reading this as five levers rather than five tips: reduce plugin load, cache the database queries, filter spam before it hits the server, simplify the theme, lighten the front page. Four of the five are about cutting work the server does per visitor. The gap: nothing here about image compression, and on most sites I’ve audited that’s the single biggest speed cost, bigger than plugins and theme combined. A single unresized photo straight off a phone can run several megabytes, and a front page carrying a dozen of those, uncached, will out-cost every plugin on the list put together. Add a sixth item to this checklist: resize and compress every image before it goes anywhere near the front page, because steps one through five can be done perfectly and still lose to one lazy upload.
What’s being missed in some of these replies is that the five steps were never meant as a controlled experiment, they’re a maintenance checklist, and as a checklist they hold up fine. Our internal ops docs read exactly like this: five plain actions, no citations, because the person following them needs to know what to do Monday morning, not defend a thesis. Ask a checklist for a study and you’ll always be disappointed.
Ade, that’s exactly how I ran the diner for nineteen years. Nobody handed me a study before I stopped ordering the fryer oil that clogged twice a week — I just noticed the pattern and changed the habit. The theme advice here reminds me of switching from heavy laminated menus to plain paper ones. Customers didn’t care, the kitchen ran faster, and I never needed a graph to know it was the right call.