Do you know any articles or tips about how to speed up a WP site?

Wordpress is JUST a CMS and most of what makes a site slow is on the front-end so is not specific to WP at all. But one thing is: Generally don't use plugins that have an influence over the front-end. Write your own application specific functionality. Things like sliders, galleries and other front-end'y stuff do not require WordPress specific plugins.

 

Everything else like minification, concatenation of files, Gzip, lazy-loading is not WordPress specific and should be done on every website.

Edited January 8, 201610 yr by rbrtsmith

Though rbrtsmith is right about the general client side issues, you can also optimize the server side performance. The main issue that can slow things down server side is the database queries. If your database has been running for years it might be a good idea to clean it up. You can use the OPTIMIZE TABLE statement to defragment and automatically reorganize the fragments for faster access and storage reduction. This is not my field of expertise so I am not sure how much it will speed up things but it might be worth a try if lots of data has been deleted/updated over some years.

 

In order to optimize the actual code execution on the server there are also some options: Depending on the server there are different tools to enable PHP caching for once.

 

Finally you could look at the files in you theme and compare them to WPs function reference. New functions are added to WP all the time and there are might be a newer/ faster function to do a particular task. Several of the functions designed to fetch data in the loop can be replaced with alternative functions that can be executed outside the loop, eg. if you just need to fetch a single data entry.

Edited January 9, 201610 yr by Nillervision

^^ That's a good point. In terms of database request efficiency WP is pretty horrible.

In terms of everything to do with development, WP is pretty horrible.

 

 

I'm going to disagree with that statement, for example this site is pretty fast http://www.nytimes.com/

 

 

I'm going to disagree with that statement, for example this site is pretty fast http://www.nytimes.com/

 

It's also not built with WP

You can Try these:

 

1. Choose a good host

2. Start with a solid framework/theme

3. Use an effective caching plugin

4. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

5. Optimize images (automatically)

6. Optimize your homepage to load quickly

7. Optimize your WordPress database

8. Disable hotlinking and leeching of your content

9. Add an expires header to static resources

10. Adjust Gravatar images

11. Add LazyLoad to your images

12. Control the amount of post revisions stored

13. Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks

14. Replace PHP with static HTML, when necessary

15. Use CloudFlare

 

You can Try these:

 

1. Choose a good host

2. Start with a solid framework/theme

3. Use an effective caching plugin

4. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

5. Optimize images (automatically)

6. Optimize your homepage to load quickly

7. Optimize your WordPress database

8. Disable hotlinking and leeching of your content

9. Add an expires header to static resources

10. Adjust Gravatar images

11. Add LazyLoad to your images

12. Control the amount of post revisions stored

13. Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks

14. Replace PHP with static HTML, when necessary

15. Use CloudFlare

 

You didn't even bother to change the order of the list when you copied and pasted all the headings from here?

http://www.sparringmind.com/speed-up-wordpress/

I know you probably can't post links yet, but in IMO you should at least specify the source instead of posting other peoples work like it was your own.

Edited January 26, 201610 yr by Nillervision

Also a framework won't help the load time, almost all are FULL of bloat and other IMO badness like premature design. (Looking at Bootstrap and Foundation)

Edited January 26, 201610 yr by rbrtsmith

 

I didn't say anything about speed. I was referring to what it's like to develop with, and it's a complete turd.

Why?

 

In any case, wordpress wasn't built to make things easy for a developer, it was built to make things easy for the user.

 

Back to the OP. If you want a site to load faster: get rid of plugins, switch to a simple theme, optimise your images, don't use google fonts, don't connect to third party content providers and send less data. Pretty much the same advice you can apply to any site, not just wordpress.

Why?

 

In any case, wordpress wasn't built to make things easy for a developer, it was built to make things easy for the user.

 

Back to the OP. If you want a site to load faster: get rid of plugins, switch to a simple theme, optimise your images, don't use google fonts, don't connect to third party content providers and send less data. Pretty much the same advice you can apply to any site, not just wordpress.

 

It was built to make things easy for non developers to make websites via plugins themes etc. The user interface for clients is ok, but it's been bettered by some of the other CMS systems out there.

Saying don't use Google fonts is pretty strong advice, I'd word it more as - consider the weight of the external assets such as fonts libraries etc. Loading things from a CDN like Google's can actually help speed up the page load vs loading it from your own servers due to limited concurrent transfers from a single server via HTTP.

Reduction in HTTP requests makes a sizeable difference, so that means concatenation of files. Avoid the use of bloated CSS frameworks if possible, build your own.

Edited January 26, 201610 yr by rbrtsmith

I'm going to disagree with that statement, for example this site is pretty fast http://www.nytimes.com/

 

Quite a few of the showcase sites on Wordpress are highly customised builds, and usually run on Wordpress VIP which has insane hardware. I'd always take these showcases with a pinch of salt, scaling websites to that size is serious work, there's usually some kind of magic behind the scenes.

 

A new PHP rendering framework

The switch to a dynamic platform required us to use a new rendering engine that could quickly serve a large volume of articles on demand. Existing PHP frameworks provide a solid foundation, but we opted to build our own. It was customized to serve a large variety of content and had the major advantage of being conceived and built with increased flexibility in mind. Thanks to this, our framework has the ability to dynamically render different layouts and configurations on the same page.

 

The new framework simplified development and provided the means to create powerful applications with a few lines of code. Application development now typically consists of gluing existing components together, a process which significantly decreased development time. In addition, the library of modules available was created to be clean and simple, benefiting from a set structure and minimal code duplication.

 

Speeding things up with server-side caching

With dynamic articles being served, our technology platform needed a strong reverse proxy to protect the PHP rendering framework from being pummeled. The successful launch of Varnish on the NYTimes mobile site last May gave us confidence that Varnish was the best technology to use for the new platform. Varnish is highly configurable and provides lightning fast response times when serving content from the cache. It also enables us to cache our articles so those that change more frequently will stay in the cache for a shorter time.

 

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/the-technology-behind-the-nytimes-com-redesign/

 

It also looks like some blogs are running off Wordpress, not the whole site. They have a custom platform by the looks of it http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/scoop-a-glimpse-into-the-nytimes-cms/.

Saying don't use Google fonts is pretty strong advice, I'd word it more as - consider the weight of the external assets such as fonts libraries etc. Loading things from a CDN like Google's can actually help speed up the page load vs loading it from your own servers due to limited concurrent transfers from a single server via HTTP.

Reduction in HTTP requests makes a sizeable difference, so that means concatenation of files. Avoid the use of bloated CSS frameworks if possible, build your own.

CMS systems out there.

I agree. I probably got a bit carried away there.

 

I helped someone the other day who was using elegant themes, sliders, galleries, umpteen fonts, facebook feeds, twitter, live chat and disqus. And their homepage slider images (6 of them) were over 600Kb each.

 

It was a little slow to load.

 

PS: what are some of the better CMS's out there that are better than wordpress (from a user perspective). I like trying new things and if there is one that is simpler and easier than WP I'll give it a go.

Try Craft @@Jack recommended it to me, it's very good based on first impressions, he can give more info on it.

 

I hope you're not getting annoyed with spammy content, freedom of speech and all that haha welcome to my world!

Touché. You caught me there partner

Still - spam is just anoying, plagiarism is illegal

Edited January 26, 201610 yr by Nillervision

If you can post a link or a print screen of the network requests we can better help find where bottlenecks are. One thing I've been looking at is HTTP 2 if you have a lot of external calls this can speed the process up a lot

You didn't even bother to change the order of the list when you copied and pasted all the headings from here?

http://www.sparringmind.com/speed-up-wordpress/

I know you probably can't post links yet, but in IMO you should at least specify the source instead of posting other peoples work like it was your own.

Why I bother to change the order of list, I am just delivering information.

Your reacting like a child, like I stole your friend's toy and you found in my room.

Touché. You caught me there partner

Still - spam is just anoying, plagiarism is illegal

plagiarism is illegal, but solution of any problem is same, you can say anything in different manner to stay unique,

You didn't even bother to change the order of the list when you copied and pasted all the headings from here?

http://www.sparringmind.com/speed-up-wordpress/

I know you probably can't post links yet, but in IMO you should at least specify the source instead of posting other peoples work like it was your own.

and BTW my friend droping links in forums are old techniques.

To make the website load faster add contents with normal fonts and the size of the images should be less and compressed.You can find all the details in this website on how to make your website load faster.Visit www.seoagencieslondon.com.

 

Go away Spammer!