Wordpress Web Optimization: 15 Tips And Plugins To Monitor, Speed Up And Optimize Your Wordpress Blog

As a famous open source and feature-rich blogging platfom, Wordpress requires a stable and good hosting environment. There are a few recommended hosting providers listed on the Wordpress official website. These hosting providers meet the minimum system requirements of Wordpress. However, there are a lot of potential providers that meet the requirements. WPWebHost and Exabytes are among the great Wordpress hosting providers.

Bloggers can actually optimize their blogs to consume less server usages and less bandwidth. There are different ways to do the web optimization for Wordpress, for example you can install plugins to monitor, tweak and speed up the loading speed of your Wordpress blog.

Besides installing the plugin, you can tweak your theme and remove the unnecessary features so that your Wordpress system consumes less resource and load faster.

In this article, we are going to look into 15 different plugins and tips to optimize your Wordpress site.

Wordpress Plugins To Monitor, Cache And Speed Up Your Blog

1. WP System Health

WP System Health can display basic server info and Wordpress PHP memory usages. Besides these, the plugin will shows the PHP information that related to Wordpress and Wordpress database table utilization status. By using the WP System Health, bloggers can easily detect the Wordpress system misconfiguration and memory race issues. Wordpress blog’s administrators can install this plugin to easily track the system health status and help them easily identify the problem.

2. Hosting Monitor Plugin

Hosting Monitor is a Wordpress plugin developed by WebHostingSearch.com. This plugin will display the system information of your current hosting server. For example, you can read the uptime, load averages, current users, hardware information and memory usage. This information will be display in your sidebar widget while the administrator has the right to control which information is to be hidden or shown.

3. WP super Cache

WP super Cache is a well-known caching plugin for Wordpress. After installing the plugin, the system will generate static HTML pages and serve your visitors with static contents instead of the dynamic one. By using cache, you can reduce your server memory usage, bandwidth and also your hosting bill. Furthermore, static pages also decrease the loading time, which means your visitors will load the content faster! So, blogs that always hit Digg.com’s frontpage are encourage to activate this plugin.

4. IP Host Blocker

This plugin can redirect unlogged in users depending on their IP addresses. Administrators can also use this plugin to redirect users from a certain proxy to a customized page. By using this plugin, administrators can block anonymous visits to the blogs. Blocking the anonymous visits will save your bandwidth and also the server usage. A good example of using this plugin is to monitor the spammers IP address and redirect them before they comments on your blog. By doing this, you can save your database space besides the bandwidth sad server usage.

5. Throttle

Throttle is a Wordpress plugin that can limit the bandwidth and scripts load. It uses API to monitor and report server load to the plugins and themes. Plugin and theme developers can then uses the Throttle API to limit the non-essential features when the load of the system is peak. This plugin is useful if your blog often receives traffic spikes or always hits the popular social media frontpages.

6. Error Reporting

This plugin can log errors and record them in a file or send the errors as email notifications to the site administrators. Ping errors will also be displayed in the administrator dashboard widget. Administrators can always check the reports for any errors and fix them immediately while the errors occur.

7. Amazon S3 for WordPress

This plugin allows you to use Amazon S3 service to host your media for your Wordpress blog. amazon S3 is a cheap and effective way to handle traffic spikes on your blog. All you need to use this plugin is an Amazon S3 account and a PHP5 server environment. After you setup your account and plugin, you can upload and browser files hosted at your Amazon S3 account. You can even create folders and the generated thumbnails are stored at your Amazon S3 bucket too. That means, you can manage your Amazon S3 files without leaving your Wordpress admin dashboard.

8. http:BL WordPress Plugin

http:BL WordPress Plugin allows bloggers to verify the visitors IP addresses with Project Honey Database. It helps to determine whether your visitors are email harvesters, comment spammers or other malicious creatures. By activating and verifying their IP addresses, you can block potential harmful visitors from accessing your website content. So, you can save your server bandwidth and also the memory usage.

Essential Tips And Tricks To Optimize Your Wordpress Blog

1. Combine and compress Javascript and CSS files

Browser can only download limited items at the same time. If you have multiple Javascript files to be loaded, then the browser will send the request individually and queue the files to be downloaded. So we can resolve this problem by adding the names of the other files to the URL of the first file. For example, you may have:

http://www.domain.com/js/jquery.js

http://www.domain.com/js/jquery.slider.js

http://www.domain.com/js/jquery.tooltip.js

You can actually combine these files into a single file:

http://www.domain.com/js/jquery.js,jquery.slider.js,jquery.tooltip.js

The server will know that the page requires multiple JS files, and it will concatenate the requested files, compress it and send is as one file to the browser. You can read more from the source of the article.

2. Remove unnecessary PHP executions

You should replace the Wordpress PHP tags with static HTML so that the number of PHP executions and database calls reduced. For example, you can replace the <?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?> with your blog’s description, instead of calling the Wordpress template tag each time your visitors visit your blog. Another example of Wordpress template tag that can be replaced with static HTML is the <?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>

Most of the free or even premium themes use the Wordpress template tags, since these tags help the developers to easily deploy the templates across different sites. But you can easily replace the template tags by viewing your source code and edit them by using on if your favorite text editors.

More information can be found on the source article.

3. Optimize CSS and Javascript files

The CSS and Javascript files can be optimized to reduce the file sizes. For example, the extra blank line and unused CSS classes should be removed. By optimizing the file sizes, you can effectively reduse the server bandwidth and save your diskspace too. There are online tools which able to help you perform optimization to your Javascript and CSS files. CSSOptimizer and Javascript Compressor are among the best optimizers.

4. Optimize your images

If you use a lot of images on your blog, then you should consider optimizing your images to reduce the file size and increase the loading speed. We did covered the image optimization tools before, which you can either optimize the images online, or download the applications and optimize them before upload to your server.

5. Move the Javascript calls to the footer

Server can only load a certain limit of items at the same time. If you are using too many Javascripts in your Wordpress site, then you should compress it using the first technique that we covered earlier. Besides compress the scripts, you should also move them to the footer/bottom of the page so that the content will be served first. Imagine, if you use a lot of script tags, visitors have to wait a long time before they can read your content, and visitors may leave your site if they take too long to load.

6. Use Google Ajax Libraries API

Google Ajax Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for popular Ajax libraries. You can get a lot of benefits by using the Google Ajax Libraries. For example, the caching of these files can be done correctly by Google. Google has the distributed CND at various locations, so these files are “close” enough to your visitors and indirectly reduce the loading time.

For first time visitors, they can load your page faster since these scripts may already load in their PC. The browsers will automatically detect the version number and will try to load the scripts locally.

7. Remove unnecessary plugins

Wordpress plugins make calls to database, which will slow down the loading speed. Bloggers are encourage to deactivate unnecessary plugins so that the number of database calls can be reduced

Deactivate the unnecessary plugins can also remove the unwanted hooks. Hooks are provided by Wordpress to allow the plugin to ‘hook into’ the rest of Wordpress and unnecessary hooks will slow down your Wordpress site.