Vladimir Prelovac has an excellent article on optimizing WordPress for speed available now. It covers plenty of bases, such as
- Caching using WP Super Cache
- MySQL Caching
- Checking plugins for slowdowns
- Optimizing tables
If you ever experienced slow WordPress admin panel, “MySQL server has gone away” message, pages taking forever to load or you want to prepare your site for a major increase in traffic (for example Digg front page) this is the guide for you.
It’s not an all-encompasing guide, of course. There are plenty of little tweaks you can do that can shave precious milliseconds off your loading times, such as cutting out unnecessary template tags, such as bloginfo() tags, and replacing them with the values they output.
And of course there are plenty of other things to tweak. PHP, Apache, and MySQL can all be configured carefully for maximum speed, assuming you have root access to your server. You can optimize your templates to decrease loading and rendering times. Yahoo has a few tips.
Performance optimization is always a good idea, especially if your blog is on a shared hosting account, or if you have a very high traffic blog (I’m talking to you, TechCrunch and Mashable!).
