Wordpress speedup

[sesertin]

Hello Everyone,

What plugins do you use to speed up wp?

[sandlappercreative]

There are a handful of caching plugins available, but I usually use W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.

[tomleger]

Also if you are getting a lot of traffic, a CDN is a good investment. CloudFlare.com is free. Others are around $20/month.

Finally, we encounter a lot of clients who come to us complaining their sites are loading slowly. Using something like tools.pingdom.com you might be able to tell if there is a giant image file that is slowing everything down. Also, some themes (free and premium) are not optimized well and load jquery 6 times, etc, which will slow down the page speed in a big way.

Finally, and I hate to rag on them all the time, but GoDaddy's hosting is painfully slow and can barely be helped. Move your site if you are on their servers.

[sandlappercreative]

Agreed on everything Tom said above - some solid advice here. You can also try YSlow to locate elements that are causing long load times.

I'll add to check how many database calls your site is performing as a result of the theme and plugins you're running - I have seen this absolutely kill performance. There's a handy little script to tell you some database stats found here.

[softclick]

We used W3 Total Cache for about 2 years. But there was a problem with recent versions of this plugin.

The cache is cleared every time, we posted something new.

We have 100.000+ posts in our WP-database. And each time (100+ times a day) we published something, it cleared all our cache objects. (at least in disk-caching mode -> no matter, what settings we used)

So we switched to Quick Cache. This plugin is way simplier. But it does the job for us.

[sandlappercreative]

Good deal - I'll have to check that one out. I've had some issues with caching plugins before, but it really just depends on the individual setup as to which one works best in each instance.