1. Use your file manager or your favorite FTP client to locate a file called error_log and delete it. If you’ve never done this cleanup before, chances are the file size is already running in GB, which affects the server’s response.
2. Next, disable your visit tracking tools like awstats, webalizer as most bloggers use Google Analytics as client side tracking code.
3. Enabling file compression is one of the main steps to improve performance and you can do it from your cpanel (mostly an option named ‘Optimize Website’). You have to compress the MIME file types ‘text/html text/plain text/xml text/javascript text/css’
4. Next, you need to ensure that your static content (such as theme images) downloads faster by setting the content expiration period to a longer duration. You can create .htaccess files in respective folders with proper ExpriresDefault setting (exact content of htaccess is out of scope of this article)
Now let’s move on to WordPress blog setup and theme optimization part.
5. As a first step, check if your theme has broken code, such as “Featured Posts” which sometimes loops through the post collection twice. Even so called professional and SEO optimized themes have several pieces of code that don’t work. Another related tip here is to use the default “more” tag feature than the theme’s own logic to display post excerpts.
6. Next you need to run all your plugins and not just disable but remove all unwanted plugins. You should be very careful when choosing your WordPress plugins and as far as possible keep the number of plugins below 12 or even 10. Another important point here is to avoid plugins that use extensive database storage. For example, some affiliate and content link advertising plugins sometimes duplicate your posts. As with the theme, non-functioning plugins also require code cleanup.
7. Reducing the number of posts on the home page will definitely make your home page load faster. You should hit an optimal number of posts to display based on your overall homepage payload. Something like 5-6 posts is ideal.
8. The use of images should be optimized below. As much as possible, you should reduce the number of images per page to less than 10 or less. You should mention the size (width and height) of the image every time you use them to help the browser render it smoothly and quickly. Also, never use formats like BMP, but instead opt for more compressed GIF or PNG image formats.
9. Compressing and consolidating the javascript files is the next step for which you can use the WP-Minify WordPress plugin. This needs careful implementation.
10. Reducing the number of ad units used is the last step. More adblocks means more scripts and more DNS lookups/HTTP requests. Even Google AdSense’s own javascript file is huge and therefore affects overall performance.
Bonus tip: Gravatar is something you use very often in your WordPress comments feature. When a particular commenter doesn’t have a Gravatar image, it usually causes a redirect to get the default Gravatar image. When you have 10 of these commenters, you are causing multiple redirect requests. You can optimize this by choosing the Discussion settings from your WordPress admin panel. Use ‘Gravatar logo’ instead of ‘mystery man’ as default avatar. This causes the image to be generated automatically instead of generating HTTP redirects.
Happy blogging!