In Fire We Trust

As you may know WordPress is a blog system based on PHP and MySQL. All in all it is quite agile and speedy system. But as every application it has certain speed. Here i will describe few ways of increasing it’s speed. I am writing this after having tried everything that is described here.

The main directions for improving the speed are as follows

• Speed up MySQL - this is easily accomplished with increasing the caches. This means that MySQL supports caching results and queries.
• The second direction is speeding up PHP - although it is a fast language, it has it’s drawbacks, especially in big environments where lots of files are being included. To speed it up we can use different caches or accelerators. I am using the Zend product phpaccelerator. I achived about 50% gain i.e. rendering time decreased twice
• The third direction is speeding up Wordpress itself. That can be accomplished by several means.
  • Turn off all unneeded extensions. If they are not used they eat resources
  • Stay away from AJAX themes
  • Fix the variable $now - it is used for getting all posts published till now and displaying them on the page. When fixed a speedup of 70% is not uncommon
  • Use plugin for generating static pages - it is much more easier to serve static content. The server load is much less than that from dinamyc pages.

As all this are my recomendations. Everyone use them as desired.