Blogging Forum Discuss 5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast in the vBulletinSetup Information forums; Here are 5 plugins listed on problogger that will help speed up your wordpress blog. 5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast WP Super Cache by Donncha O ...

[Brandon Sheley]

Here are 5 plugins listed on problogger that will help speed up your wordpress blog.

5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast

• WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh- A very fast caching plugin for WordPress. This is what has been saving me from traffic spikes. In a normal WordPress install, every time a visitor comes to your site WordPress builds the webpage for them from scratch by pulling information out of the database and processing a variety of things in the software. The bottom line is, this is time consuming - and usually after you’ve published a blog post, it doesn’t change very much except when people comment. When a page is loaded, WP Super Cache caches a static (one time generated) copy of that webpage, and then every time a new visitor comes, it preferentially gives them the cached version of the page. This is much faster, and has totally saved me when a rush of people come from one of my posts going viral.
• GZIP Output by Austin Matzko- This plugin automatically compresses CSS, Javascript and HTML output, allowing it to travel faster from your blog to a visitor’s browser. According to Best Practices On Yahoo! Developer Network: “Gzipping generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip.” This is a simple change that will not affect what your readers see at all - except that it will load in their browser faster.
• WP Minify by Thaya Kareeson- This plugin uses the Minify engine to combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time. Like the previous plugin, it also automatically shrinks the size of your files without you having to do anything.
• W3 Total Cache by Frederick Townes- If I was starting a brand new blog today, this is what I would use on day one - and then go with a more complicated set up (like I have currently) after it grows. This plugin is amazing. It includes minify capabilities, caching (but less aggressive than WP Super Cache) and GZip compression.
• Free CDN by Phoenixheart- If you have static files (images, javascript, css) taking a long time to load and slowing your site down, you may benefit by installing Free CDN - especially if you have large images. Briefly, a CDN is a content delivery network. Static files are cached on the CDN and pulled from their servers instead of your own - which means that your server has to do less work, and potentially can serve more people at once, faster.
• Bonus: Upgrade WordPress! This isn’t a plugin, but every time a new version of WordPress there’s a good chance they’ve optimized the software so it runs faster than before. Be sure to test your blog after you upgrade to make sure everything still runs smoothly.

[ArnyVee]

Thanks for the info Brandon!

I'll be definitely adding a couple of these to my WP installs.

[Hafsoh]

Nice share, honestly, all these plugins are new to me except WP Super Cache, which i use at my site..

[2dub]

Brandon,
Have you ever considered setting up a forum dedicated to WordPress like you did here or are doing at IPBSetup? I think it's a market waiting to be tapped into. Right now the only good consolidated source for WP is their own site, but discussion there is lacking. You probably have a pretty large instant audience too. I'd try, but don't have enough knowledge on WP to get it off the ground.

[jacksonp]

Wow, its great. Everything is super organized and really great for anything and everything really. Thanks!

[reese0117]

Thanks for these pieces of information. I'm about to Google this topic, thank God I saw this post. About upgrading, is it true that you could loose some of your content while upgrading?

[themeswarehouse]

Thanks for the plugins list, I think I going to use it on all of my blog.