10 wordpress performance optimisation tips

I wanted to prepare my wordpress powered blog for an influx of traffic from social media sites such as reddit.com or digg.com, in case one of my articles got big, so I decided to investigate what could be done to optimise the performance my blog.

This is the result…

1. Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Each version has more performance improvements. Try using the WordPress Automated Upgrade plugin.
2. Avoid using lots of large javascript or css files or huge images in your site template or try to Minify them.
3. Disable any plugins that you don’t use or need.
4. Enable WordPress Object Caching, and learn how.
5. Try WP-Cache2 or WP Super Cache (based on WP-Cache) ideal for large sites, with lots of traffic.
6. Optimise your MySQL database tables.
7. If you’re serving lots of images, offload some to free image hosting sites such as flickr or imageshack.
8. Use Xdebug to check if the plugins you are using are causing performance issues. If they are, get rid of them.
9. Use Mysql Query Caching to speed up calls to the database.
10. Use PHP Opcode Caching such as eAccelerator.

Also read how to configure Apache for performance.