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How to Optimize WordPress?
English: WordPress Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms available, and is used widely for different types of sites. However, depending on how your WordPress site is set up, it may not be running as efficiently as it could be. When your Wordress site is not running efficiently, it can load slowly and disrupt your visitors, and in more extreme cases, cause your site to consume more CPU and memory on the server.
There are some things you can do to optimize WordPress so that it loads quicker and uses less server resources. I’ve devised a list of 4 things you can do to make sure that your WordPress site is running in its peak condition.
1) Keep WordPress up to date
The WordPress developers are always making changes and optimizations, so it’s important that you keep your WP installation up to date. If you installed WP through Fantastico you can simply log into cPanel > Fantastico and upgrade there, or if you installed WP manually you can download the latest version at http://wordpress.org and follow their instructions for upgrading.
2) Watch your plugins
It’s also important to keep your plugins up to date (which newer WP versions allow you to do very easily), but it’s also important to not bog down your site with a ton of plugins. The more that the server has to load in a single page, the longer it’s going to take. Since WordPress has thousands of plugins available, it’s very tempting to install more plugins than you actually need. Unfortunately, having too many site-facing plugins (or known “bad” plugins) installed in your WP instance is the #1 cause of problems related to slow loading and CPU/memory overages that our customers have reported. Therefore, you should disable any plugins you’re not using or that you don’t need. Generally, plugins that collect data from remote sites or run interactively (like chat plugins) are the most problematic on shared and v-dedicated servers.
The follow plugins specifically are known to cause issues:
wp-forum, wp digg, geo-mashup, wassup
Yahoo! Site Explorer Tools : How to Verification
- Log in to Yahoo Site Explorer with your Yahoo! account. You can also submit your site as a Guest.
- Enter your blog URL and click Add My Site.
- You are presented with several authentication methods. Choose By Adding a META Tag to My Home Page.
- Copy the meta tag, which looks something like <META name=”y_key” content=”99dd95bf0abb1c40″> .
- Leave the verification page open and go to your blog Dashboard.
- Open the Tools, Tools page and paste the code in the appropriate field.
- Click Save Changes.
- Go back to the verification page and click Ready to Authenticate.
- Go to the main page using the My Sites link on the left. In the status column, look for a green check mark indicating your site has been validated.
Related Post:WordPress Security, Basic Tips and Plugins to Install
WordPress is an awesome publishing software and Auttomatic (the company behind WordPress) always tries hard to secure it so that millions of blogs can be safe from hacker threats. Recently TechCrunch the world’s biggest blog, got hacked twice in a short time frame of eight hours.
Basic Tips
- Don’t install WordPress in the root directory. Install it in some folder with a weird name which is not easy to know.
- Change the WP prefix of database tables. It will save you from sql injection hacking.
- Never use the admin account. After installing WordPress, you should change the administrator user name.
Plugins
It encrypts your admin password when logging in without the use of SSL. This is the best plugin if you want to encrypt your passwords and don’t have ssl certificate to use.
