More WordPress Tips To A Faster Blog

Writing by Brick Marketing on Monday, 18 of February , 2008 at 7:26 am

Our previous post on WordPress Tips looked at decreasing the time it took to load and run the PHP code together with plugins and widgets. Today we will take another look at the sidebars but first, one of the biggest enemies to time when it comes to loading a page, graphics.

Graphics, particularly the memory hungry high resolution photos can take forever to load. Just visit some of the celebrity sites - and grab a coffee while you are waiting for it to finish loading. I am sure you have witnessed this effect.

There are a number of ways to sidestep the slow loading. While it may sound obvious, reducing the size of the graphic helps. You can do this using a good graphic editor. If you cannot reduce the size physically, then try reducing the size within the graphics link. You can use either pixels or % and use the <height=”xx”> and <width=”xx”> tags. You can also use a blog plugin like ImageScaler to do the job more efficiently. Another option is to use a plugin that render thumbnails of the image. Hover the mouse over the image and it appears full size. Images are always going to effect the load speed of a blog. The key is to use them wisely.

The second WordPress tip to a faster blog involves the sidebars. WordPress by default allows a maximum of nine text boxes. You do not have to use all nine boxes. Wherever you have related code, for example, banners with links, they can be combined within the one text box. If you have nine text boxes in use, each box is loaded into memory, the code run and the results rendered to the screen - one box at a time. By combining the code into only a few text boxes you will gain extra speed on loading.

These WordPress tips work well to help your blog load faster. What is most important is that you take the time on a regular basis to review your blog. Make sure everything is up to date. Remove what is no longer needed and keep everything optimized for speed.

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Category: Blog Plugins, WordPress tips

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