WordPress is one of the best Bloggin/CMS engines around. The sheer functionality available, coupled with the available plugins, themes and widgets will satisfy most of your design needs. Best of all, minimal programming (in most cases, read no programming knowledge here) experience is required to get everything up and running quickly and efficiently.
You still have to be mindful of basic website design principles, as a bloated, overly-complex and slow website will not attract many visitors. The 4 plugins that I am talking about should be the first thing you do to your site after installing WordPress. They will greatly contribute to the speed of the page downloads, as well as saving bandwidth and reducing processing time on the server. You could even say these plugins will help reduce your site’s carbon footprint!
So the plugins I have chosen are the following:
This little plugin gzip compresses your html, javascript and css content before sending it to the user’s browser. Compatibility is first checked with the browser to make sure it supports compression (it should be said that almost all modern browsers support this functionality nowadays). The time spent compressing and decompressing the content is greatly offset by the amount of bandwidth saved, and hence a much quicker page load time for your users.
One suggestion I can make if you are using the Apache web server to host your website; see if you can get gzip compression running natively on apache instead of using this plugin. PHP code is far less efficient at compressing content than the native Apache modules. Setting up Apache compression is beyond the scope of this post, but information can easily be found through a simple Google search.
Under the hood WordPress is a very complex piece of machinery, with many hooks and function options for themes, plugins and widgets. This functionality comes at a cost, and your server invariably has to do a considerable amount of work to generate viewable pages for your users. This will inevitably slow your site down as more users come to your site – we all hate slow websites, don’t we? WP Super Cache tries to address this by caching content generated by you server. Invariably content does not change often between page requests, and serving cached content generated previously can seriously reduce server load and page load time.
Another popular caching technique is to tell the user’s browser to cache content on the browser itself. So instead of fetching that rather large picture from your server every time, the user’s browser will cache the image locally and then server the image from the local cache in the future (usually, you will tell the browser how long the content should be cached for). Be careful with using this plugin, as you are no longer in control of when the content of your site is completely refreshed – I would suggest disabling client-side caching a day or two before making big changes to the layout of your site.
Unfortunately, WP Super Cache does not give you much control over client-side caching (it just switches it on without giving you much control over it). Client-side caching can either be controlled by using the Apache server modules, or alternatively another module called Quick Cache – a good alternative to WP Super Cache that will give you options for setting client-side caching on or off.
WP Widget cache works with WP Super Cache to effectively cache the content of your widgets. This helps to reduce the time your server spends querying the MySQL database to create your widget’s content. This plugin also allows you to fine tune per widget the amount of time the content should be cached. So you can cache the archives widget for a longer period of time than say a picture album display widget.
Definitely combine this plugin with WP Super Cache (Quick Cache will also work). Developers invariably indent and space code neatly when developing stuff for your WordPress site. All the spaces and indentations really help when writing and debugging code, unfortunately they add lots of unnecessary bytes to the overall size of the scripts on your server (just in case you were wondering, expecting the developers to remove all the spaces after writing the code is not a very practical solution either!).
Enter our featured plugin, before the page is served to the user, this plugin scans through the code and removes all those unnecessary white spaces and newline characters. Can you believe that this process will reduce the page sizes by as much as 30%! And if you add in the benefits of page caching, the impact of running this extra process will be minimal.
We have just looked at a few of the awesome things one can do with WordPress. As you will see when you try these plugins out, no programming knowledge is required to get the basic functionality up-and-running. We hope you will enjoy using WordPress as much as we have. Happy blogging!
