WordPress has become the most famous overloading high CPU script in the world thanks to its popularity with new users. The good news is, even as a new user, optimizing WordPress is pretty easy if you take sometime and follow the steps below.
We listed each optimization for WordPress in order of most helpful.
Before starting, we suggest making a full back up of your WordPress website and database.
- Install caching software
Without any caching in your WordPress it has to check every link, image, tag, and more to load each page. To avoid running everything for each visit, there are two caching programs you can easily add as a Plugin from your WordPress admin section. The most common is WP Super Cache and the second is W3 Total Cache. Both are trusted and used by millions of WordPress sites.
- Make smaller pages or add Lazy Load
Making your pages smaller will have a major impact on your load. In fact splitting your page in half will normally lower more than half your load use. If you are still dead set on a long page than at least add a lazy Load plug in. The common amount of posts on a page is 5, anything over that is at risk of having load issues.
- Remove tags
Tags seem like a great way to tell Google what SEO traffic to send to your site. The truth is, Google has said many times it does not use tags for SEO purposes. Being the third most common reason for overloading WordPress and with no real SEO benefit, removing tags is a great way to lower your CPU and load use. We suggest that if you remove tags to make sure and use sufficient categories to help your visitors navigate well.
- Remove admin-ajax
It's too detailed to explain how to disable admin-ajax in this list, but we have put together a nice blog post showing how you can here: Remove Admin-Ajax
- Remove wp-cron
It's also too detailed to explain how to disable wp-cron in this list, but we have put together a nice blog post showing how you can here: Disable wp-cron.php
- Add Akismet
This will block spam and junk from wasting your sites resources.
- Limit login attempts
It is important to block hackers and attackers, there are multiple plugins that do this well.
- Keep media compressed well
Having large images and media requires more time to load which adds more load use.
There are many other ways to help WordPress, these are just the top ones that really should be done to any new WordPress that plans on getting a substantial amount of traffic.
