Over the weekend, my WordPress Blog started to get very slow.  With every day, every hour, it seemed to get slower, and slower.   Over the past few months, I have really bumped up my blogging., posting more photos, videos and articles.  Since I joined Triberr and am sharing on Stumbleupon regularly, my traffic has also increased tremendously.  With this growth, it would make sense that my blog might get a tad slower, but the last thing I want with all the new traffic is reduction in speed!  I started to panic.  I know from research and learning over the years that a slow blog gets penalized by Google when they analyze the quality of your site, and even more importantly readers get impatient and go elsewhere before the page ever fully develops.   I began to seriously assess the situation yesterday early evening and went to work on getting it running faster than it ever has.  I am going to share with you what I did in case you have or ever have the same problem.  Before I begin, I want to say that I wish I could give my cats, Abigail and Madison, some credit for the new faster version of Kritters that Twitter but the truth is, Abigail was busy socializing on Twitter all night and Madison was upstairs playing on my his Pilates mat.

Although adorable, they were useless.

 

 

 

 

So it must have been around 5:30 PM EST I really started to get antsy about how long it was taking my blog to load.  Here is what I did and the results from each.

(please keep in mind this is all using a WordPress Blog)

 

• Check Speed of Blog

My first step was to find out just how long it was taking to load.  I went directly to a site called Pingdom.com and clicked on tools.  This website is a fantastic website for all types of uptime monitoring and they will do free load time analysis of your blog.  Simply type in your url once you click on tools.  The recommended time a website or blog should take to load is about 10-11 seconds, but I say even less if possible.  Just give it a quick try, count to eight and see if you are still eager to wait around even one more second for the page on your computer to arrive.  I get cranky around eight.  So I figure, even if you still have your captive audience at 10 or 11 they are starting to get annoyed, your fabulous article could be read with bitter eyes.  As you can imagine, I almost fell out of my rocker when Pingdom.com came back with a time of 27.5 seconds.  I wanted to vomit but instead began the work.

 

• Eliminate Unnecessary Plugins

I went into my Plug-Ins and deleted all the ones that were deactivated and just sitting there. I then scanned through the remaining ones, and got rid of any duplicate types.  I had two SEO Plugins and two Social Media Share Plugins so I was able to eliminate one of each.

 

• Smush.it

After I got rid of all the yucky Plugins, I began to add a few new ones.  Just like the old Plugins were sitting there taking up space, these new ones are designed to help free up space.  A good eliminator of unwanted space is Smush.it.  This is a really awesome tool that allows you to literally ‘smush’ your photos down to a more reasonable blog size.  Once you add this Plugin, you will not have to do anything else.  All photos going forward will be reduced without you having to do anything.  If you would like to ‘smush’ some already posted photos, you can do that as well!  This is manual however, so you will need to go into your media library.  Since you have already uploaded the Smush.it Plugin, you will see smushitnow directly below each photo.  Click there.  Wala, smushing begins.

 Okay, pause here.  By now I am getting a little tired and needing some energy so I grabbed a few Jolly Rancher candies and a cup of coffee.  Don’t worry, I first drank the coffee, than popped the J.R.  This seemed like a good time to check my progress.  I went back to Pingdom.com to see how the speed was improving.  Good news, I was down to 18.56 seconds, but that is still way too high.

 

• WP-Optimize

Still wanting to increase my speed, I added another Plugin called WP-Optimize.  This Plugin is fabulous because it erases and deletes all SPAM comments with a few clicks.  It cleans up unwanted comments, and removed post revisions quickly.  I had thousands of each so you could feel the weight of my blog get lighter with a few simple clicks. Good stuff.

 

• Server

The last and probably most important task I completed last night at 10:30PM EST was to call GoDaddy and find out how the server looked.  Horrible, they told me.  In fact, all of my work felt for nothing because there was a major blockage on the server my blog sits on which was now causing my time to load at 40.56 seconds.  I threw up in my mouth.  WHAT should I do?  I was lucky in that moving to a new proprietary server call the 4GH was the answer to the jammed up over crowded server issues.  It is very important to have a functioning server.   Some people even eventually have their own.  Once I was transferred over to the 4GH my speed came in at 6 seconds.  (this can fluctuate by a second or two from time to time, but still well under the standard 11 seconds)  When I saw the 6 seconds today, I broke out in a cartwheel.

 

• W3 Total Cache

The last Plugin I plan to install later this week is W3 Total Cache.  This will not only improve server performance, it will reduce download times.  I’ll post after with the results of my new speed to let you know how much it helps.

 I am so much happier with my blog speed and so are my readers!  I had increased traffic average all day and more comments coming in then usual.   Please leave me a comment with your feedback or any questions you have.  More tips are welcome!

 

-Lisa

“Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.”

- Joseph Addison