In this post im going to talk about a couple of simple changes you can make to your settings or wp-config.php. Although they only be very small changes, when you add them up it makes a big difference to your speed.
Some of these changes may require you editing the wp-config.php file, but some do have plug-ins if your not sure.
Reduce The Amount Of Homepage Posts
Having too many post displaying on your blogs homepage can reduce the speed of your blog. Goto your settings tab in your blogs admin, select reading and reduce the number of blog posts on the homepage ( i recommend setting it to 5).
Reduce Hyper-linking
This is a good idea if your blog is getting a lot of traffic, and more so if you receive a high amount of comments.
When ever another blogger links to one of your posts in their blog, it produces a trackback . Although these do help in building good relationships with fellow bloggers, they can slow down your blog a lot.
Goto Settings>Discussion and uncheck Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) .
Managing Post Revisions
Each and every time that you edit your posts or make revisions, WordPress saves a copy of the older version.
Its very easy to turn post revisions of by editing your wp-config.php file.
php file:
define (‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);
If you want to limit the amount of revisions, rather than turn them off all together.
Define (‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 1); [this will save 1 revision of each post]
Alternatively, if you regularly use your post revisions, you may want to keep the feature enabled. If you want to keep your revisions then there’s a plugin called better delete revision, this will better help you manage them.
Remove The Trash
Whenever you delete anything in WordPress, be it a comment or a post it will go into the trash where it stays for 30 days.
This may be a good feature in case you trash something by mistake. However, all these trashed comments and posts mount up making your blog run slower and slower. I tend to delete mine at least once a week.
Access the trash by selecting the Posts sidebar, then choosing trash. Make sure that there are no posts in the trash that you want to keep, then it delete.
You can edit your config file to make it empty automatically. Just go into your wp-config.php file, and add the following code, with X defined as the number of days that you want a post to stick around for after you delete it:
define (‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, X);
For me, 5 days is usually long enough. So put in:
define (‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 5);
That should save you a little bit of space, as your files won’t be sitting around for so long after you delete them.
Keep WordPress up-to-date
This is a no brainer as far as im concerned, make sure that your blog always has the latest version running. The majority of WordPress updates will include performance updates.
