A couple of weeks ago I got a frantic communication from my favorite client, Nilofer Merchant. To say she was freaking out is an understatement; she had written yet another popular post on the Harvard Business Review website and the traffic was bringing her website to a crawl. Some of the slowness was caused by her hosting company but I found several things that I could do on her server and in WordPress to speed things up quite a bit. Now we’re ready for all the traffic that her next TED Talk will generate…

Here’s the before shot:

Click image to enlarge…

Here are some of the steps I took:

1. Enabled browser caching on the server side by adding this code to the .htaccess file:

# cache images/pdf docs for 10 days
<FilesMatch “.(ico|pdf|jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=864000, public, must-revalidate”
Header unset Last-Modified

# cache html/htm/xml/txt diles for 2 days
<FilesMatch “.(html|htm|xml|txt|xsl)$”>
Header set Cache-Control “max-age=7200, must-revalidate”

2. Installed and configured Donncha’s WP SuperCache plugin.

3. Installed and configured the WP Minify plugin.

4. Installed and configured WP Smush.it.

5. Removed the big fat feature slider from the front page.

6. Got rid of NextGen Gallery [too many PageSpeed errors -- using a WordPress slider instead].

7. Stopped loading featured image thumbnails for every post.

Here are the results:

Click image to enlarge…

If you need to squeeze a little more juice out of your WordPress site, comment below or connect with me so we can talk about how this applies to you and your situation…