Speeding up Wordpress

[xoggoth]

A relative with more money than sense paid a pro a small fortune for a website using Wordpress. It looks nice but is very slow to load. Have run it through various free test things, yslow, pingdom etc. There's images that could be compressed more and have found some other fairly easy things on the net, like using gzip, minify, using cookie free domains.

However, I think much of the problem is the sheer number of scripts and styles included. Don't want to spend ages on it, so is there
a cross reference or other easy way of finding which ones are actually needed on any particular page? Much ta.

[DirtyDog]

I know this isn't an answer to your exact question, but...

Have you tried installing the W3 Total Cache plugin, which can help performance by caching lots of different things. I'd also install "Exploit Scanner" and check whether there is anything nasty going on, and also Sucuri Security - SiteCheck Malware Scanner which will check whether you are on any blacklists. Finally, TPC! Memory Usage will show you what memory the site is using, so you might be able to see whether the problem lies with RAM or disk access.

[administrator]

I would also look at the hosting. Could be that the site doesn't perform badly but that it is the server it is sat on that is struggling due to other activity on the box. Try downloading it all and sticking it on a VM or whatever local testing set up you have and see how it performs there. Good luck!

[Boney M]

I know this isn't an answer to your exact question, but...

Have you tried installing the W3 Total Cache plugin, which can help performance by caching lots of different things. I'd also install "Exploit Scanner" and check whether there is anything nasty going on, and also Sucuri Security - SiteCheck Malware Scanner which will check whether you are on any blacklists. Finally, TPC! Memory Usage will show you what memory the site is using, so you might be able to see whether the problem lies with RAM or disk access.

Would echo the W3 Total cache, made a hell of a difference for a couple of charity websites I am involved in

[Spoiler]

Would echo the W3 Total cache, made a hell of a difference for a couple of charity websites I am involved in

W3 Total Cache + CloudFlare ?

[xoggoth]

Cheers all. Had already added Cloudflare without any very obvious improvement.

Wary of caching of any sort, had problems last year on another site of people seeing old versions of page unless they clicked refresh, or was that summit else? Not an expert in this stuff.

[Boney M]

W3 Total Cache + CloudFlare ?

Not aware of cloudflare, will give it a look over the weekend

[Samik224]

Images/ scripts

First rule of thumb for me would be to check any images that load with the page. How big are they? What file format? I would suggest making sure they are all . PNG and are all under 100KB. I've seen sites with 1MB photos, and trust me, they add up.

Also (this is more technical) you can look into what scripts are loading first. If the HTML loads the header, but then requires a few other scripts to load, the body will not load until the script is loaded (since the script tag is in the header). My suggestion, in this case, would be to move the script tags into the body right before the div/ class/ element where they are needed.

-Sami

[xoggoth]

Cheers for extra answers. Cut down images as far as poss.

Most of the references in the page are quite unnecessary, I saved to disk, deleted almost all the js and css files and the page still worked fine. I would have thought Wordpress allowed "experts" to be a bit more choosy and not include unnecessary stuff.

[d000hg]

It does - experts edit those files by hand.