Despite it’s greatly accepted as a platform for the bloggers and as an excellent CMS, it is no secret that WordPress is quite insatiable when it comes to the memory. This high memory usage soon becomes noticeable when your blog gets a decent number of visitors. Then the server surrenders.

Installing one of the many caching plugins will fix 90% of server problems, while the server update will solve the rest. But it is not all in uptime and downtime process; we also want a website that loads quickly every day. Follow these 10 steps that are listed below and instead of an old man who is lying on the couch you will get an athlete ready to win the decathlon.

Step 1 – Installing a cache plugin

Caching solves about 90 % of the server problems. It noticeably eases the load of the site by presenting your visitors static files instead of every time asking numerous queries to the server. There are several plugins that will do this instead of you, such as: WP – Cache, WP Super Cache, Hyper Cache and W3 Total Cache.

Our choice is WP Super Cache. We’ve been using it for years, and a few days ago it was released an update and it does an excellent job. However, if you still want to try alternatives, our recommendation would be W3 Total Cache.

Step 2 – Remove redundant plugins and widgets

WordPress plugins make this application so powerful, but each of them occupies an extra space on the server, which needs to be loaded on each page. If there are plugins that are unnecessary removing them would speed up your site.

For example, instead of using a plugin that needs Google Analytics code, insert your own Google Analytics code in the place provided for it. The chances that some of these plug-ins to be flooded with unnecessary code are big, so in this case when loading, plugins will call for CSS or JavaScript files for the options that you may never even use.

Step 3 – Fix the template

This step is more intended for designers and developers who have their own website, instead of the sites that were made for clients or the ones that are set up for public use. Replacement some of the WordPress PHP tags of HTML can help and speed up the website.
For example, every time your web page is loaded WordPress must first verify the number of pages in the database and then place them it into your theme. Instead of that, you can link up these elements directly to your theme.

A similar thing can be done for lots of the standard PHP tags in your WordPress theme, for example OR. Amendment of these tag is ideal because when you install your site the way you want it , these parts are almost certainly will not be changed anytime soon . However, if any of these changes often then leave tag as it is or you will have problems with alternation every time this tag is reproduced.

Step 4 – Minimizing HTML and CSS

Minimizing can help you utilize every kilobyte of your front-end files, speeding up your website little by little to significant results. Minimizing expels white space and comments from your HTML and CSS files, which reduces the size of these files, and therefore the time it takes for these files to load.

Step 5 – Optimize photos

Images are a big part of the files that are downloaded during each page load. Some files, such as images in the header or some other graphics that are related to the appearance themes are loaded on each page so it is useful to have these photos as smaller in size, without losing on quality.

So check to see if there are some photos that could be minimized and try to reduce their size in Photoshop. However, if you have no experience in this software, you can use Smush.it online service that can do the job for you. In addition there is a WordPress plugin WP Smush.it which optimizes images in the process of using them, so you do not need to download them again and upload the media to your site after optimization.

Step 6 – Disable post revision

Post revisions are a useful option if you are running a several-authors blog, but for most of the bloggers, this option is not so much used feature. On the other hand, post revisions can fill up the database with copies of your many changes thus adding additional megabytes your SQL files. This option can easily be disabled by adding: define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS ‘, false); into your wp -config file.
Do not forget to remove the existing post revisions using SQL query:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision “;

This is something you can do through phpMyAdmin or through some similar DB manager (as always before that, make a backup of the database).

Step 7 – Delete all spam comments

Just like bunch of post revisions, spam comments caught by the Akismet plugin, occupy a significant part of the space in the database. This is especially noticeable if you have not deleted the comments for a while. Luckily it is simple to clean them all with just a click of a button in the admin section.

Step 8 – Refine and check the options

If your blog is a few years old chances are high that you will have installed plugins that you no longer use. Most of the plugins are developed well and they clean up after themselves when they are uninstalled, but unfortunately there are others who leave behind their setting and various other information. These unused tables can make your database difficult to use, so it useful you delete them. WordPress plugin Clean Options is a handy tool to clean the database. It looks for tables that are no longer in use then gives you the option of removing them.

Step 9 – Optimizing the database

As is the case with defragmenting your hard drive, database optimization removes all the gaps in time due to displacement and copying the data and puts everything in its place. There are two easy methods to do this, with a plugin or with the phpmyadmin. If you have WP- DBManager installed, this plugin has the option to optimize the database, and can even schedule it to get the job done automatically.

Step 10 – Buying more servers

At a certain point you get into the situation that even your nice and tidy blog on dedicated server becomes highly overloaded. In this case, the first step is to increase your server size, of course in numbers.

Using a larger server only for MySQL allows the database to use as many resources it needs, while PHP and front-end files will be on a smaller server.
If you want to switch to a separate database server use define(‘ DB_HOST ‘); option in wp – config.php file to specify the IP of the server on which the database is living on.