How to make your blog load faster

One of the biggest problems people come to us to solve is making their blog load faster. This is often the first challenge a growing blog faces.

Eventually, your blog will become popular enough that you need to upgrade your hosting plan. However, there are many things you can do to put that day off for quite some time.

One of the first and most powerful things you can do is cache your home page and posts.

What is a “cache”?

To understand how caching works, you first need to understand a bit about how WordPress works. No caching, that’s how your blog works. When someone browses your site, WordPress immediately queries your WordPress database to see all the content and settings on the page.

A query is like a search. The site script searches the database for the appropriate content to display on the page. Every time a user calls the page, the database is queried again and again. This repeated database query will eventually cause a great deal of stress to the server.

The result is that pages start to load more slowly. Eventually, they can start running out of time all together.

This is where caching comes into play. You’re probably not updating your site thousands of times a second, are you? So why does the system have to query the database over and over again for each new user that enters the site? For example, the home page will look the same as it did two seconds ago when you checked it out. It will probably still be the same 10 minutes from now when the next guy checks.

So what if you could query the database and then display the results over and over again without querying the database again? Well, that’s what a cache is.

Your site’s cache will save the results as a new file and simply reserve it for the next user online. If an update is made to the site in the meantime, the cache will be cleared for that page to reflect the new pages.

The cache will hold some of the load your server faces.

WordPress has a great plugin called WP-CACHE that handles all of this for you.

Another way to save valuable load time is to limit the amount of external content that enters the site. If you have a lot of third-party widgets and banners, they will make your site load more slowly. Loading all that external content will slow down your site because you need to leave your server to fetch the content. Reduce the number of ads and large fonts you use, and you should be in better shape.