Here are a few things that I’ve done to get my WordPress installations’ performance in check:

Minimize Plug-In Usage - Many WordPress users, including myself, have the bad habit of running 20 to 30 different WordPress plug-ins at once. Each plug-in that you have installed adds to the amount of work that the server needs to do to load pages on your website. Keep the number of WordPress plug-ins that you have installed to a minimum.

One of the Plug-Ins that has been considered a “worst offender” is the popular All-In-One SEO Plug-in, so much so that DreamHost has banned its users from using the plug-in. Some would dispute the claim that it’s a performance nightmare, however you are probably better off to build your SEO optimizations into the template itself rather than using a third-party plug-in.

Word Press Super Cache – Super Cache is a plug-in that creates static HTML files which will load for your users instead of dynamically generating post HTML on each page load. Almost all Columbus Ohio web designers use this. This plug-in is a great help for sites that get featured on social bookmarking sites or have a few popular articles that get hammered.

Super Cache also supports a more traditional caching method (the one that came with the “WP Cache” plugin) for servers which do not support Super Cache. The downside to the “cache” method is that it does require loading a PHP script, whereas the “super cache” method requires nothing in terms of executing server-side scripts on a cached page load.

Word Press Object Cache – WordPress has a built in object cache which was added in version 2.5. The “Object Cache” will cache the results of different database queries that WordPress makes. For example, when any of the pages on your site loads, it will need to populate the site’s blog-roll and any widgets from the database. By enabling the object cache, you can cache the results from queries, minimizing the amount of database queries that WordPress needs to make.

To enable the WordPress object cache on yours site, edit your WP.Config file and add “define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);” to your list of “defines”. This may be added by default to later versions of WordPress.

To read more about the Object Cache, read this article on NeoSmart.NET.

Optimize Your PHP.INI File – Optimizing your PHP configuration file can improve the performance of your site. ElliotBack.com has some suggestions about what changes you might want to make to your configuration file, which will disable some modules which may not be needed for your website. He also offers a link to this more complete guide to optimizing your PHP.INI File.

Use a PHP Compiler Cache – You can make use of a PHP Compiler cache which will save scripts in a compiled format so they are not being recompiled each time they’re called from a page load on WordPress. The compiler cache will save your PHP scripts, including your WordPress files in a compiled state, eliminating the overhead caused by the compilation of your PHP files. Two popular PHP compilers are  APC & eAccelerator that you may want to investigate, but it’s probably not worth it to go through the process of using these tools unless you have an extremely high traffic website.

Choose a Good Web Host – This won’t make your WordPress install run any faster, but choosing the right host from the get-go can minimize the need to spend a lot of time tweaking your site’s performance. Not all host are the same. Most hosts will shove you on a shared server with dozens of other websites, which isn’t a bad thing, because shared hosting allows you to get web hosting for much less than you would have had to if you bought your own web-server. The difference lies in how many websites a host will try to shove onto a single server.

Before choosing a web-host, search for the name of the host followed by “WordPress issues” or “Wordpress Problems” to see if current customers of the host are having performance issues with their WordPress sites.

Hardcode Values in Your Template – By default WordPress values use PHP functions on each page load to calculate the server path of where your template files are. Digging into WordPress suggests that you should replace these with hard-coded values to improve performance. We’re not sure how much of a benefit using hard-coded values will provide and probably isn’t necessary for smaller sites, but will probably provide some sort of assistance for sites with substantial traffic levels.

MySQL Database Optimization with PHPMyAdmin - Your web host probably provides you PHPMyAdmin access, which will allow you to run a built in optimization function on your tables. Weblog Tools suggests that going through the process will  provide a nice performance boost. EarnersBlog.com agrees that it’s also worth doing. It’s probably worth trying, but make sure to back up your database first.

Conclusion

More often than not, installing Super Cache and getting rid of un-necessary plug-ins will be more than enough to make 95% of sites run at more than acceptable performance levels. If you’ve got a large site, as in that you are receiving hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month, then it probably makes sense to start looking at some of the other optimizations suggested in this article.

Essentially, they’ll give you an image of a virtual machine that contains the web-server software, as well as the server-side software you are testing. Everything will be pre-configured and ready to go. You’ll download a copy of the virtual machine, get it running with VirtualBox, and you’re good to go. Some of the virtual machines do cost money, but fortunately for us, the image for Joomla is free for download from Joomla.org.

Normally, I’d post a walk through of going through the process of installing the software and getting it up and going, but the folks at Joomla.org have already done that for us:

Run Joomla in 5 min with JumpBox and VirtualBox from Sean Tierney on Vimeo.

Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to your WordPress installation to make it much friendlier to search-engines, resulting in more traffic to your website.

Here’s the list of search-engine optimization techniques that I frequently use on WordPress websites:

(1) Create a site map and submit it to Google’s Webmaster Tools

A sitemap is nothing more than a list of pages that are on your website and how frequently they are updated. This will help Google and other search engines know which pages they should index and which ones likely haven’t been updated and they don’t need to check. It’s difficult to measure how much of a benefit creating a site map actually has for your site because Google doesn’t publish their algorithms, but it definitely helps.

To create an automatically generating site map in WordPress, download and install the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. After installing the plug-in and getting your site map built, make sure to add your website to Google’s Webmaster Tools and submit the sitemap to there.

(2) Create Better Permalink URLs

By default, WordPress will use URLs such as http://www.example.org/?p=23. Typically, URLS that have keywords related to what the users are searching for have a better chance of ranking high than those that don’t. By changing your WordPress settings, you can create keyword rich URLs such as “http://www.adventuresindevelopment.com/2009/05/26/how-to-generate-random-passwords-in-c/.

To do this, go to the “Settings” tab under your WordPress back-end then go to “Permalinks.” I typically recommend the “Day and Name” setting

(3) Get the “All In One” SEO Plugin

A key aspect of doing search engine optimization well on any site is making sure that the right pages are indexed and that “clickable” page titles are selected. By default, WordPress will generate page titles such as “AdventuresInDevelopment.com – The Name of the Article Here”, but most web-browsers are concerned about the article it self and not your specific website, so it’s generally agreed that having the title of the article should come before having the title of your website. That’s why we use titles like “Article Name | Adventures In Development.”

You also want to avoid having duplicated content on your website. Generally, that’s something that you want to avoid. If the amount of duplicate content that you have is excessive, Google could punish your rankings as a result. For this reason, it’s a good idea to add “noindex” meta-tags to your category pages, tag pages, and monthly archives. This way, only your homepage, your individual posts, and your about pages are indexed.

There’s a plug-in called “All in One SEO” that accomplishes these two tasks for WordPress. “All In One SEO” can be downloaded from the WordPress plug-ins section. You can also use it to set custom meta-data for your homepages if you’d like, which certainly won’t hurt.

(4) Get the Word Press “Related Sites” plug-in

To rank well in search engines, you need to get people to link back to your website, and unless you are promoting a very authoritative website, that is not an easy task. Some people try to generate free links by participating in blog-carnivals and others even go as far as purchasing links from other websites. Related Sites is a way for you to generate free in-bound links from websites in your niche without the risk of any sort of Google penalties. Basically, it looks at the keywords in your post and provides links to related posts on other participants websites that use similar keywords. It does the same thing on their articles and generates additional links back to your website.

Here’s what the “Related Sites” module looks like on an article on one of our other sites (Interest Rate Hikes And What You Can Do About Them @ American Consumer News)

Here are some other WordPress SEO articles you might be interested in:

• SEO for WordPress – The Complete Guide – Jim Westergren
• Search Engine Optimization for WordPress – WordPress Codex
• WordPress SEO – Yoast