Make Your WordPress Site Lightning Fast

I know many people in the A/E/C industry use WordPress for their corporate site (including me). Wouldn’t you love it to be lightning fast?

One of the key plug-ins I use to speed up my WordPress sites is W3 Total Cache. I first learned about it from Brian Hill.

Alex Denning over at Noupe wrote an interesting article on how to speed up your WordPress site. Here is what Alex has to say about it.

Setting Up W3 Total Cache   Installing such a complicated plugin is surprisingly easy. Total Cache installs like most other plugins — under the plugins tab, do a search for W3 Total Cache and it’ll show up as the first result. Click “install now” and then activate the plugin.   However, the plugin isn’t set up yet! You’ll see a new tab on your admin bar “Performance”. Open this up.   Total Cache does some impressive detective work and gives you some recommend settings. It’s now just a case of going through all the settings, activating each one and seeing what performance boost each option gives you. Some may decrease performance so it’s vital you test.   Total Cache has some excellent documentation built in — select the various options under the Help tab. The FAQ is brilliant at going through more or less every single question you could possible have and answering it clearly.   However, there may be some extra set up required. You might get some messages popping up at the top of the page telling you you need to add some code to a file called .htaccess. .htaccess is a file which allows you to locally configure your Apache settings, and thus is impressively powerful. To access it you’ll need to log into your site’s FTP and then navigate to the root. If you then can’t see it, show hidden files.   Download it (again, show hidden files), make a copy as a backup and then load it in your text editor. Add the lines of code to the bottom of the file, upload again and you’re done! Make sure you try loading your site immediately to check it still works. If it doesn’t, check you’ve copied all the code exactly and you haven’t deleted any other code in the file.   And you’re done! Total Cache is set up! via Speeding Up WordPress – Noupe.

The article has a variety of other solutions for making your WordPress site lightning fast. Check it out.

What are your favorite WordPress plug-ins? What frustrates you about WordPress? Join the conversation by commenting below!