How to Speed Up Your Blog
TweetWordPress sites can tend to run a bit slow, especially if you are getting a lot of traffic to your site. The problem is that page loading time matters quite a bit to your visitors. They don't want to wait around for 10 seconds for your page to load or else they will just go somewhere else to try and find the information they were looking for. With that in mind there are probably some things that you can do right now to speed up your site.
Review Your Hosting
A shared host can be great because they cost less than $100 per year, but if you start drawing heavy traffic to your site and make a decent amount of money this is the first thing you are going to want to upgrade. A VPS or dedicated server can cost quite a bit more per month, but not having to share resources with other sites will allow more computer power to be used towards your site. See How to Move Your Blog to Another Host for more information.
Remove Unused Widgets and Plugins
The more plugins you have onyour site the more code that your server has to compile, eating up more resources. Remove any plugin that you do not feel is absolutely necessary.
Install WordPress W3 Total Cache
This plug generates static files for all of your posts and pages. This means the server loads without having to process any PHP code and will quickly speed up your blog. You can also use this plugin to eliminate the white space from your html, CSS, and javascript code.
Minimize PHP Calls
Each time a page on your site loads the browser executes all of the PHP and database queries that it finds. This adds to your load time. Here are some examples of what you can replace:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
An example of minimized queries & requests:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 3.0" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/wp-content/themes/lightword/style.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/wp-content/themes/lightword/original.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.jamiefaidley.com/feed/" />