Steps to Optimize a High Traffic WordPress Blog

WordPress is one of the best content management systems (CMS) for blogs. And the best thing about WordPress is that it is free and open source, yet powerful. It has engaged a growing community developing plugins and themes. And according to Wikipedia, WordPress shares more than 12% of the top 1,000,000 websites on the internet. This makes WordPress unbeatable in this type of CMS.

But like a double-edged sword, WordPress is so powerful but also resource sucker. The more complicated the system will be, and the more resources taking it will be. If it’s just a simple WordPress installation, it doesn’t require as many resources. But if you add more and more plugins and more complicated themes, it will require a lot of resources. So why not uninstall all plugins?

Let’s move on to what WordPress plugins are for. The goal of WordPress plugins is to extend the core function of WordPress to add more features to WordPress. Since WordPress plugins are developed by the community or by a personal developer, not all WordPress plugins are good. Most of them are dead projects or abandoned projects. And this will lead to a lot of problems on the WordPress blog itself. And high CPU load is one of them.

A low traffic WordPress blog will generally not cause problems with high CPU load or high memory usage. But when it comes to a high traffic blog, you have to think about CPU load and memory usage. Otherwise, your blog will slow down and even worse, your account will be suspended. Getting banned is a really bad experience, you lost visitors and that’s not good for your site’s SEO.

Follow the tips below to optimize your high-traffic blog:

1. accessories

The WordPress plugin system is one of the most powerful features of WordPress. Developers or the community can easily create plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress. In addition to its easy to use API, it also has comprehensive API documentation. And there are many samples and articles on the internet on how to develop a WordPress plugin. But this is the double-edged feature. Even it is powerful, not all plugins are good. Some of them are dead or discontinued projects, and even worse, they leave security holes in your WordPress blog. So my suggestion is to minimize the use of WordPress plugins. Use only the highly recommended (high rated and most downloads) and live (not discontinued) plugins. Always test the plugin on your mock site before uploading it to your live site. One mistake could bring disaster to your site. So choose carefully.

2. Topics

The WordPress template/theme system is also one of the best WordPress features. You can change themes and customize it easily. And there are many free or premium themes that you can find. I suggest you use simple, easy to read and beautiful themes for your high traffic blog. Because if your themes are complicated, it will take more resources to your server. For example swiping the featured post, this is a nice feature for the user. But not for server load. Minimize your themes (css, image and javascript), so you will optimize your server load.

3. Optimize Script

Script optimization means removing unnecessary scripts and modifying them to optimize the scripting algorithm. The scripts included php, css, sql, and javascript. Check the execution time of your script and optimize, optimize and optimize.

4. Use cache mechanism

This is one of the most important things to have for a high traffic blog, the caching mechanism. There are many WordPress plugins to do caching. There are 4 caching mechanisms: database caching, page caching, memory caching, and object caching. Database and page caching you must have. There are some plugins to do that, but I highly recommend installing db cache reloaded and hypercache. These 2 plugins would be the best for the caching mechanism.

5. Host images on another server or use cdn

Hosting your images on another server or using cdn might be better. Hosting images on another server or cdn will reduce the CPU load of your server. Imagine if you have 1k images stored on your server. And you have to serve 10k visitors a day. This will consume your CPU resources and as a result your site will be slower to respond. Besides images, you can also host css and javascript files on another server or cdn.

6. Analyze your traffic

Use and analyze your traffic monitoring or analysis application. I recommend Google Analytics and Awstats. Google Analytics to analyze your traffic sources, daily traffic and many things. And from this data you can make the decision where you should host your site, say most of your traffic is coming from the US, and then host your site within the US and analyze your traffic with Awstats (available in Cpanel), to find fewer hours of traffic. And you should do your backup or update in this hour.

7. Optimize the database and make regular backups

Optimizing the database is also important, if you have a lot of data in your MySql database, it will generate overhead data. Therefore, you should regularly optimize your database to maintain the performance of your MySql database. And you should backup your database regularly, for disaster prevention.

8. Upgrade to VPS

At last, when you get 5K traffic per day, you have no choice but to go for VPS (virtual private server). Buy the smallest or medium VPS just to get started. And then as your site grows, add more resources to your VPS.

That is all for now. Final words, good luck to your blogs and happy blogging.