WP-Tonic 105: Speeding Up WordPress From Slow Dog To Young Speed Machine

A common complaint about WordPress from both those who use it and those who don’t is that WordPress is slow. It’s true that any dynamic website is going to be slower than an otherwise-equivalent static website, because it takes more time to generate a page from database queries than to serve up static HTML. But you can prevent WordPress from being what Jonathan Denwood calls “A slow dog”, and that’s what we talked about on WP-Tonic 115.

The key ingredients for WordPress performance that we discussed are hosting (because the most important optimization happens on the server side), using a CDN, caching plugins, image compression, and eliminating unnecessary overhead (unused or poorly-coded plugins, for instance).