This article will provide you with 4 easy steps to optimize your WordPress blog. If you follow them you will get better performance of your site and will minimize usage of server’s resources:

1. Reduce the number of posts on the main page of your blog. This will speed up the loading of your blog in the browser and will optimize its work on the server. The best number of posts will be around 5-10 posts on the page.

2. The important thing is to have Caching plugin installed for your WordPress.

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an html file is generated your webserver will serve this file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more resource expensive WordPress PHP scripts. You can download Caching plugins on its official pages:

Super Cache – http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/

W3Total Cache – http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/

The main point of its work is to reduce the usage of server’s resources while WordPress loads in the browser. Caching plugins will help you to make your blog load quickly and make it more attractive to browse for people with low connection speed.

Installation process of plugins is described here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/installation/ and here: http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/installation/ . It is really easy to setup these plugins and the main advantage of it – is that you install it once and forget about it – it will work without any further actions from your side.

3. As an alternative to Caching plugins, we suggest using CloudFlare CDN that servers for the same purposes but makes its caching in another, sometimes even more efficient, way. In order to power your WordPress with CloudfFare, please follows the steps in this tutorial – How to enable CloudFlare for your hosted domain name.

4. Also you can have anti-spam modules setup for your WP blog. We recommend you to use Akismet plugin. It is the most useful one as it has powerful system of spam detection and it is easy to work with.

You can read more about Akismet itself and about its installation on the official WordPress page: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Akismet

5. We would also recommend you to check the DataBase of your WordPress site once a week and remove unnecessary records to keep your WordPress database clean and up to date. This will also help to reduce loading time of your site and will decrease recourse usage as a result. In case you are not able to to that in phpMyAdmin, the easiest way to do that is to install another WordPress database management plugin that will allow you to optimize your database automatically. Please find the top DB optimization and management plugins below:

Adminer – http://wordpress.org/plugins/adminer

WP Optimize – http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-optimize/

WP Clean Up – http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-clean-up/

Participants Database – http://wordpress.org/plugins/participants-database/installation/