Few weeks ago I wrote on how to optimize your WordPress site for better performance which has some tips and tricks on how to speed up a WordPress Site. I received a few requests to elaborate on some of the points as not all of them are obvious changes. In this article I have explained how you can add far future expiry header to your image, css and javascript files to speed up your site. Adding expires headers do not affect the site load time for a first time visitor but you will be surprised how much the page load time decreases (faster page load) for subsequent page views/return visits from that visitor. Expires header specifies a time far enough in the future so that browsers won't try to re-fetch images, CSS, javascript etc files that haven't changed (this reduces the number of HTTP requests) and hence the performance improvement on subsequent page views. If your server is Apache (most web servers), you can use the 'ExpiresDefault' directive to set an expiration date relative to the current date. ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 months" This sets the expiry date of the file 2 months into the future from the current time. The following values can ...

Is your Wordpress blog performing at it's best? How quickly does the page load? Is it sluggish? Your website's performance is one of the key factors in ensuring that the visitors are having a good experience with your site. So I personally think it is worthwhile to spend some time tuning/optimizing the site for performance. In this article I have listed various tips and tricks on how to speed up a WordPress Site. Before diving into the optimization tips and tricks I recommend measuring the current performance of the site so you have some benchmarking figures to compare against after you make the changes and see how it has affected the performance. How to Measure the Performance of a Site 1. I use YSlow Firefox addon to measure the page load time of a site. YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. So to use YSlow you will have to get the Firebug addon and then install the YSlow addon. The site in question takes about 23 secons to load which is not a very good page ...

I wanted to use widgets in the footer of my WordPress theme but my wordpress theme didn't come with a footer-sidebar by default. I didn't really wanted to change the theme just because of that. So I hacked the wordpress theme to introduce footer-sidebars. If you are looking for a tutorial that explains how you can add sidebars/widgets to the footer of your WordPress theme then keep reading. There are really three main parts to introducing a footer-sidebar 1. Registering the Sidebars in the WordPress Theme 2. Inserting the Sidebars In the WordPress Theme 3. Putting some style into the sidebars 1. Register the Sidebars in the WordPress Theme Go to the WordPress theme editor and open the Theme Functions (functions.php) file. Now Search for the following line in your Theme Functions (functions.php) if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) Once you find the above line then take a look at the the next line which should look similar to one of the followings depending on how many sidebars you have: register_sidebar(array( or register_sidebars(2,array( Say for example you have one sidebar in your theme and you want to add three rows of sidebars in the footer area so you can put widgets then overwrite the code with the following: register_sidebars(4,array( The above will register 4 sidebars (one ...