For the past several months I had received the odd complaint from visitors and readers that my blog was taking a bit of time to load up. I had checked it out and found that it took about 10 seconds to fully load up and thought that it was not worth the hassle of tinkering just to shave off a couple of seconds.
How wrong I was!
I had a few little minor problems with the admin panel as well. It was nothing that I deemed to be too troublesome for me that it warranted messing about with the files. It just meant that I could not have certain plugins as they did not show properly or run correctly.
Finally tonight I had decided to finally act. I had received several emails complaining of the slowness and a couple of plugins had started spitting out complaints about my site not loading quick enough for them to work.
Since I had a bit of free time I rolled up my sleeves and got under the hood of my blog and had a bit of a tinker about. Within fifteenth minutes I had made my blog load up twice as quickly as I had done before!
Here is what I did.
1. Get Rid Of Those Unwanted Themes
I must admit that this is mainly something for speeding up the admin panel, and certainly making it look nicer to your eye.
We have all done this at one time or another; you upload a load of themes, pick the one you want, but more often than not you just don’t remove the ones you don’t want. Save them onto your PC if you really have to but get them off your server.
2. Deactivate & Delete Those Plugins
Plugins are great, they help you do all manner of things to your blog. The problem is that the more plugins that you have on your list, the most they slow down the loading of your blog. Even if they are deactivated.
When I had a look at my list I had what I would considering a lot, I had 37. I decided to be absolutely ruthless and deactivated and removed the ones that I could do without or simply did not need.
I whittled the list down to 22, which I think you will agree is slightly more manageable.
3. Repair & Optimise Your Database
WARNING: Backup your database before you even think about editing it!
I actually found out about this little tip completely by chance. I typed in ‘how to speed up your wordpress blog’ into Google and this was one of the methods. I’m not 100% sure how it works but what I am sure of is that it does indeed work.
You log into your Hosting Cpanel, go to the phpMyAdmin page of your database, tick all the tables and then click Repair from the drop down menu. Once this is done do the same again but this time select Optimise from the menu.
4. Installed The W3 Total Cache Plugin
I know some cynics might say that my blog has speeded up because of this plugin. Well you are wrong, my blog was speeded up before I installed the plugin. This baby just helped make it load even faster!
If any of these methods help you then I’d love to know via the comments section. 
Article by Dean Saliba
Dean Saliba is a freelance writer, professional blogger, media enthusiast, dirty football player and huge professional wrestling fan who covers a wide range of subjects and niches including, making money online, traffic generating, pro wrestling, blog reviews, football, how-to guides, music, internet marketing and more.
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Dean has written 357 awesome articles for us at I Need Di$cipline
I am a 33 year old full-time freelancer & blogger from East London, United Kingdom, who has been working online since early 2001.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post let me try it with my blog thanks for sharing its really informative i stumble up your post
Just to prove that these methods really do work I have also used them to speed up my personal blog.
Nothing you do (aside from caching) has as much impact as getting off the shared hosting account and getting your own server. Sometimes, through no fault of my own, my old shared hosting was so slow that I’d have to wait 7-10 seconds for the site to load. Who knows what they’re doing on the server when that sort of slow performance is going on?
But yeah, plugins are an awful hit on your load times. Get rid of as many of them as possible. I just hard-coded a table of contents on one of my pages because I didn’t want the performance penalty from yet another (toc) plugin.
The hosting account I have is free, I\’m too tight to pay to move to a slightly faster server.
I also installed the W3 plugin . Works like a charm. It seems to be working because I had the same problem. You just did it eh?
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I had to remove the W3 plugin because it was causing admin pages and comment pages to load blank pages.
You won’t believe I tried tens of methods to make my blog load fast and I got to see your blog at the right time. Thanks buddy.
Glad they helped.