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!

Download W3Total Cache Plugin

If any of these methods help you then I’d love to know via the comments section.

Blog security is something that pretty much every blogger should be concerned with. WordPress has a number of plugins that you can use to combat hacking attempts, one of the plugins is called Limited Login Attempt plugin.

The plugin is designed to place a limit on how many times someone can attempt to login before it springs into action and prevents any more login attempts.

Some of the features of the plugin include:

- Limit the number of attempts when logging in.
- Limit the number of attempts to log in using cookies.
- Informs user about remaining retries.
- Will log the failed attempts.
- Option to have email notification sent to you.

This is what the login page will look like.

Download Plugin From This Link

I receive a few emails a week from people asking me if I can help them set up their new WordPress blog for them as they have no idea how to go about doing it. Sadly I am normally very busy and have to politely turn them down.

This evening I was sitting at my desk when I had the following thought:

“Would people be prepared to pay a small fee to have their WordPress blog set up for them?”

I’m not talking about a huge fee, maybe something like $5.00.

This would include the following:

- Initial set up of the latest WordPress version.
- Installation of up to 10 plugins of your choice (I’ll provide a list of ones I’ll install).
- Support for the first week.

Then I had another thought:

“What if I offer this service and then offer another option where I do it for free if they sign up for hosting from a company I recommend?”

What do you guys thinks about this?