6 Performance Enhancing WordPress Plugins

WordPress, like any other CMS, eventually fills with clutter and unused entries within its database, which in turn can reduce the performance of the website.  At first, performance issues won’t be noticed, but after awhile, especially after traffic has increased on the site, your website is clunky and takes a longer time to load than it used to.  Now what?

Thankfully, WordPress has a strong community and an abundance of plugins. Here are some of the plugins I use on my own site to improve performance and to keep a clean and optimal database.

1) Bulk Delete

This plugin allows a person to delete drafts, revisions, pending posts, scheduled posts, private posts, and draft pages all in one fell swoop. Use with caution, because once they’re deleted, they’re gone (unless of course, you decide to move them to the trash instead).

2) Clean Options

This plugin allows a person to find orphaned options from the wp_options table in the database.  Choose and delete at your own risk.

3) DUI (Delete Unused Images)

This plugin allows a person to delete images that are not used in WordPress posts or pages.  The screenshot above demonstrates that many of the images that go unused are automatically generated by WordPress for image resizing purposes.  For every image I upload, WordPress creates 3 other images that will likely go unused. If I used 3 images in 100 different posts, that’s 900 images that go unused and that’s a lot of useless information taking up space.

4) JavaScript to Footer

This plugin simply moves all Javascripts to the footer of the website for faster load times. The reason behind this is because the HTTP/1.1 specification suggests that a browser downloads no more than two components in parallel for each hostname.  The problem is that while a script downloads, the browser won’t start any other downloads even if they are on different hostnames.  By moving JavaScript to the footer, all other content can download first without causing the site not to load at all. This practice is also recommended by the Yahoo! Developer Network.  Note that sometimes AJAX and JavaScript rich features might be affected by the use of this plugin.

5) Hyper Cache and 6) DB Cache Reloaded

For a long time, I was a huge fan of the WP Super Cache plugin and eventually found that W3 Total Cache was the superior plugin for how my site operates.  After reading about multiple caching plugins, though, I found an awesome blog post on WordPress caching that led me to Hyper Cache and DB Cache Reloaded. While WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache are still great (and highly marketed) solutions, I like results, and Hyper Cache yields the most optimum results, especially when paired with DB Cache Reloaded. Both plugins are feature rich and are easily customizable.

Caching, for those unfamiliar, simply means that a site will deliver static content to a user rather than dynamically. Think about it this way: would I want my server to be stressed by making the same requests over and over again, or would I rather do the request once, save the results, and deliver those same results to others without requesting it each time someone wants to access it? I’d rather have my server think smarter and not harder when it comes to requests.

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