Ways to Optimize WordPress Database for High Performance

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform which is used by most of the people. However, sometimes it can be excruciatingly slow due to several reasons. Here are few tips for optimizing WordPress that can make your WordPress blog speedy.

First of all define goals:
1) You can set various goals like decreasing page load time may be from 8 seconds to 2 seconds.
2) The speed of the site can be checked with various tools like Website Speed Test. There are various factors like internet connection or other fluctuations.
3) Pingdom can be used for detailed analysis.
4) Keep a check on your browser with tools like Charles Proxy, Wireshark or Firebug’s network tool and server logs can be reviewed.

Get rid of Unused Plugins:
Use only those plugins that you really need. It might be tempting to use all the snazzy plugins offered by WordPress but too many plugins will affect the performance. Use about 5 to 10, but do not go above 20.  Keep only the best and required wordpress plugins.

Cache your Database:
To enhance the speed, cache the database so the number of queries will be reduced that are made to the database when the visitor is on your site. This can be easily done by DB Cache Reloaded plugin.

Some other plugins for caching and protection of server overload are:
1) WP-Cache 2
2) WP Super Cache
3) PHP Speedy : This is a script that can be installed on the server for optimizing the speed and download time of the web pages.
4) Digg Protector plugin: This is used to check if the visitor is from Digg and then this plugin will serve the Digg visitor a remotely-hosted version of the image or otherwise locallyhosted image.

Optimize your files: HTML, CSS, javascript, videos and images:
1) Make use of CSS sprites. With this images can be added to one larger image file with a convenient layout.
2) Videos should not be hosted on your server. It is better to upload them on various video sharing sites so that the server load will be handled by them only.
3) Compress Javascript by using tools like JavaScript Compressor, Free JavaScript Optimizer, YUI Compressor.
4) Compress CSS and HTML. Remove HTML format, white spaces, trim class names and omit quotes around attributes
5) Use CSS Compress WordPress plugin. Activate this plugin and all new lines, tabs, comments and gzip compresses will be removed.

Optimize images by using the following tools:
1) Web Resizer.
2) GIF Bot.
3) Smush It.
4) Dynamic Drive Image Optimizer.
5) JPEG Cleaner.
6) Web Graphics Optimizer.
7) Image Optimizer.
8) Image Reducer Optimization Tool.

Do not enable post revisions because there will be multiple entries for blog post and this will slow it down and rather your database will be cluttered. This comes with WordPress version 2.6. This is not at all necessary. Use the plugin Revision Control or No Revisions to accomplish this.

Try not to embed the external content. There is lot of content available like videos, widgets, chat applications, images and many more. But remember you cannot take care of the speed.

Also make sure to not install all these DB optimization and cache plugins. Try and keep the ones which works best for your settings.