5 Quick Tweaks To Improve Your WordPress Blog

WordPress is great right out of the box, but the default setup leaves many areas for improvement.  Here are just 5 things you could do to boost performance, SEO or usability.

Boost your page serving speed

You can use a caching plugin to speed up your blog, but you could also add a snippet of code to the top of your header.php theme file to dramatically make improvements as well.  If your web server supports zlib compression, add this to the very top of your theme’s header.php file for a quick boost:

<?php
ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 'On');
ini_set('zlib.output_compression_level', '1');
?>

Source

Split up your RSS feed

RSS feeds are great for keeping up with what’s going on, but what if your readers want the latest on just one of your categories?  You can easily create a linkable list of category feeds with a quick addition of code.  Decide where you want to list your individual feeds (the sidebar perhaps?) and insert this where you want it:

<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1&feed=RSS'); ?>

The default appearance is rather ugly if you ask me, so some CSS styling would be in order after doing this. Source

Remove post revisions

I really don’t like my WordPress databases being littered with unnecessary clutter, and one of the biggest offenders are the post revisions.  That’s why I like to nip this one in the bud every time I do a fresh install of WordPress.  You can stop the accumulation of post revisions by adding this line to your wp-config.php file when you do your install:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Source

Remove the WordPress version in the header

Your WordPress blog will be a little more secure if you don’t broadcast to the world what version of the software you are using.  By default, WordPress inserts a tag in the header declaring the version number.  Remove this tag by going to your blog theme’s functions.php file and adding this line to it:

remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

Source

Add breadcrumb navigation

Breadcrumb navigation is good for visitors and good for SEO.  You can use a plugin to enable this feature, or you could avoid adding yet another plugin and coding this in manually.  Open up your theme’s functions.php file again and enter the following code:

function the_breadcrumb() {
 if (!is_home()) {
 echo '<a href="';
 echo get_option('home');
 echo '">';
 bloginfo('name');
 echo "</a> » ";
 if (is_category() || is_single()) {
 the_category('title_li=');
 if (is_single()) {
 echo " » ";
 the_title();
 }
 } elseif (is_page()) {
 echo the_title();
 }
 }
}

Then open up your theme’s single.php file and enter this code where you want the breadcrumb navigation displayed:

<?php the_breadcrumb(); ?>

Again, this would also need a touch of CSS styling in order to remove the ugly from it. Source

What tricks do you have in the bag for tweaking your WordPress blog?  Do you have any tips to add to this short list?

Tagged as: Wordpress