Over the past week or so as part of the project I am working on I wanted to speed up a WordPress site that is being used as a CMS. During this process I discovered a two methods (well three technically) that can be used to dramatically shorten the load time for content and speed up WordPress. These tweaks will only work with Apache though they may work on a Windows version of Apache it has not been tested. One method only requires editing your template files while the other requires that you are able to edit your .htaccess file. The first two methods work by compressing data before sending it and the third uses plugins that do a variety of things to speed up WordPress.
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Installing Alterative PHP Cache (APC) with Plesk on Ubuntu
Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a PHP accelerator. PHP accelerators are extensions built to increase the performance and decrease the load time of software applications written using the PHP programming language. Most PHP accelerators work by caching the compiled bytecode of PHP scripts to avoid the overhead of parsing and compiling source code on each request. A PHP accelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of PHP code anywhere from 2-10 times.
APC is a free, open source accelerator that optimizes PHP intermediate code and caches data and compiled code from the PHP bytecode compiler in shared memory.
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