Wordpress is great blog and cms software. Since it's used by over 20% website platforms, it's necessary to make it more efficient for better speed. One day, your find you have made a big wordpress site and you have to wait long time to get it loaded, it's time to optimize for better performance. Based editorial experience, we have composed the following 6 tips on how to optimize your wordpress site speed.

Tips 1. Get a right wordpress hosting service
Hosting is the most important and should be your primary consideration for any kind website. WordPress can be the core platform for any kind website development such as personal blog, enterprise website, content management system website etc. You will need different hosting plans for different website purpose. If you just use wordpress for hobbies that's viewed by very few people, a budget hosting service will work perfectly because no much server resource will be ultilized there. However, if you're going to promote your wordpress site to a business platform, a regular shared plan will not work. Instead, you will need either vps or dedicated server or a special optimized service for wordpress like wpengine. We highly suggest check out the top 5 wordpress hosting providers for success choice.

Tips 2. Use WordPress Cache plugin
Wordpress cache plugin is great feature that should be used by all sites. We highly recommend to install W3 Total Cache which is simple and powerful to all sites. Your wordpress site speed will be greatly improved after installed this plugin because all your static contents will be cached so they don't have to reload every time when visited.

Tips 3. Use CDN Service
CDN is used by most big websites. Especially for those world wide popular sites, CDN is a MUST for quality loading speed from different locations. The concept of CDN is to deliver your site content to different networks, when users send out http requests to your website, it will be downloaded from the most nearby network nodes. In this way, fast loading from different locations is possible. High performance CDN services are not cheap but worthy of the money if you plan to deliver services to different areas on the planet. You can also use some free cdn service like cloudflare or simply install this Free-CDN wordpress plugin.

Tips 4. Optimize wordpress database
When you write/update your articles, wordpress will leave lots of duplicated contents in database. Also, if you have used some spam control plugins like akismet, it will create a big table in database. Such useless data will result in big size database and slow down its performance. We highly suggest install WP-Optimize to clear out such data and optimize your tables every few periods.

Tips 5. Optimize your pictures
Pictures always take long time to load, you can either compress it before uploading to website or use WP-Smushit plugin for live compression on website. It's highly recommended plugin if your wordpress site is photo gallery based. It will greatly reduce the picture size for better loading speed.

You might also need to avoid hot linking if you have great pictures on website. When more and more people link to your pictures, your server resource usage will be high and your site performance will be downgraded a lot. There's great wordpress plugin called hotlink protection. It's highly suggested solution if you have lots of great value pictures and would like to improve performance as much as possible.

Tips 6. Add delay loading function
It's extremely helpful solution if you have long page on website. Delay loading will only load the first screen content, when you scroll down page, rest contents will be loaded. Such function will not only help with fast loading, it will also save bandwidth. We can easily add this function by jQuery Image Lazy Load wordpress plugin.

If you're operating a wordpress site, you can follow above tips and receive better loads. All above writing is generated from editorial experience so you can use directly with worry free. Of course, you might have other solutions based your website requirements, just feel free to share your experience.

For most windows hosting service, we're required to configure SMTP authentication for script email or form email. The concept is to disable using localhost for smtp server and force to use real email server to handle the service. Why they do that? How can we configure smtp authentication on website and how we will benefit from this requirement? This article will explain such from indepth reviews and guide on how to configure smtp authentication for popular web applications.

How does SMTP authentication work?

SMTP authentication is occurred before we sending out email message. When we compose an email we need the exact email address & password and authenticate to it. Once we send out an email, ISP will check where the email is sending to and relay the message to receipient mail server, this process is called email relay or SMTP relay. SMTP authentication checks if you're authorized to send emails using that account on server end.

Why SMTP authentication?

From above explanation, we know a valid email account and password is required in order to send out email. However, things are little different on web server. Most servers have smtp enabled by default using localhost. Unlike regular email service, localhost smtp doesn't require smtp authentication at all. The original purpose is to simplify web form programming where you can send emails easily via script. But this leaves a problem, senders can abuse the service easily. For example they can use it for bulk mail purpose or spam! The direct effect is hosting server will be overloaded so any existing service will be slowed down. What worse is the entire server might be blacklisted by major ISPs and all other customers on the server will not be able to send mails any more.

SMTP authentication will solve the problem perfectly. Via smtp authentication, you must specify the correct SMTP credentials in coding. In this way all your emails will be sent out via actual email servers where you have to follow various rules such as daily limits, spam filters etc. In a word, smtp authentication protected both web and mail servers and all clients will benefit from it. That's why localhost smtp is not allowed any more by more and more hosting providers. Alternatively, they will guide you to use smtp authentication.

How to configure SMTP authentication?

SMTP authentication requires smtp server credentials to be specified in script, this includes smtp server address, full email address and login password. If you are not sure how its used, we highly suggest using phpmailer – a pre-configured email script with smtp authentication enabled. Downloads and sample codes can be founded on this phpmailer page.

However, since cms softwares are used more and more these days, we don't have to program such service by ourselves. Below is a list of SMTP solutions for popular cms applications including wordpress, joomla

SMTP authentication for WordPress
Wordpress uses localhost for smtp server by default. You have to install a plugin for smtp authentication. We highly recommend using Cimy Swift SMTP which is simple and compatible with other email services like Gmail. Just fill out the required smtp details then click "save changes" to enable. Now your wordpress site will send emails through your specified email account.

SMTP authentication for Joomla
SMTP authentication for Joomal is pretty easy. The system has both options provided, you can choose to use smtp or default email functions. To configure SMTP authentication for your joomla site, login to admin panel -> Global configuration -> Mail settings, select "SMTP" from drop down selections and click yes value for "smtp authentication" -> fill out your smtp server details then click save to reflect the changes.

SMTP authentication for Drupal
Similar to wordpress, you need to install extra drupal module for smtp functions. You can download drupal smtp module on this drupal download page.

You need to extract the package and upload to modules directory then go to your drupal admin -> site building -> modules to enable it. Once the module is enabled, navigate to site configuration -> SMTP Authentication Support section then fill out your smtp server details. You need to enter the same email address as "From address" for "Site Information" under "Site Configuration" tab or else your smtp setting will not work.

IIS web server provides a great feature called "ScriptMap". A script map is to map a specific extension to an executable engine on Web server. You can easily handle lots of server end settings by this technology. Moreover, it's great solution for website protection. You might have added all available solutions to protect your site from hacking, but scriptmap will give another guard layer. This article will guide us to learn about script map side by side and tips on how to use it properly.

ScriptMap working principle is, add a specific file extension for example ".asp" to point to an existing scripting library like asp.net, php or other libraries. In this way you can use any available executable engine to process your files. Most extensions are configured by default during IIS installation. More details and guidance on how to add scripmap handler can be found on this microsoft kb.

Top Features of Script Map

Manage Asp.net Version
Asp.net installation will auto add its current dll mappings to IIS handler. Before IIS7.0, when you want to switch .net framework you have to login IIS manager then click the asp.net tab on website properties. Normally it will frize iis manager few seconds or minutes depends how busy your server is. It will either slow down the server or simply stop entire server IIS process. You have to give iis restart commands after the change. It's absolutely not acceptable for production server. Here hosting providers can make use of scriptmap advantages. What they need to do is only to map your site to the specific .net library. It's fast and professional.

Manage PHP Version
Most IIS servers got multiple versions PHP installed. PHP is configured the same way like asp.net and its managed directly from scriptmap handler. In order to use the desired PHP version, you just need to add a new php mapping to installation directory then everything is done.

Make Unknow file Extensions readable
Sometimes your web developer might produce some kind file extensions that're not readable by web server. If you know what engines it requires to make it working, then just go ahead and add the extensions to scritmap handlers.

Website Security Protection
The greatest feature of script map is its security protection. Script Map protects your web application in two ways, file extension and downloadable data protection. File extension protect means to change your file extension to something not commonly used. For example if your site is asp programmed, the file extension is always *.asp. Hackers will easily find any potential security hole then hack into your applications. But if you change the .asp to others for example .cpp and map it to asp engine, hackers will not hack it easily because they will have to research a lot for what scripting you used.

Sometimes you keep sensitive datas in access database or excel files that can be downloaded directly once user got the exact location on your site. It's absolutely a big security hole. However you can use script map to avoid such issues. After mapped the file extension to other script engines, it will not give out download option on user end and your data is protected in safe place. Same tricks can be also applied to your other website properties, what you need to do is to map the file extensions to a non executable engine.

How to add script map on user end?

Script Map is only available for IIS users. Means you must be hosted on windows hosting server. Many providers give out the function directly from hosting control panel where you can add the specified extensions directly. The following screenshot shows how its offered.

However, after IIS7.0, there's revolutional improvements where we can manage settings from IIS manager directly. You must ensure remote iis manager is supported for your hosting service. Once you have connected to your website on iis manager you got all available options to work with. You will see how services being configured on hosting server for custom changes. In this way you don't have to contact hosting support for such small assistance.