WordPress plugins I use and how one made my blog faster

Thought I could share what plugins I use. I am curious to know what others are using, so it would be kind of rude by my to not share what I use Anyways, here they are.

• Akismet keeps spam from flooding my blog.
• Clicky for WordPress, enables the right tracking code and such for Clicky Web Analytics — Added 2009-11-03.
• Code Colorer for nice and clear code snippets.
• Contact Form 7, cause I wanted a contact form.
• FD Feedburner Plugin redirects all the WordPress feeds to my Feedburner feed for me.
• Google XML Sitemaps generates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap for my blog and automatically pushes it to Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo when it does.
• Login-Logout, for easier access to, well… the login, logout, site admin, et cetera.
• NextGEN Gallery, a very nice photo gallery.
• Persistent Styles, which enables me to do some adjustments to the site styles without messing with the actual theme styles.
• Platinum SEO Pack makes the blog more Search Engine Optimized. (Seems to be slowing my blog down a lot… will try without it for a while…)
• rpx enables OpenID login, which I really like.
• Scissors lets me for example crop, resize and rotate images when I add them to posts. (No longer needed in WordPress 2.9)
• Speedy Smilies substitutes the WordPress smilies with a single CSS image sprite (and adds some nicer looking sets to choose from)
• Viper’s Video Quicktags, makes it easy to embed videos from YouTube and similar websites. (No longer needed in WordPress 2.9)
• WP-Cumulus creates that awesome looking tag cloud in my right column.
• WP QuickLaTeX lets me write math that doesn’t look like garbage.
• Xavin’s List Subpages, lists… subpages. For example used on my portfolio page.

Now, I’ve left one out. Because I didn’t add it until recently. You see, all these plugins make (in my opinion anyways) a nicer looking blog, and an easier life for me. I like them all. I don’t want to remove any of them unless I find a better version.

The problem is that they slow WordPress down… It got quite annoying frankly. And at first I just couldn’t understand what was wrong. FireBug reported around 200ms of loading the data. But before it could do that, it spent anywhere from 2 to 10(!) seconds waiting for a response. That’s pretty long! And my blog pretty much felt like a snail stuck in peanut butter. Removing all the plugins would make it snappier of course, but I want those plugins. Interestingly enough, the solution was to add yet another plugin And it kind of amazed me how much of a difference it actually made.

• WP Super Cache.

If you have a slow WordPress blog, and haven’t tried it, you should!