How to speed up wordpress blogs?

First check with your hosting company, sometimes hosting server casuses speed issue. Other things you can do to check the sizes of images and try to upload images in minimum size in bytes. Try to avoid so many unnecessary plugins.

Check on your plugins using WordPress › P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) « WordPress Plugins

and

Test your site using WebPagetest - Website Performance and Optimization Test

or one of the other page test sites. The site I linked above will give you suggestions on how to improve.

All fairly easy things to above :-)

Plugins are normally the biggest speed killer

Danny

You can read this >> High Traffic Tips For WordPress « WordPress Codex

Get MAXCdn, Good VPS, W3 Total Cache.

SIMPLY USE ANY CACHE WORDPRESS PLUGIN OR YOU CAN USE CDN SERVICES LIKE MAXCDN ... HELPS A LOTS TO SPEED UP YOUR BLOG

Check your hosting and your plugins. Most people tend to have a load of plugins that are unnecessary and slow down the site. Make sure you only use plugins that are absolutely necessary. No point having al the whizz bang features if your site loads like a turtle.

dedicated wordpress hosting may be a solution for you, with claims of being up to 4 x faster than most other hosting. May be a bit expensive however, but you get what you pay for.

I've got a free checklist that you can download (as a spreadsheet) which contains everything I do to speed up my sites on shared hosting:

[Checklist] Shared Hosting High CPU Usage - Wordpress | Penny'pedia

Contains everything from optimizing databases to css sprites, etc.
You don't need to do everything on the list but at least it gives you a big list of things to find out what the 'cause' is and fix it.

I use Hostgator, Site5 and Bluehost and anytime they have a 'problem' with any of my sites, that's the checklist I go through and none of them have a problem with me now.

I don't use free themes, haven't for years but I highly doubt it's your theme causing the speed issue - it's more likely to be your host (crap host), database (too many plugins, or a badly configured one, etc.), or content (large images, no caching system, etc.)

Anyway, go through the checklist and you should be able to discover and eradicate the cause of your site slowness.

For me, usually it ends up being a particular plugin causing slowness (Im a plugin addict) or the database needs cleaning (most plugins don't 'cleanup' after themselves upon deletion)

Look for the plugin "W3 Total Cache" which has worked for me, and you may also want to look into different options that your web hosting provider offers, sometimes a dedicated server will help you out a lot. Also, delete any plugins that you aren't using which are just taking up space.

There are many factors that affect speed. Among them are high-resolution photos, videos, plugins, and so on. If your images are big files, compress them. Also, do away with unnecessary plugins.