Has your website been blocked by your host company due to excessive WordPress resource consumption? If yes then you're not the only one. This problem is quite common these days and the root cause in most cases is a malfunctioning plug-in or script. Webmasters usually think that a website cannot overburden a web server unless it has a virus or malware in it but that's not the case. Even a completely clean blog can wreck a web server if it is not optimized thoroughly. Fortunately it's really easy to minimize the resource consumption of a WordPress site and make it more reliable.

There are three main ways of lowering WordPress resource usage, including:

- Reduce your site's traffic

- Take steps to make your website less resource intensive

- Use a reliable dedicated server

It is never a good idea to stop individuals from accessing your website so we can rule out the 1st option. The last option isn't viable for everyone either since renting a VPS, dedicated host or a cloud system is very pricey. Moreover these alternatives do not offer the same convinience that shared hosting companies do. You may need technical expertise and experience to run a hosting server. The only sensible and cheap option is the second one. With some easy tactics you can make your blog streamlined and light-weight.

Setup a Cache system - If you don't have a caching system installed on your website then you should get one as soon as possible. Caching is the easiest way to reduce server load and make a website blazing fast. The most popular caching plugin available on the internet is WP Super Cache. W3 total cache is another popular choice.

Keep Your Site Updated - The WordPress community is always searching for ways to make the system more efficient and less bandwidth intensive. Each new update offers some key improvements. That's why you must always keep your WordPress installation up-to-date. Same goes for plugins and templates. If a plugin hasn't been upgraded in a long time, you shouldn't make the mistake of installing it on your web server. It won't just increase resource usage but may also create severe security problems in the system.

Optimize the theme in use - Optimizing your theme is another easy way to speed things up and improve user-experience. If your theme has a lot of images and fancy visual effects then it might be using a huge amount of resources. The first thing you can do to optimize your theme is install a compression utility. W3 Total Cache comes with an easy to use compression tool that can reduce the size of any given Javascript file or stylesheet dramatically. Similarly there are many plugins that compress all the images on a webpage for faster loading. Another option is to optimize each image manually with the help of Photoshop or some other image editor.

Tweak your database - WordPress stores all of the site information in a MySQL database. With time this database gets overloaded with junk material like post revisions, unused drafts, junk comments etc. You should get rid of all this worthless junk at regular intervals. Just log into your cPanel, click on PHP My Admin and eliminate all that isn't required. But before making any adjustments remember to take a full backup of your data.

Here are some other tips that you might find useful:

- Deactivate or delete plugins not in use.

- Use Google's search box rather than the default WordPress search.

- After updating to WordPress' newest version, always perform compatibility tests with the site's plugins and delete all that are incompatible.

If you want to spend less on web hosting and get good search rankings then you must follow the rules given in this post.