Five Ways to Improve Performance on Your Wordpress Site

March 27th, 2006 · 114Comments2006-03-27+20%3A17%3A56Dan+Grossman · Blogging

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Slow loading sites annoy me. Given that this site was becoming increasingly slow and annoying, I recently made a number of changes and, as a result, performance is much better. If you run Wordpress on a managed host, read on. If you don’t maintain a blog or if you do so on a hosted service (ie Blogger), then this post isn’t intended for you.

Anyway, following is my list of steps to take to improve Wordpress performance:

Optimize your MySQL database. With time, database performance can degrade. Cleaning things up on MySQL isn’t hard–WebKeyDesign has a good guide (just make sure to have a backup in case things go wrong). In addition, I’ve found that dropping unused or unnecessary MySQL tables (especially if they are large) can make a huge difference.
Turn off plugins one by one to see if any create performance issues. Certain plugins, such as those that only affect admin views, have no noticeable performance impact on visitors. Other plugins, particularly those that modify a post’s content or access the MySQL database in an inefficient way, can slow things down more dramatically. The best way to tell if any plugins are problematic is to go through each individually and see if performance improves after deactivation.
Remove any external services one by one to see if any create performance issues. Just as plugins can run slowly, some external services run like molasses. Google Analytics, in particular, was a problem for me. The data was great, but it wasn’t worth an incremental ~10 seconds of load time. It’s gone for now.
Install a caching plugin. Wordpress 2.x comes with some built-in caching, but I’ve found that the wp-cache 2.0 plugin makes a big performance difference. Recommended. Incidentally, wp-cache can also help your site stay up if you are lucky enough to experience the Digg or Slashdot effect.
Check your web server and switch, if appropriate. As writted about earlier, I was frustrated with my old host because my site’s load times varied tremendously–the same page on the same day (with the same template and plugins) could take anywhere from 5 to 60+ seconds to load. Despite multiple calls and emails, the old host’s support team was unable to determine why performance fluctuated so much. In response, I switched hosts–and have been very happy with the results. Load times are consistently much shorter. If you’re interested in a new host, read here for more info.

Any other tips or ideas?

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114Comments2006-03-27+20%3A17%3A56Dan+Grossman so far ↓

digg / software / digg // Mar 29, 2006 at 2:17 am

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Geoffrey McCaleb // Mar 31, 2006 at 3:03 am

Next to wp-cache, the next best thing you can do is install a php accelerator. Wordpress, like a lot of blogs, includes a great deal of php code that is executed multiple times per page. An accelerator will compile this code, which makes future accesses much faster.

If you have money, use Zend. If not, a free version is available as well (http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk/).

Geoffrey
bonie // Jul 21, 2006 at 5:39 am

Perfect pages… tnx
WKD // Oct 2, 2006 at 2:41 pm

Avoid using javascripts or images from other sites.

If you still want images to link to other blog directories or sites, save the image to your site and reference it locally.

Avoid using javascripts that link to other sites, if you must use them, put them in the footer section of your template so your site still renders, just in case that javascript’s server goes down.

Lastly, clean up your CSS and make it as compact as possible. Every byte helps, and even under broadband the results are noticeable.
Antibush // Feb 14, 2007 at 4:14 pm

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Our country is in debt until forever, we don’t have jobs, and we live in fear. We have invaded a country and been responsible for thousands of deaths.
We have lost friends and influenced no one. No wonder most of the world thinks we suck. Thanks to what george bush has done to our country during the past three years, we do!
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How To use Wordpress for Content Aggregation, 100,000 posts, MYSQL issues and Wordpress Performance Tuning revisited | weblog.cemper.com // Apr 19, 2007 at 1:02 pm

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gloreclek // Nov 16, 2007 at 5:24 am

Two new studies show why some people are more attractive for members of the opposite sex than others.

The University of Florida, Florida State University found that physically attractive people almost instantly attract the attention of the interlocutor, sobesednitsy with them, literally, it is difficult to make eye. This conclusion was reached by a series of psychological experiments, which were determined by the people who believe in sending the first seconds after the acquaintance. Here, a curious feature: single, unmarried experimental preferred to look at the guys, beauty opposite sex, and family, people most often by representatives of their sex.

The authors believe that this feature developed a behavior as a result of the evolution: a man trying to find a decent pair to acquire offspring. If this is resolved, he wondered potential rivals. Detailed information about this magazine will be published Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In turn, a joint study of the Rockefeller University, Rockefeller University and Duke University, Duke University in North Carolina revealed that women are perceived differently by men smell. During experiments studied the perception of women one of the ingredients of male pheromone-androstenona smell, which is contained in urine or sweat.

The results were startling: women are part of this repugnant odor, and the other part is very attractive, resembling the smell of vanilla, and the third group have not felt any smell. The authors argue that the reason is that the differences in the receptor responsible for the olfactory system, from different people are different.

It has long been proven that mammals (including human) odor is one way of attracting the attention of representatives of the opposite sex. A detailed article about the journal Nature will publish.
sufehmi // Dec 25, 2007 at 11:46 pm

Sometimes, you simply need to avoid invoking Apache/PHP altogether

Just recently I’ve got a client asking me to help his overloaded website. It’s as if he’s Slashdotted all the time.

I moved his website from his dual core, 4GB RAM server; into my P4 512MB RAM server. It runs much faster, and my server’s avg utilization is still below 5%.
This is the power of the edge server.

Hope someone find it useful.
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