Speeding up your blog or website

Well, so far so good. Another 24 hours and no outages on my wife’s blog. Both sites are showing 100% uptime from Uptime Robot:

uptimeRobot-uptime

I submitted a ticket to HostGator a few days ago when House of Hepworth kept going down and they gave me a generic, yet very helpful email response on some things that I can do to make the site run smoother and ensure that processes execute quickly and don’t stack up. These are things that I’ve been putting off doing for quite some time. I know that they need to be done and that they will definitely help out. I guess it’s finally time to get around to doing all of these things. I’ll be posting more in the future as I implement these tuning options and tweaks. The list of things I’m going to tackle, in no particular order, are:

  1. Optimize the MySQL database on a regular basis. I did a manual optimization yesterday via PHPMyAdmin, but I want to schedule it to automatically happen without me having to remember or log in to do it. I’m a huge fan of automating anything that can be automated. I even considered installing a smart light switch in my son’s room because he can’t remember to turn the light off when he exits his room, but I think that might take automation too far. At some point my son needs to learn to clean up after himself and not have Dad automate that for him. <tangent over>
  2. Remove any resource intensive plugins. I plan on doing an in-depth review of all plugins that we have installed to date and only run with the ones that really add value. There is a tradeoff in running plugins. Some add extra processing that is not worth the gain. HostGator provided a link to a list of resource intensive plugins here.
  3. Enable WordPress Caching. I tried this a while ago and something didn’t work quite right. This is probably one of the single biggest things I could do to make her website run faster and avoid outages. Without any caching, whenever someone hits your website it goes all the way to the database for everything. Assuming nothing has changed in your website, you can setup caching so that static pages are created for people to view, instead of hitting the database. Going to the database is the most expensive operation for a website generally. Whenever someone leaves a comment, it goes to the database. A properly written caching plugin will only update the cache when it needs to (i.e. when a new post is made or when a comment is left). There are two main plugins that I will be researching before choosing one to implement: WP Super Cache and WP Total Cache. Once I decide on one, I’ll let you know which one I go with and how I got it working.

Once I get all of this stuff implemented, I’ll be interested to see how the response time for the site goes down. It’s not great right now – sometimes more than 10 seconds to load. Uptime Robot also tracks this and trends it over time. Pretty cool, right?

uptimeRobot-responseTime

Comments

  1. cool

Trackbacks

  1. […] dying a lot lately and their answer was, as expected, to implement caching. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. MySQL keeps filling up the memory and […]

  2. […] of the site has tremendously increased as well. Check out the difference before and after. In my post about speeding up your blog I mentioned how the speed to load my wife’s blog was many times […]