Title: Optimize Speed
Last modified: August 19, 2016

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# Optimize Speed

 *  [waronyou](https://wordpress.org/support/users/waronyou/)
 * (@waronyou)
 * [17 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/optimize-speed/)
 * I need a way to cut resources and optimize my site for speed. The digg effect
   shuts my site down when 10,000 people show up. So I need a way to deal with spurts.
   I use hyper cache but it seems to slow things down.
 * Any super heavy plug ins I should avoid?
 * I
    [http://waronyou.com](http://waronyou.com)
 * Im going to start by getting rid of rarely used plug ins.
 * I also noticed on wp that hyper cache freezes ads. This is another problem, I
   have to get rid of some of them too.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

 *  [Josh Leuze](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jleuze/)
 * (@jleuze)
 * [17 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/optimize-speed/#post-943426)
 * My first suggestion is to upgrade to 2.7. There isn’t necessarily any specific
   performance enhancements in 2.7, but some optimization is always happening in
   every revision of WordPress. Besides, it’s just the smart thing to do, security-
   wise!
 * WP Super Cache is a great plugin, it helps me reduce load on some of my more 
   busy sites. If you are Dugg, you might weather the spike better with Super Cache’s“
   Lock Down” feature. But it could take some tweaking to gain maximum benefit, 
   I would see what the plugin developer all has to [say about it.](http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/)
 * Of course, the developer also says:
 * > Don’t expect a cheap hosting plan to survive a major traffic spike, even if
   > it is cached!
 * Are you using a cheap host?
 * You might need to attack this problem from both ends, increasing your server 
   resources, and reducing the resources that your site uses.
 * Less ads will speed up your pageloading(and sometimes less is more), but if they
   are being served from an ad network, they aren’t causing much load to your server.
   If you are using more than one network, maybe one is not keeping up?
 * I’d suggest paying attention to your queries to the database as well. Each time
   you load a post or a comment in your sidebar, or any other content from your 
   database, you are adding load to your database.
 * There is a code in the default theme’s footer which puts the number of queries
   to load a page as a comment in that page’s code. I’d suggest you use that to 
   keep tabs on your queries, and reduce the amount of content on each page to ease
   the load on the database:
 *     ```
       <!-- <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries. <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds. -->
       ```
   
 * As an aside, I like your header graphic, but the typography needs some adjusting,
   all caps as body copy is very hard to read…
 *  [eas](https://wordpress.org/support/users/eas/)
 * (@eas)
 * [17 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/optimize-speed/#post-943641)
 * I found [WP Tuner](http://blogs.icta.net/plugins/wptuner/) to be very helpful
   in understanding what was hurting responsiveness of my blog. Once you install
   and activate it, it hooks the hookable operations in wordpress and tracks execution
   time, query count, query time and memory usage at each step.
 * One thing that is immediately obvious is that startup is an expensive process.
   It happens on every page load, and accounted for 30-50% of the execution time
   in most cases. If you need finer-grained profiling than WP Tuner can achieve 
   via the available hooks, you can go in and add one-line timing statements wherever
   you want. Doing so showed me that plugin loading was the most costly part of 
   the startup process. Some plugins were worse than others, but even the quickest
   loading plugins still added up.
 * The only way I found to really improve startup times was to set up a test machine
   and install [APC](http://pecl.php.net/package/APC) which caches already parsed
   PHP code to speed up execution. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take advantage of this
   on my shared hosting. I expect the same is true with most other shared hosts,
   because I think it increases baseline memory requirements, and may create security
   issues. There are some shared hosts, like Webfaction, that give you your own 
   Apache instance and let you do pretty much whatever you want with it. APC should
   be an option for any dedicated host or VPS.
 * The next thing you can do is optimize database use. The quickest path is to use
   something like WP-super-cache that can cache the HTML from generated pages, but
   you’ve already found the disadvantage of this approach, dynamic elements of the
   site get frozen until the cached copy is expired.
 * Fortunately WordPress has an object caching framework that can cache at a finer
   level, so you can still take advantage of dynamic page generation, while caching
   the results of database queries and the like. One option is to use a simple file
   based caching backend. I’ve been [using this](http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/file-based-extension-to-the-wordpress-object-cache/),
   which seems to help. It looks like [this](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/db-cache/)
   does something similar. Some people have reported that their shared hosts have
   complained about the disk IO this approach causes, but I’ve had no trouble.
 * There are other back-ends as well. One for APC, another for MemcacheD, and perhaps
   others. As with APC itself, these probably aren’t an option on most shared hosts.
 * These things should help with responsiveness when your traffic is low as well
   as high, and they should help your ability to ride out traffic surges.
 * The same goes for optimizing the speed with which your pages can be downloaded.
   It looks like your pages and your javascript are being gzipped, but for some 
   reason, your .css files aren’t.
 * There is a lot more in the [WordPress documentation](http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Optimization),
   but I’d suggest starting out with WP tuner so you can get a handle on where time
   is being spent on the server-side.
 *  [alains](https://wordpress.org/support/users/alains/)
 * (@alains)
 * [17 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/optimize-speed/#post-943643)
 * Kudos eas!
 * Thanks for this really useful reading, explanations and links.
 *  [Ovidiu](https://wordpress.org/support/users/ovidiu/)
 * (@ovidiu)
 * [17 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/optimize-speed/#post-943656)
 * you can also try this mod of wp super cache: [http://murmatrons.armadillo.homeip.net/features/experimental-eaccelerator-wp-super-cache](http://murmatrons.armadillo.homeip.net/features/experimental-eaccelerator-wp-super-cache)
   and this object cache plugin instead of the neosmart one (very old) [http://murmatrons.armadillo.homeip.net/features/eaccelerator-wordpress-object-cache](http://murmatrons.armadillo.homeip.net/features/eaccelerator-wordpress-object-cache)
 * good luck!
 * I just went through 2 month of optimizing mysql, apache, wordpress, eliminating
   plugins, checking themes so I know what you are looking at 🙂

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

The topic ‘Optimize Speed’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [cache](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/cache/)

 * In: [Everything else WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/miscellaneous/)
 * 4 replies
 * 5 participants
 * Last reply from: [Ovidiu](https://wordpress.org/support/users/ovidiu/)
 * Last activity: [17 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/optimize-speed/#post-943656)
 * Status: not resolved

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