WordPress Performance Issues

Comment on Comments WordPress SEO Plugin by SEO Dave.

No problem, already put the plugin update out so you should see it as an upgrade on your Dashboard soon.

WordPress performance issues are very common, especially if you run a site with a theme and plugins that haven’t been optimized for performance.

Run your site through https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and you’ll start to get an idea of what might be causing some issues. Unfortunately won’t help with diagnosing backend issues, there are plugins for this, but they give mixed results.

It’s why I developed an SEO theme that does everything I want, means I can go through the code line by line stripping out anything unnecessary/replacing bad design ideas. My approach is to have a lot of features available, BUT if I’m not using a feature on a site don’t load any of the resources it uses.

WordPress image sliders for example tend to use Jquery to do the fancy effects (big performance hit). Before performance was a big SEO issue I added a slider to Stallion and like all sliders I’ve looked at it needed Jquery for it’s effects.

Since performance is a big SEO issue I don’t use the slider on a single site (I own over 100). On the Stallion Responsive options pages (there’s over a dozen options pages with hundreds of options) there’s a tick box to turn the slider feature on/off.

When set to on, Jquery is loaded, but only where needed.
When set to off, Jquery isn’t loaded and the PHP code that creates the slider isn’t even loaded.

For those that do use the builtin slider there’s options to set where on the site to run it, if set to only run on the home page they only need Jquery to load on the home page. If you aren’t using a slider on posts for example you don’t need to performance killing Jquery feature on posts. So even though sliders are bad performance wise, if you use one take performance into account to minimize the hit.

You will find with many WordPress sliders not only will Jquery load even if you don’t use the slider, it might even load under your dashboard slowing things down at the backend.

You will find this type of poorly thought out design in a lot of themes and plugins, all you can do is learn to weed out the really bad ones. Some are awful, related posts plugins tend to be database hogs! I’ve tested some that added hundreds of database queries on parts of a site where the related posts plugin should even run (home page, categories etc…).

I have my sites set to not even load widgets I’m not using on the widgets page. I have all theses widgets disabled (unregistered):

Default WP Widget Recent Comments
Default WP Widget Calendar
Default WP Widget Meta Links
Default WP Widget Links
Default WP Widget Monthly Archives
Default WP Widget Recent Posts
Default WP Widget RSS
Default WP Widget Pages
Default WP Widget Search
Default WP Widget Categories
Default WP Widget Custom Menu

Only have these two active along with 10 of the 21 Stallion widgets.
Default WP Widget Text
Default WP Widget Tagcloud

Means my server isn’t wasting resources loading features I don’t use, saves me money as I can use cheap virtual servers. On some of my sites I only have 3 or 4 widgets active.

Every bit helps on performance.

David