Optimize wordpress for your server

Today I m going to talk about very popular blogging platform or content management system behavior towards the server, which happens behind the scene.

Very often people can see their hosting account get suspended because of excessive resource usage. Truly its a moment of panicking when you see a suspension message is hanging on your own site where people come to see and become disappointed. So to prevent this kind of harassment you should take precautionary measures to minimize your server load by tweaking into your content management system platform.

WordPress and server usage:

Why very simple and sleek blogging platform like WordPress consume excessive resource! How you can reduce or less your server resources by tweaking in WordPress! Well, today, I may cover only WordPress but I will be trying to release another article for you to help.

If you use WordPress than you can find WordPress is great software because of its ease of use, it does have a history of using excessive server resources (such as memory and/or CPU time) at times. This is not always the fault of WordPress directly, but instead it could be the result of either:

1. A coded plugin
2. Custom theme sometimes with too much unnecessary features

With so many lines of code in WordPress and custom user code written in plugins and custom themes, pinpointing directly where the excessive server resource usage is occurring is a difficult task. To solve these multidimensional problems, we can approach one by one.

#1. Stick with the latest updates:

Days passed, new bugs come up and developers jump on it to fix and they release updates. So it is better to be updated on your WordPress platform, plugins and themes regularly. Because it is seen that most recent versions have the latest optimization that can prevent you from your WordPress website being hacked or suspended for excessive resources.

#2. Budget the functions you need for your theme:

Statistic shows that most of the people choose WordPress theme/template by only seeing its design and outlook. Yes, outlook is a vital point on choosing your preferred WordPress theme but very often these themes come up with so much garbage functionality that makes the site load slowly and give pressure to the server CPU. So before making your best WordPress template selection, you should budget the function you want along with the look you dream. It better to avoid team Avengers when Hulk is fair enough.

#3. Choose the best coded plugin for your wordpress website:

If you are not rich enough to play with server memory than you may try to avoid using these plugins as to perform the task these offer, consumes a lot of memory of server.

List of WordPress plugins use excessive server CPU/Memory usage:

Broken Link Checker Pounds the server with HTTP requests.

Dynamic Related Posts Almost all Related Posts plugins suffer from the same fundamental problems regarding MySQL, indexing, and search making most very database intensive.

WP Smushit Relies on Yahoo services and memory mapping… When Yahoo fails or memory mapping is exceeded, the plugin fails and brings down sites with it.

MyReviewPlugin (MyRP) SLAMS the database with writes at orders of magnitude.

LinkMan? Related to MyRP.

SEO Auto Links & Related Posts? Creates large and inefficient queries which load down the database

Fuzzy SEO Booster Thrashes MySQL

WP PostViews? inefficiently writes to the database on every page load. Try something like Automatic stats or Google Analytic to track traffic in a scalable manner.

Tweet Blender

Similar Posts- Does FULL TEXT indexes on MySQL which does not scale.

Contextual Related Posts- Does FULL TEXT indexes on MySQL which does not scale.

List is collected from WP Engine and I have removed some from the list because those are vital for SEO of WordPress and enhancing functionality.

#4. Install WP Super Cache/W3 Total Cache/Memcahced WordPress plugin:

Though sometimes these plugin works in a different way but their purpose is all the same and that is reducing server load. These reduce a site server load by creating static html versions of pages as they are requested, which are then served the next time anyone hits the page. This means none of the php scripts or database calls are executed the second time around, so the server has to do a lot less work per page view, as it is not calling the database over and over again and need not to wait for database to respond. It also has the benefit that cached pages are served quicker, and thus provides a better user experience and speed in surfing the site. In order to know how memcahced works and the installation process please visit Memcached and WordPress.

We always face the best in everyday. So, these four steps may make a very good and exemplary change on your WordPress and server and may save you from spending more bucks on buying a VPS but you should look always for the updated tips and tweaks available online.

Hoping to hit back to you with a similar article for a different platform soon. Originally posted on SuperInception.com