cmarshall - 2:06 pm on Jan 14, 2008 (gmt 0)

I have a WP site that is zippy as all git-go (I'm not allowed to link to it here). The difference came when I switched ISPs. I have a friend who's site generated bigger pages than mine, yet loaded three times as fast.

I got a VPS on his ISP, and it has sped up my WP quite a bit. Maybe it's the Apache install.

Administering the site is still slow, but nowhere near as slow as it was. WP is a big fat pig; especially if you use a few plugins. Some people throw every plugin they can find into their installs. Each plugin costs you.

I haven't had much luck with WP-Cahce in my install. I have several pages that actually get screwed over by the caching, and I couldn't easily except them. I don't use it, and the site is really zippy.

Here's what I do:

1) I use a decent ISP with a fast LAMP.

2) I only use the plugins that I ABSOLUTELY NEED.

3) I put code into my header.php or pluging wp-head handler that prevents loads of things like the Google Maps API (REALLY SLOW) unless the page in question needs it.

4) I "scrub" my output, scripts and styles with a "cleaner" that strips out cruft like comments (in CSS and JS), multiple spaces and indents.

5) I use the "ob_" functions [us2.php.net] to deliver compressed content.

It makes it quite bearable for me.