Wordpress running slow

I’ve been developing a site using Wordpress as a CMS and up until now things had been going great.  The wealth of plugins and support available on the Internet coupled with its “out of the box” SEO friendly reputation was enough to win me over.

I’ve noticed over the last couple of weeks that page load times seemed to have increased for both the front end (seen by visitors) but especially the backend admin pages. A few weeks back I updated to version 2.5 but I’m loathsome to upgrade to the latest 2.6.1 as I’m aware that some of the plugins have not yet been updated.

To address the front end page load times I installed the super-cache plugin.  As my site doesn’t have any dynamic content that gets updated regularly such as “most popular post” etc this wouldn’t be a problem for me.  In a nut shell what it does is serves up a local copy of the pages content instead of querying the MySQL database each time.  I’m happy to say that this seems to have decreased the page load times on the front end of my site considerably with no ill effects or problems.  I just need to play around with the plugins settings to get the expiry times etc working effectively.

Some plugins could also be the cause of slow page loads.  You could disable them all and then re-enable them one by one checking each time if it has an effect on the page load time.  For those of you who use Firefox there is a great plugin called firebug that you can use to diagnose how long each element of your page takes to load.  For an excellent guide on doing this see http://www.paulspoerry.com/2007/08/04/diagnose-slow-wordpress-performance-using-firebug/

The admin pages were another matter.  navigating between admin pages was taking over a minute in some instances, totally irritating and useless.  First I disabled all plugins to check it wasn’t one of them effecting the admin pages but this had no effect whatsoever.  Secondly I turned on MySQL query cache by adding the following lines to my  my.cnf file

query-cache-type = 1
query-cache-size = 20M

I then restarted MySQL and for good measure I restarted my Apache server (I’m on a dedicated server)  Fingers crossed this seems to have had a positive effect and the admin pages are now running much faster and more importantly are usable.

I just hope it stays this way.  I have a number of sites in the pipeline that I was planning on using wordpress for as the CMS