Wordpress | Les Jones

Home > wordpress

All In One SEO Pack for WordPress is a Pig

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 | Tech | Permalink | 2 Comments |

I’m just about to launch a new WordPress site at work and I’m tuning everything to be as fast as possible. In trying to track down inconsistent performance I installed WP Tuner and discovered that the All In One SEO Pack plugin is sometimes driving up database loads like crazy, even with half of the options disabled.

On this page it’s adding 4.9 seconds to the page loading time. More, actually, since wp-blog-header uses less database time when AIOSP is deactivated.

all-in-one-seo-pack-db-time

On other pages AIOSP is only adding a couple of hundred milliseconds to the page loads.

When I set WP Tuner to “Show Everything” so I can see all queries, it’s obvious that AIOSP is doing SQL queries for every link on the page. Why I have no idea.

If I can’t make AIOSP behave then I’m going to figure out how to replicate the features. Adding nofollow tags to the appropriate pages is pretty easy. My theme framework can insert canonical URLs. I think I can create meta descriptions via custom fields and then code that into the templates.

P.S. When I contacted tech support at my Web host about sluggish performance one of their first questions was if I was using an SEO plugin. I had previously tried SEO Ultimate and it had the same problem.

Tags: wordpress

Scott Kelby: don’t let WordPress resize your photos

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 | Blogging, Photos | Permalink | No Comments |

Scott Kelby discovers that WordPress’s automated preview generator is noticeably less sharp than what he gets from Adobe Photoshop. WordPress also strips out the EXIF data in the preview. I use it anyway for the convenience, but YMMV.

Tags: wordpress

You first

Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | Blogging, Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

WordPress 2.8 is out. Announcement and full feature list. There are more features and it’s supposed to be faster. I’ll probably wait a bit to let some of the inevitable new release bugs get worked out.

I just upgraded to 2.7.1 a few weeks ago when I moved to a new server. It turns out that wasn’t a wasted effort. Beginning with 2.7 you can upgrade to new versions automatically without re-installing.

Automatic updates over the Internet are one of the best changes in tech in the last 10 years for productivity and security. Good stuff.

P.S. Here’s a cool WordPress widgets/Google hack: Add Custom Search to any site in two minutes. I’ve added it to my sidebar to see if I like it (and it actually took less than two minutes). Looks like I need to play around with the formatting for long titles.

Tags: google, wordpress

Is anyone accessing LesJones.com from a mobile device?

Saturday, April 11th, 2009 | Blogging, Tech | Permalink | 5 Comments |

I ask because the MobilePress plug-in is using hella database time.

The blog is still accessible without it. With the MobilePress plug-in you get a list of the most recent posts. Without it you get the front page, more or less, with the title and text of the post.

Output is from the WP-Tuner plug-in for WordPress.

Tags: wordpress

Optimizing WordPress database performance

Thursday, April 9th, 2009 | Blogging, Tech | Permalink | No Comments |

Some ideas from Joost de Valk. Good ideas in comments, too.

I’ll give a big thumbsup to WP-DBManager, which solved some of my WordPress CPU usage issues. It can repair, optimize, and backup databases through your WordPress interface.

Tags: wordpress