Is Your WordPress Blog Slow?

Question:
Should i let people post comments on my blog? I keep having troubles with CPU usage policies of hosts so i am trying to fix this issue. If a page has let’s say more than 30 comments is it going to cost me a lot of CPU? Thanks for answers.

Answer:

It would be a shame to have to turn comments off because they provide unique content to your blog posts and the search engines love that.  However, comments, along with posts and pages are stored in the database and fetching them results in hits to the database, hence CPU usage.

Troubling Shooting WordPress Slowness

Who is your web hosting provider?  Do you get a lot of traffic?  Do you have ads on your site that are loading images from another source other than your server’s file system that might be the problem and not your comments?  Are you sure it’s the comments?  Have you tried disabling plugins to see if one of them is causing the problem?  Do you have any CRON jobs running?  Are you sure it’s not your theme that’s slowing things down?  Did you get it from a reliable source or are you using a free theme that some wannabe programmer kid coded?

Speeding Up WordPress

If you’re not already doing so, I would suggest using a caching plugin.  A lot of people use WP-Super-Cache.  I like using Quick Cache, a WP Super Cache alternative.  It’s easier to use.  WordPress dynamically creates pages, posts and comments on the fly when they are requested by a visitor.  That means it has to fetch the information from the database every stinking time.  A caching plugin actually creates physical HTML pages and retrieves them, instead.  If you make a change to the data, Quick Cache will update the HTML page.

Another plugin that REALLY speeds up WordPress is one called Use Google Libraries.

The reason I asked about your hosting provider is because I was also having problems with my blogs.  Can’t say it was due to comments, though.  Whenever I’d spark up a new blog, even brand new without anything on it, it would run slow.  When the Dashboard runs slowly, you know you’re in trouble.  I thought it was just a WordPress thing.  Actually, I think the more likely answer is sucky web hosting and over-crowded slow-ass servers.

Fast WordPress Hosting

I know this is going to sound like a sales pitch, but here goes anyway.  I was having a lot of downtime with one of my hosting accounts and I knew I had to find a new host.  I’ve been doing this web hosting thing for many, many years now and it never really gets any easier because they all pretty much have the same features and make the same promises.  BUT, I was blown away with WebHostingHub.  They say their servers are optimized to run WordPress.  Couldn’t wait to check that claim out.  Long story short, I transferred one of my blogs from another host and couldn’t believe the increase in speed and that was without a caching plugin.  So I kept transferring more blogs and they all ran faster.  Give WebHostingHub a try.  They’ve got a 90-day money-back guarantee and an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau.

How To Transfer Your Blog To Another Host

I’ll give you my instructions on how to transfer a WordPress blog from another host.  You can do a test run by setting up your blog on your Hub account.  I’ll show you how to do it so only you see it and it won’t affect your current live blog.  If you like the way it runs, then you can flip the switch.

When you sign up for your Hub account, don’t use any of your live domain names.  Just take advantage of the free domain name offer and make up a short name as your primary domain name and then don’t use it.  Just treat it as a placeholder for your hosting account.  You absolutely do not need to use the primary domain name on a hosting account for any anything.  That way if you every have to close your account, you don’t have to worry about transferring that primary domain name because you won’t have anything tied to it.  Always buy your own domain names and then create addon-domains with your real domain names.  I use NameCheap for hella cheap domain names and free privacy protection.

Click Here to get WebHostingHub.