Wordpress is an amazing CMS or Content Management System that makes creating and maintaining a website really easy. However at times it can cause high resource usage when not optimized properly. In this article, you’ll learn how to optimize WordPress.
Why you should optimize WordPress
Because WordPress makes it so easy to do a lot of things, this requires a lot of stuff going on in the background. Depending on the size and complexity of your website, as well as the traffic you receive, you’ll want to pay extra close attention to making sure your WordPress site is optimized to handle the type of traffic you get.
If you’ve viewed your website’s speed with Google’s PageSpeed tools and your site seems to be running slow, WordPress could be the problem.
Steps to ensure an optimized WordPress setup
Below we compiled a list on what we recommend doing to optimize your WordPress website.
These are ordered by the typical resource usage reduction expected from each method, and not all are required.
For instance most customers just need WordPress caching and that’s enough to bring the resource usage down.
Implement WordPress caching
WordPress by default will dynamically create your pages and posts by pulling from your database.
If you have 100 people view one of your pages, by default this will cause 100 PHP executions.
Instead the first person to view your page should pull from the database, and create a cached page.
This cached page can be viewed, hundreds, if not thousands of times by others with minimal usage.
WP Super Cache (Basic and easy to setup)
W3 Total Cache (Offers more advanced caching options)
Be careful of known intensive WordPress plugins
WordPress plugins can vary greatly in how efficiently they were created, since anyone can make one.
You can try to find an alternative plugin, seeing if leaving one of these disabled brings your resource usage down enough.
You could also use the P3 Plugin Performance Plugin to try to figure out which WordPress plugins are the most intensive.
Below is a list of plugins we’ve seen customers have issues with before as they seem to utilize a large amount of resource usage compared to most plugins.
| CMS Tree Page View | Constant Contact WordPress Widget | Digi Auto Links |
| Disqus Comment System | FireStats WordPress | Geo Mashup |
| Google Talk Widget | NextGEN Gallery | PHP Code for Posts |
| Quotes Collection | Reveal IDs | Simple Post Thumbnails |
| Skype Status | VaultPress | WassUp Real Time Analytics |
| Wordgento | wpCloaker | WordPress Facebook |
| WP Forum Server | WP Live Stream | Online Backup for WordPress |
| WP Autoresponder and News Plugin | WP Super Heatmap | WP Symposium |
| Yet Another Related Posts Plugin |
Disable default wp-cron.php behaviour
WordPress runs wp-cron.php on every visit to basically ask “do I have anything to do?”
When visitors start to roll in, checking multiple times the same hour is very inefficient.
By default your wp-cron.php script could be getting called hundreds of times an hour.
Setup a manual cron job to run this instead, at a more appropriate 4 or 6 hour interval.
Disable WordPress autosave and log out of dashboard
WordPress autosaves, and admin dashboard activity goes to the /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php script.
There can sometimes be hundreds, if not thousands of these requests and you can limit them by disabling the autosave feature in WordPress and staying logged out of the admin when not in use.
Log out of WordPress admin dashboard when not in use
Limit or block search engine crawlers
By using a robots.txt rules file, you can deny access to certain search engines you don’t want crawling your website, or deny them to particular sections of your website.
Stop or slow search engine crawlers on your website with robots.txt
Block unwanted users from your site
You can outright deny access to your website from either certain IP addresses, or User-Agents.
For instance the following .htaccess code would block the Chinese Baidu.com spider, HTTrack which is a website copier, and the Russian Yandex.com search engine.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(Baiduspider|HTTrack|Yandex).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [R=403,L]
Block unwanted users from your website using .htaccess
Deal with WordPress comment spam
You should be using a CAPTCHA plugin to protect against comment spam like WP-reCAPTCHA.
If your WordPress site already has comment spam you can clean up WordPress comment spam.
Find out who is comment spamming you
If you already have comment spam you should remove it from your database, and then you can try to protect against further comment spam based off who is trying to spam you.
For instance, a WordPress site today had these unique IPs that were trying to spam them:
8 218.10.17.148 8 60.173.26.43 8 60.173.26.61 9 218.10.17.208 9 218.10.17.94 9 60.173.10.231 9 60.173.10.242 9 60.173.10.244 9 60.173.11.219 9 60.173.26.47 9 60.173.26.57 9
So we can see that there are a lot of unique IP addresses from the 60.173 range, and the 218.10 range that are trying to spam our comments at least 8 times each.
Now you can try to see where these IP addresses are from using a website like geoIPtool.com
In this case you’d end up looking at:
http://www.geoiptool.com/en/?IP=60.173 http://www.geoiptool.com/en/?IP=218.10
These ranges are all from China, so if that’s not your target audience, there probably shouldn’t be people from there commenting on your website.
Block IP ranges from accessing your website at all
You can outright deny these IP ranges in .htaccess with this:
Deny from 60.172 Deny from 218.10
Block IP ranges from commenting on your WordPress site
Or if you wanted to still allow people from these IP ranges to visit your site, but not comment on it, you could use these .htaccess rules:
ErrorDocument 503 "Commenting disabled"
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^60.173 [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^218.10
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/wp-comments-post.php$
RewriteRule .* - [R=503,L]
Limit or disable WordPress revisions
Although not as intensive as preventing requests in the first place, you can also disable or limit WordPress revisions to improve database performance as well.
Limit or disable WordPress revisions
Install and use the Better Delete Revision WordPress plugin
Update everything WordPress
To ensure everything is running optimally be sure to update regularly.
Request further help from support
If all of this fails to help your WordPress website run faster and use up less resources, then a deeper investigation probably needs to be done on your access logs to see what’s really being requested the most which could be causing problems for you.
Resource usage patterns typically come in waves, so it’s important to enable raw access logs in cPanel for your account, so that if you need to contact support for further help, we have a lot of data to work with to recommend you something as a possible culprit of your high usage.
Once you have at least a full day of logs, feel free to contact technical support for further help.
You should hopefully now have a better understanding on how you can optimize your WordPress website to reduce the resource usage required from the server in order to handle your account’s requests.
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