Hello!
I’ve noticed recently that this blog has started running a little slow. Not incredibly so, but enough to be a pain. I’ve not made any major changes to it, config-wise, since the last update for WordPress so I’m not sure what’s caused it. It’s all hosted on a shared server though, and I suspect it has a less than friendly neighbour eating all the resources.
Anyway, I’ve taken some steps to speed things up. I’ve got rid of some plugins (some old posts with odd embedded things may now be broken, unfortunately), I’ve optimised the database and moved it to a faster DB server (hopefully this hasn’t broken anything), I’ve tripled the amount of RAM WordPress has access to, reduced the number of posts on the homepage a little, and I’ve also implemented caching. It’s the caching which seems to have made the biggest difference. I used this plugin, if you’re looking at doing the same thing.
Still, using a tool like Pingdom’s website speed test, I can see there’s a big pause between sending the request for the page and the server actually doing anything. It could be settings or plugins or huge posts causing it, but I’m pretty sure that the drastic speed change over the last few weeks is server side. My host is on the case looking into possible issues, but I’m also considering upgrading my package (to another which is actually cheaper, as it works out) but that’s dependant on the work involved migrating. Watch this space.
In the meantime, if you see anything broken then please let me know in the comments of any of the broken pages and I’ll try and fix it. Or I might just delete it, if that’s easier. I expect the latter, as most of it is crap anyway.
