The problem with orderby rand is that on most setups the database will load all posts into memory, then randomly order them, and return what you asked for. It’s that loading into memory that makes the query super slow/expensive Also yes, terms are individual categories and tags, where category is a taxonomy, and the ‘development’ … Read more
Well, the short answer is the first item consumes more memory then the second one. One of the reason would be that WordPress hooks uses call_user_func_array() to call al those functions dynamically. And call_user_func_array() actually takes an array as one of its parameter and do a search for a function with this name. So in … Read more
I’ll be controversial here and point out that if you’re using a pre-built theme as massively “heavy” as you are, then honestly I wouldn’t even worry about minning CSS files! I’ll go out on a limb and guess you are also using a bunch of plugins (my bunch is 6+) in which case why not … Read more
I monitor a few websites with pingdom, one of the sites I monitor is not mine but I monitor out of curiosity is a amazon hosted site. In the past 6 months it has had 3 hours of downtime and 2 hour of that is in one chunk, apart from the it just went off … Read more
An option is to manually disable all plugins and enable them one-by-one and see when trouble occurse again. Another option is to use a WordPress profiler. I would highly recommend using InterconnectIT’s WordPress Performance Profiler. This plugin will profile all or a certain amount of requests and show you what plugins take a long time … Read more
You should look at the queries there run on the pages, with and without plugins and custom Theme. So you have the possibility to compare the process and find the bottlenecks. As helping tools should I named: https://wordpress.org/plugins/debug-objects/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/query-monitor/ Activate the debug mode so that you also get errors and the usage of minified scripts … Read more
Your first example with a separate variable is actually slower. In both cases you have the $post variable already in your scope, and reading from that doesn’t cost anything. But if you create a copy and assign that to a new variable, you are using more resources. Just reading an existing variable doesn’t cost any … Read more
The shop I’m looking after also has a lot of large queries and for us, the solution was a WP optimised hosting provider with litespeed caching and sufficient resources (RAM) to handle the query. And for queries which are always the same, I also use transients. With transients, the query runs only once and is … Read more
I think, it would be hard to achieve this, on the PHP-side as there is not much to gain in how you execute the WP_Query, because it will still result in the same WP_Queries executing the same logic under the hood. There is however “easy” performance to gain by either; not using WP_Query and for … Read more
It is very possible to scale WordPress to support multiple sites. WordPress.com, for example, has over 13 million. The trick, when it comes to performance, is to: Make sure your server can handle it If you’re on a shared hosting system, upgrade to a dedicated server (or many). If you’re running 170 blogs, you should … Read more