What you are seeing isn’t “bad” exactly, you’ve just got a terrifically labor intensive query and WP_Query is not smart enough to optimize it– it doesn’t even try. Briefly, you’ve got a bunch of JOINs, you’ve got two LIKE conditions, which will read every row in the table of that post type, those likes are … Read more
If the data you’re fetching is only a single or at most a few instances, then the Transients API should do the job; keep in mind it also handles the auto-expiration for you. If the data could potentially be an unlimited (or at least medium-large) number of instances, especially if there may be even slightly … Read more
Normalizing data is more efficient, and storing serialized data in a table field that you want to search / work with on DB level isn’t something for Non-Nosql RDBMS like MySQL/MariaDB. Searching those fields is inefficient, you can’t use indexes on it, can’t join on it, and it’s generally painful to develop imho. If you’ve … Read more
There is no significant difference. Both will use a cached version of the current $post, in one you will access it via global $post, in other via functions that will get the data from the $post in the cache. I would suggest moving the in_the_loop() condition to be first in the IF.
WordPress has Transient and Object Cache APIs available. In a default WordPress install, Transients are stored in the database while Object Cache is stored in memory for the duration of the request. You can change this configuration to using something like Redis, Memcache, or APC to store and access this faster. In your case, you’d … Read more
It depends on your circumstances. There are, however, several things to consider: Loading CSS added to Additional CSS is added inline in a <style> tag at the head of every page. This means that if you have lots of CSS you’ll increase the size of all your pages individually. So the browser will be essentially … Read more
It is always best to avoid the use of plugins as it is simply an overhead on server resources. I strongly recommend that you use header.php or functions.php for adding the code. This is not true. In the end, it all comes down to PHP code. If the code lives in a plugin, a theme, … Read more
I just ran your page through the NET console on Firebug just so I could see what was loading … and wow … you have a lot of things loading that don’t need to be. From the looks of things, the following plug-ins are adding scripts and other collateral files to your load which are … Read more
I think Pingdom Tools gives you a false image. I opened your website (advia.com.au?) in Chrome with the Developer Tools open, and it loads 57 items, not 146 as Pingdom Tools shows. I think Pingdom Tools just scans the HTML and CSS files and loads all images it finds there – you have 113 url() … Read more
If you want to have more control over the filtering of your posts then separating the meta values into separate keys is the best option to go about it. Also what you could do is, only the values that would be required while filtering could be separated and the rest of them could go into … Read more