get_the_foo() in the loop – does it perform another query?

Query results for posts, terms, and metadata get placed in cache. If a function is called that accesses data from previously queried objects within the same request (or you’re using a persistent cache mechanism that maintains data across requests), it will not trigger another query and will instead fetch the data from cache.

WordPress performance issue. Can I debug it?

You need to check the actual access logs, such as web, SSH, etc., and if you can access it, the MySQL log, too. That will show you what is possibly hitting the site at that time and let you differentiate between a huge unexplained web traffic spike from a bot and something that is happening … Read more

WordPress shortcodes & performance

You need to look at this from a couple of perspectives and then you have to weigh the odds against each other In general, shortcodes will be slower (we are talking milliseconds here) as they need to be parsed and processed by the shortcode handler. USAGE: [my_shortcode] in post editor Shortcodes in general are quite … Read more

Disable Outbound Web Requests

Defining WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL constant (wp-config.php is good place to do this) would kill all outgoing network requests, other than those for hostnames, defined in WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS. See source for details, doesn’t seem to be documented in Codex.

Promoting child theme to stand alone

Start with “view source” of rendered HTML and then work backward from that, building a new theme by pulling whatever css, php files and functions from the parent as needed. (footnote – thank you for the pointer to the ‘dust me’ utility, I will check that out).