Make your Wordpress Fast and Efficient

Well whatdoyaknow? eJabs has been smashing previous traffic records again today!

Started 4 months ago now, eJabs (with great love) has realized awesome success in a very short period of time. After running for 1 month, traffic looked something like this: “75 daily hits by 23 unique visitors“. After 2 months we were looking a little more like so: “125 daily hits by 45 unique visitors“. Now entering our 4th month, eJabs is starting to catch on, and the numbers represent the growth. At this point, 12 hours into the day, here is how the current numbers are looking: “3951 daily hits by 2205 unique visitors.”

***update*** - Just in the time I’ve spent writing this post, my traffic rose to: “4261 daily hits by 2362 unique visitors“! And just before posting: “4369 daily hits by 2411 unique visitors“!

Although I am very happy with the growth, and the Adsense revenue that comes along with it ($25.52 $37.71 $37.97 today alone), growth also brings to light a new round of challenges. Chiefly the following:

1. Wordpress efficiency - How efficient is your theme, plugins, site as a whole, etc?
2. Webhosting company - They say you have X amount of GB transfer a month, but will they really live up to that? ***(eJabs recommends InMotionHosting…they’ve been nothing short of wonderful to work with)

To combat the first hurdle, make sure all of your Wordpress plugins are up-to-date. You may want to install the Wordpress Update Manager plugin to help you stay on top of this. Here is a snippet from the authors website:

“Update Manager is a new Wordpress admin plugin that helps you keep your plugins up to date. This helps to ensure you always have all the latest bug fixes, security patches and gadgets at your fingertips.”

Also, to make your site as efficient as possible, you’ll want to make sure you have the WP-Cache plugin. Here is a short description of the plugin from the author:

“WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.”

If you install WP-Cache, and make sure all your plugins are up-to-date, you should be running as smooth as possible. Now on to your web hosting company!

If you host your own website, which I believe a serious blogger should (I’ll write more on this later), then you’ll want to do your research before signing any 2-year hosting contracts. My best piece of advice is to use a hosting company that has great support above all else. Here are a few sites to look at if you want to compare hosting companies:

1. Top-10-Web-Hosting
   
2. BestWebHosting2007
3. TheHostingChart

Personally, I use InMotionHosting and I have been very happy. Which leads me to the last point I wanted to make.

How will your web hosting company handle a huge traffic increase on your website? Please refer to the following post on Daily Cup of Tech (DCoT). Timothy of DCoT wrote a post that hurled him into experiencing “The Digg Effect“, and wrote a very thorough and impressive post on the subject.

Personally, the large traffic increase eJabs has been experiencing in the last few days has led to a similar situation which I’ve been forced to deal with. I’m glad it happened now, so I know how to react to and resolve similar events in the future! Anyway…I received the following email from my web host provider today:

“Dear Matthew,

System administration has been tracking high resource usage on the machine housing your account, and has traced it to your site, ejabs.com.

Top Process %CPU 18.5 httpd [www.ejabs.com] [/]

Please let us know your plans in this regard as soon as possible to avoid any downtime in case this problem cannot be resolved.

Best Regards,
The InMotion Hosting Team”

Of course this alarmed me & temporarily took me out of my state of daily Adsense bliss! I didn’t panic, but responded in kind, and asked if there was anything I could do to help. They sent me some of the above suggestions, which I implemented immediately (I had already had WP-Cache, but it was disabled due to site changes I made yesterday). After updating a few plugins and enabling WP-Cache (and setting it’s “Expire Time” to 600 seconds…recommended by RT Cunningham), InMotionHosting assured me everything was okay; that eJabs was perfectly fine; and that I’d live to blog another day!

After it was all said and done, I would recommend my hosting company to anyone! They have handled all my needs with speed, precision, and professionalism. Here is a link to their site if you’d like to see the plans they have to offer, and get started on a site of your own!

I hope this post has benefited you in some way; if so, please show your kindness here. As always, thanks for reading, and enjoy eJabs!

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