Update (March 15th): Since writing this the redesign and hosting move have both happened, and things seem to be running quite smoothly. And this time I installed Akismet rather than WP Spam Free to deal with the spam.
After my last post, in which I briefly sang the praises of Wordpress, I became increasingly troubled by the horribly slow page load times of this blog, so I spent an hour or two last night trying to speed things up. It’s a while since I installed WP Super Cache, and all this time I’ve been thinking that my troubles were over. I even tried pretending that the occasions when it took 10 seconds to load a page were just freak occurrences, only ever noticed by me. As various authority figures from my childhood would say, I was only fooling myself. Even with WP Super Cache it’s still been crap.
I’ve managed to improve the speed substantially now, so I thought it was worth recording here the changes that seemed to make the biggest difference. I knew the problem wasn’t a heavy theme, uncompressed CSS (it’s compressed but it really doesn’t need to be), too many images or any of that, so I knew it had to be all those pointless database queries (see here, here and here for details).
Well, it was partly that: removing them made a big difference. But the biggest difference I noticed after a single change (not from rigorous testing, I should add) was when I removed the WP Spam Free plugin. Looking at what the plugin was actually doing on every page load (even with caching), I did have a feeling it would help to get rid of it. That it’s known to be slow is confirmed in a few places online, including here.
I guess the lesson of this is that if you’re using particularly slow plugins, you might not see the gains from WP Super Cache that you’d hoped for.
Greedy for speed, I also removed a few things from the theme, including the Cufon text-replacement JavaScript that drew the headings in the Diavlo font. It wasn’t working very well (there was always a delay) and, although it’s a beautiful font, I don’t think it was right for me or this blog. Nothing wrong with Georgia.
Anyway, soon I’ll be moving this blog to my new host, WebFaction, and it’ll be getting a redesign, along with the rest of my site. I’m at the stage where I’ve designed an HTML/CSS template that I’m very happy with, but now’s when I have to commit to the software, and I’m avoiding facing up to it. Realistically, though, I can’t see myself choosing anything but Wordpress.