Monthly Archives: March 2012

Just a quick note about WordPress Optimization

I’ve been struggling with a clients site for a few weeks now that has an enormous lag on all page loads.  8 – 10 seconds…yeah, right?  Turns out the real issue is a conflict between the PHP and PHP cURL versions and…wait for it…I’m sure you’d never guess…a…plugin. I know you are stunned at that news.  That’s not why I’ve brought you here today.

I discovered that if you add a trailing slash ‘/’ after the URL to any given page in wordpress, you can avoid a 301 redirect.  For example, http://www.example.com/test-page, really gets redirecteed to http://www.example.com/test-page/.

Depending upon your server situation, you can save up to a second or two just by eliminating those redirects.

🙂

I feel dirty today

Today, I’m setting up a client for web hosting.  I have two favorite hosting companies for the clients that are mindful of their costs.  One is Site5.com, and the other is Media Temple.  Both are great companies with excellent service and servers.

Unfortunately, putting an SSL certificate into the fray manages to make them both, well, less palatable.

Site5 does not sell SSL certs, which requires that you purchase the cert from a third party and have it installed on Site5.  Yes, of course that’s doable, but rather a complicated affair.  When thinking in terms of the longevity of the account, the likelihood that the client will have to deal with renewals in the future, and all that, it’s just setting the client up for hard times in the future.

Mediatemple offers SSL certs, but for $120/year.  Uhm, wow, well, jeez, that’s almost twice as much as the industries leading hosting rapist, Godaddy.  So that just stinks.

So I’m pondering what to do at this point.  Bluehost….meh. 1and1….meh.  Some smaller outfit with great prices….meh.   ……………….  OMG…Godaddy?  Gulp.

I feel like a lemming right now. *sigh*