Tag: WordPress

WordPress Caching

I had some WordPress performance issues over the weekend. The website was performing so poorly that connections timed out. I traced the problem to some changes I made in the MySQL configuration. I want to spend more time learning about that so that I can find tune thing. To recover, I created a new Digital Ocean VPS and copied the default MySQL configuration to my VPS. The website performance returned.

By the time I had things squared away, my mind was soon in tweaker mode, so I made sure APCu Object Cache for PHP7 was installed, then I installed and configured the WP LCache and W3 Total Cache plugins.

There are still some issues I want to work on fixing:

  • render-blocking CSS and JavaScript
  • MySQL read performance

Open Source Sustainability

Open Source Sustainability by Ben

My concern with WordPress is that we may end up with something akin to the free-rider problem mentioned in the article. Whereby the code is maintained by a small group of people – or in WordPress case – a small group of companies (Automattic, Google, etc) and most of the freelancers are either hired by those companies, or stop using the project because it’s going in a direction they don’t like.

We’re already seeing this to a degree with Gutenberg. People who were once diehard WordPress developers are now broadening their horizons. Many still use WordPress, but they may also consider alternatives now, where they used to use it by default.