My Monkey Do

A great way to take more control of your wp-cron and also slightly speed up wordpress is to disable cron and scheduled a cron job on your server to run wp-cron.php.  You just need a server that supports cron jobs. In wp-config.php add: define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true); Be careful though, sometimes this has a negative effect on [...]

A couple things that may optimize your custom wordpress queries.  First there is a parameter called ‘fields’ where  you can specify that you only want the ID field back.  Something like below: $some_query = new WP_Query( array( ‘fields’ => ‘ids’ ) ); An even more significant optimization is by caching your data and using WordPress’ [...]

W3 Total Cache is a great plugin that will help your Google Page Speed score and will also speed up your website.  The only problem is that it doesn’t clear the cache when widgets are updated.  So for example if you have a custom theme with a widget on your page and you update this [...]

“Optimizations” in the sense that you’ll have to do less work.  This website gives some great tips on saving you some time using MAMP. http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2008/05/16/supercharge-mamp/ This site below actually helped me with the silent MAMP startup.  Read the comments on this page for updates on getting it to work with version 2.  It’s so good [...]

Problem: The menu on this website:  http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/side-navigation-tooltip-popup-bubble/ ran fine in IE.  It was quick and worked fine.  On my website however, it ran slooow. Solution: Look for large images that may be loaded.  IE doesn’t seem to handle them very well.  The background image for my project was 1196×1150.  Pretty large…  Gotta adjust for the [...]

Some great tools for optimizing images so that it downloads faster: http://www.webdesignbooth.com/12-really-useful-image-optimization-tools-for-web-designers/

Ever wonder if VARCHAR(255) or TEXT is a better data type?  This thread suggests VARCHAR(255) is better because it is allowed to use MEMORY (or RAM).  The TEXT data type is not allowed in there. http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?24,105964,105964#msg-105964   Although it was also found that a larger VARCHAR like VARCHAR(3000) has worse performance than TEXT (in MyISAM). [...]