Tom J Nowell

Tag: performance

  • Using HTTP2 Push With WordPress

    Taking advantage of HTTP/2 push can bring big improvements to front end performance. This pushes resources to the browser preemptively, avoiding extra requests and waiting time. I’m going to cover how to do this in WordPress. This has made big improvements to page load times, removing connections and waiting times for resources, as well as…

  • Utility Taxonomies

    Using a private taxonomy can give huge performance gains. I'm going to cover some examples of the things you can do, and the gains to be had. Setting Up Your Utility Taxonomy We'll be using this taxonomy to mark posts, but since it won't be public facing, the registration code is quite small: We can…

  • Not all Post Meta is bad

    A few weeks ago, I wrote an article titled Post Meta Abuse, but I think some have misunderstood the problem at hand. Meta Queries are Bad? Searching for posts via post meta is bad, but grabbing post meta is not. For example, this is a hideously expensive/slow query: $args = array( ‘meta_key’ => ‘color’, ‘meta_value’…

  • Post Meta Abuse

    Post meta queries bring down databases, cripple traffic scaling, and dramatically inflate page load times. Thankfully there’s an almost trivial solution. Searching for Meta The problem comes when you need to query for post meta. This is a data design failure. Examples include: A meta key for posts that should appear on the homepage Marking a…

  • WordPress Related Posts & Insanity

    I see a lot of attempts to do Related Posts using WordPress plugins. However, a lot of these plugins are attempting to automate the process by comparing content. This is madness. It’s: Error prone Slow Unreliable It’s also overlooking the glaringly obvious. Related posts are posts that are about the same or similar thing. We…