Comments on: Making Wordpress faster with Apache and PHP

By: Cheb

Cheb — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 07:13:24 +0000

Thanks for the extra information mate. C

By: Make it faster | www.redips.net

Make it faster | www.redips.net — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 06:24:04 +0000

Nice trick to minimize bandwidth especially if your site is hosted. On the other hand you can make wordpress even faster by turning on MySQL and PHP caching. I have found that PHP 5 engine spends about 40% of time to compile PHP page. PHP cache (like APC) will compile page once and store it to memory. Every other request pulls compiled page from cache and proceeds normally from that point. That way overhead on PHP engine level is minimal.

By: WebSHOUT

WebSHOUT — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:37:59 +0000

Hi Cheb, that’s a great share of information you’ve got here. I’m interested in know if it’s possible to commpressing large images too.
Anyways, will be looking forward to part 2.

Regards,
WebSHOUT

By: Cheb

Cheb — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:38:29 +0000

That’s correct tAz! MIME Types would help too. Nice going! Cheers for the info, Cheb.

By: tAz

tAz — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:40:47 +0000

You could always skip the file rename and use .htaccess to parse all js/css as php

Something along the lines of:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .css .js

Would do it at root (in your .htaccess) – or per directory if your file structure allows

By: fwboodol

fwboodol — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:04:04 +0000

I am new here and looking to have a great time and learning experience
within your community.

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Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:56:33 +0000

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By: Cheb

Cheb — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 17:48:46 +0000

Hey Hank.
Thanks for your post mate! In regards to changes to the actual theme files – you shouldn’t have a great deal of problems… All I had to do with mine was edit ‘Header.php’ so the links to my CSS and/or JS files now link to filename.css.php instead of just .css; or filename.js.php instead of just .js. That should do it!

But you are correct in saying sometimes there are functions and/or plugins that auto-add links to CSS or JavaScript files on the fly and that would be a tad harder to change. Will definitely post something on this topic soon.

Thanks for the visit mate!

By: hank

hank — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 14:24:06 +0000

Hey Chebs,

A good technique, I shaved of some significant KB from my bigger CSS and JS files.

Your post would be even more useful if you discussed the changes you need to make to Wordpress’ PHP files to make it accept PHP instead of CSS or JS, etc. I had to change functions.php and a few other files in my theme in order for it to recognise the php files, but it’s going sweet now.

By: Cheb

Cheb — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:18:53 +0000

Hey Michael, welcome and thank you for your reply. I have WP-cache installed as well and you are correct in saying it needs gzip disabled.

I currently have gzip disabled natively through Wordpress, but that hasn’t turned gzip off in terms of Apache (server-side).

Effectively, what the method above does, is dramatically reduce the file size of particular files; in this case CSS – but can easily be applied to JavaScript such as prototype.js, etc.

You can run both WP-cache and implement the above method with no hassles. I mean I’m currently running both and have so far witnessed no dramas.

I think the difference between WP-cache and WP-Super Cache is that the former still needs to load the PHP engine to serve the cached files – whereas apparently, WP-Super Cache actually generates HTML files on the fly!

It should be interesting to see how those two pan out though. For my money; I think anything you can do to make your blog/site faster – go for it. If that means cutting down files to a fifth of their previous size (something I believe neither cache plugins are capable of, at the moment) through gzip compression then all power to ya!

Thanks for visiting Michael and for your nice comment. I’ll keep checking out your latest. Keep up the good work!