Hey peeps,

I've been researching how to improve page load times on my WordPress blog recently. I mainly have been looking at caching plugins as solutions, but have not yet implemented one because of issues I've read about that others have encounted with these plugins. I try not to install unnecessary plugins anyway as they slow WordPress installations down and often lead to compatibility issues when upgrading to a new version of WP or themes.

Anyway, last night I stumbled onto what I believe is a brilliant tip to realize WordPress performance improvements that is so simple and involves no plugins. Instead, it involves replacing the inefficient .htaccess code that WP adds on installation with some well thought out and optimized .htaccess code written by Jim Morgan, an Apache/Mod_Rewrite god if ever there was one.

Give it a read if you're interested. It cut my page load times in half or better. I'd love to hear what if any results others see after implementing the suggestion from Jim.

~Canonical

This is good reading. I, too, am concerned for page load time with WP. I have worked on sites that used cache plugins, and they seem to work at first, but not as time went on for some reason. I hate plugin's anyway as well. I do try to hardcode any http requests that are using php to query the database for the value as recommended by this site: http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/09...-up-wordpress/ or I set up my own variables in the functions.php file.

I generally don't even use wp_list_pages() or other functions. Just too bloated for what is a fairly simple hard-coding procedure.

Thanks for passing the link, I can't wait to try it!

Hello,
I was too confused with the plugins, themes, .htaccess codes on WP. But after reading your post as referred by you, it helped me a lot.
Thanks for the link.

I was trying to do this myself and well I don't know anything about PHP. I tried using Supercache but it tells me to remove some file I'm not familiar with. Could you offer some laymen advice man?