Stripped all the social media plugins from techwag and site performance improves noticeably

Hopefully everyone will see a major improvement in operations here, no, didn’t move to a new hosting company, no didn’t do much other than strip out all the stuff that could have been impeding the smart operation of the web site.

While word press is a great blogging platform, when you go back and take a look at what we did as a major site redesign back in April to celebrate our first birthday, we added a pile of neat plug ins that we figured would help us out in learning about folks.

We had popularity contest running, and gregarious, and a host of plug ins thinking that people would want to use them, well they didn’t and the site slowly dropped into the dirt. So much for functionality, there is the reality of hosting.

We are limited to the number of CPU cycles we can take, and by stripping our word press installation down to a bare bones, all about blogging and not about digg, spinn, gregarious, and the rest of it, we noticed that when we disabled 5 social networking plugins, and moved to a stripped lean format, well guess what, the site is going very fast this morning.

It is not a WordPress issue, really it is more about the number of plugins and data connectors/collections that we can do in a shared hosting environment. Interesting if trivial, but for sites that are having performance issues like we are, stripping down to a lean site might just make a lot of sense here.

Keywords: wordpress, plugins, performance, gregarious, popularity contest, windows, iis, php