When I first came into web development and blogging, I thought Wordpress was great. It handled many of the things that I needed handling, and it did it intuitively and fairly quickly. Since then I’ve had lots of experience with lack of performance, and optimizing web code for performance. Let’s face it, we don’t all have dedicated quad cores for webhosting, nor do we necessarily have separate boxes for DB server and webserver.

Wordpress is not optimized for large amounts of traffic. There is seemingly no caching (within Wordpress) whatsoever. On a normal pageload it makes no fewer than 10 trips back to the database. That’s why if you see a non protected Wordpress site “dugg”, or “slashdotted”, it will be down after only a moderate number of concurrent hits.

WP-Cache is a plugin for Wordpress that caches pages and posts, not requiring Wordpress to hit the database upon pageloads. I couldn’t get it to work with my Wordpress setup after about a half hour of tinkering, but in theory that would make Wordpress a robust, non-performance-hog piece of software. But the point is that there should be no excuses to creating poorly performing code. There shouldn’t have to be a user-submitted-tweak that “fixes” software to not be slow.

Maybe we’ll see it when the Wordpress team finally considers it high priority, perhaps by Wordpress version 5.9.2.