Three Wise Men

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WordPress is crap, but it is the best crap we can get. When your website, with WordPress sitting in the back, starts to pick up traffic, it will slow down and become unresponsive. Adding hardware will help, but correctly implemented load balancing and load distribution across more than one computer can be tricky and expensive. Trying to optimize WordPress and the web server itself usually gives better short-term results. In the long run even this won’t help and it will just postpone the inevitable, you will have to cluster in one way or another. I am not going to talk about clustering and load balancing today, I will focus on optimizing your WordPress. Newbie friendly, yet hardcore, meaning that I will provide explanation for all the complicated stuff.

In the early years of internet growth I had the opportunity to work as a web designer. As web designer I designed a web page. Simple not too complicated. And it rocked. Literally. Admired by many. By today’s standards web page was LAME. Totally. But it used an interesting JavaScript. As now I was using Linux at the time and I replaced the default mouse cursor with cool animated Linux penguin. The penguin was fabulous. The animation was interesting. The script was flawless. It did not bother me that the script was not working in IE because at that time netscape ruled the web and Microsoft did not bother to make it work on Linux.