More than a dozen useful WordPress database queries
Secure, clean up, and optimize your blog with 10 “life-saving” SQL queries from Cats Who Code. Most of them are short and should work by simply copying & pasting them into your database manager. Here’s what you can do:
- Manually change your password
- Transfer posts from one user to another
- Delete post revisions and meta associated to those revisions
- Batch delete spam comments
- Find unused tags
- Find and replace data
- Get a list of your commentators emails
- Disable all your plugins at once
- Delete all tags
- List unused post meta
- Disable comments on older posts
- Replace commentator url
- Replace commentator email adress
- Delete all comments with a specific url
The article also recommends an SQL WordPress plugin so you don’t have to go anywhere else to execute the queries. If you’re not familiar with SQL, the best way to learn is by example! As a precautionary measure, however, make sure to have a database backup ready before doing any database manipulation.
Tips for speeding up WordPress
Michael Gray of Graywolf’s SEO Blog has compiled a comprehensive list of tips for optimizing load times with your WordPress site. Since Google has announced that it would include page loading time as a factor in its search results rankings, and launched its Let’s make the web faster microsite, site performance & optimization is now the hottest topic in the SEO world. (If you need something to blow up so everyone else follows suit, trust Google to get things done.)
The trick is to look at all the plugins and widgets you’ve added to your site and figure out which ones you can do without. Do you really need that fancy lightbox zooming script to display your larger images? How about opting for a more compact, all-in-one solution for your social media buttons? Or a lighter theme?
But whether or not you’re on WordPress, website analyzing tools and techniques such as gzipping and caching should come in handy. Yahoo! also has a great resource page on speeding up your website.
It seems this will be the year of optimized page loads, so don’t get left behind!
An “ultimate” WP 2.8 optimization guide
Still on the subject of keeping your WordPress site in tip-top shape, StoreCrowd has compiled the Ultimate WordPress 2.8 Optimization Guide. It’s a long list of code snippets, plugins, tools, and tips to improve the performance of your blog. For example:
Use a CDN or Subdomain for Static Files
Serving all your images from the same domain can means that your browser is waiting to download all the items one after the other. Lets say you have 12 items, if you split these out across 3 subdomains then they can be downloaded concurrently (as there’s 3 sources), instead of the browser waiting to download them from one source.
WordCamp Philippines 2009 talk: WordPress in the Wild
Markku Seguerra just blogged about his talk in this year’s WordCamp Philippines called “WordPress in the Wild”:
WordPress used to simply be a blogging app and not much more. It’s growth in the past few years though has pushed it to adapt a more extensible structure to allow for other uses beyond blogging as well as various other customizations. These changes made it more appealing to a wider range of users, but at the same time it also introduced some performance bottlenecks that become apparent when your blog rises to be just a bit too popular. Ah, the price of success.
His slides on WordPress deployment, performance, optimization, and security are embedded in the post, but scroll down for all the important links and points covered by his presentation. A bit on the technical side, but definitely a must-read for everyone running a WordPress website.
