How to Make Your Blog Load Faster

One of the biggest issues people come to us to solve is making their blog load faster. This is often the first challenge a growing blog faces.

Eventually, your blog will become popular enough to necessitate upgrading your hosting plan. However, there’s a lot you can do to put that day off for quite a while.

One of the first and most powerful things you can do is cache your homepage and posts.

What is a “cache” ?

To understand how caching works, you first have to understand a little about how WordPress works. Without caching, here’s how your blog works. When someone browses over to your site, WordPress immediately queries your WordPress database for all of the content and settings on the page.

A query is like a search. The site script searches the database for the appropriate content to display on the page. Every time the page is called upon by a user, the database is queried again and again. This repeated database query will eventually cause a tremendous amount of stress to the server.

The result is that pages start to load slower. Eventually, they may start timing out all together.  [Read more...]

Managing Ads on Your Blog or Website

logo openx Managing Ads on Your Blog or WebsiteOne of the issues that always arises when your site starts to take off is managing ad inventory. With WordPress, managing ad placement is fairly simple. You just create a widget, drop in your code, place the widget, and you’re done.

But what if you need to change it often? Or, what if you have sold your own clients and want to traffic your own ads?

Well, you are in need of an ad management system. There are some basic ones (in the form of plugins) available through WordPress, but they are not terribly sophisticated.

Until Google opens its new ad management system up to the public, I recommend using OpenX (formerly known as phpadsnew) to serve your ads. It’s a free system you can download and install on your own server. I also recommend putting it on it’s own box if you plan on serving a lot of ads, or you site gets a lot of traffic. The system itself is pretty resource intensive.

OpenX will allow you to traffic all of your ads including Google Adsense ads and other ad networks like Commission Junction, Azoogle, ClickBooth, etc.

You can then set impression levels, goals, and weights for all your campaigns. This makes it especially valuable when evaluating new ads or campaigns. [Read more...]