How to reduce wordpress's server load on Shared Hosting

For everyone of you, who use wordpress as a platform with shared hosting for his/her blog will know the importance of this post. So before i start writing about how to reduce server load due to wordpress on shared hosting, i would talk a bit on wha prompted me to write this.

My another blog  Avinashtech – Software tips and tricks was hosted on a webhost which suspended my account as i have said in my previosu post due to high server use as they alleged. That all lead to me doing a bit of research on ways to reduce server load.

Many of you may not be knowing whats the limit of CPU usage you can have for your blog on your Shared hosting package. Generally this varies from 1-8%  but webhosts that oversell put the limit to just 1% of total server resourcs.

As wordpress runs using php excuting so many queries through php, hence if your site isnt optimised it may result in your blog exceeding the server resource limit. Apart from just the wordpress, its the plugins often that result in excessive server usages. Normally every wordpress blog is run along with 5-10 plugins.

The few things you can do is start disabling few plugins which cause excess server load. I have identified some of the plugins and will talk about them. apart from this, you need to install a caching plugin that will produce static html pages to your visitors instead of excecuting php scripts.

So, you need to install a plugin called WP Super Cache . This is the best  for wordpress caching pages of your blog. It helps reduce your server load as it generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. whenever visitors come to your blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

And the plugins which you should deactivate and delete from your blog till you solve the server issue atleast :

• Google XML sitemap generator and
• Global translator plugin.

Google XML sitemap generator plugin generates XML sitemap for your blog which is needed for SEO. For this sitemap generation, it takes too much memory everytime you change something on your blog. This may take too much memory usage if your blog has too many posts. Even if you dont optimise this plugin option it may lead to high server usage. But sitemap is important. If you still want to use it, you need to optimise its settings. If someone want me to write about it, i will write a separate post for  how to optimise settings for this plugin.

Other culprit may be Global translator plugin if you use its transaltion services . More resources if you have checked all 41 languages in its settings. The reason is it keeps connecting to translation engines like google to translate your pages every three minutes.

Also Global translator generates too many blog pages at same time in different languages. This often results in more spiders and robots of search engibne hitting your blog resulting in high server load. wana me write in more details about it, ask me to post a new post.

I hope these facts will help you solve your high server load problem on a shared hosting.

Tagged as: Google, Search engine optimization, wordpress, WP Super Cache