Certain Wordpress Permalinks Make Your Site Slow

[WareTime]

I've seen some slow wordpress sites and figured it was poor plugins, etc. Now after reading these articles I wonder if it was the permalinks.

Using Permalinks WordPress Codex states:

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text "page slug" as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID. See wp-testers discussion of this topic.

If you are starting a new site, rethink those permalinks if you were planning to pick the non performant ones, especially now that we here Google is going to start considering page load times.

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by WareTime

Google is going to start considering page load times.

What you're describing isn't going to be a factor. Of course, everybody is in a panic about something that will only affect truly slow loading sites, sites that take 30 seconds or more to load, not the difference between a 10ms and a 30ms load time.

[WareTime]

I'm pretty sure it adds more than a few milliseconds. The more posts you have the worse it is. Won't matter for a clickbump site, but for an active site it probably will.

The bigger worry than google is giving slow load times to your visitors. Anything over about 5 seconds is becoming unacceptable, 8 seconds for darn sure is.

It also looks like a fix to this is a LONG ways off. A patch was dropped into the 2.7 repository, then 2.8, then bumped to 2.9, then to 3.0. Apparently the fix is not as easy as it would seem.

Here is the whole history of the patch #8958 (Optimize rewrite rule generation) ? WordPress Trac the last entry states

• milestone changed from 3.0 to Future Release

This item does not appear to be beta ready.



So, that means likely there is a year or two of posts going to be added to sites before WP comes up with a fix and then add the time it will take a site to move to the new release for fear of non functioning key plugins.


I don't think this is as much a non event as you think, at least not with sites numbering hundreds or more of posts.

[Alexander CPA]

It's nothing I'd personally worry about, your looking at adding 10-100MS to your websites loading time, if your that worried about it, upgrade your hosting package to something faster, I'd rather have good on-page SEO, then poor on-page SEO but a website which loads a 50MS faster.

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by WareTime

I'm pretty sure it adds more than a few milliseconds.

I don't think this is as much a non event as you think, at least not with sites numbering hundreds or more of posts.

I've got autoblogs and so forth with well over 1000 posts with either a postname or category/postname and they don't show any speed problems. My educated programmer guess would be that you would have to have over 20,000, probably closer to 50,000, posts before you started seeing any noticeable degradation on your average shared server.

[Alexander CPA]

Originally Posted by bgmacaw

I've got autoblogs and so forth with well over 1000 posts with either a postname or category/postname and they don't show any speed problems. My educated programmer guess would be that you would have to have over 20,000, probably closer to 50,000, posts before you started seeing any noticeable degradation on your average shared server.

If you had 20-50k posts on your blog, surely you'd be making more then $100/month, so you could invest in a upgraded hosting platform, so it wouldn't even be a problem. Trying to run a large website on shared hosting hardly ever works out, that's a issue with hosting and how websites infact work, how they load, how shared hosting works etc. Not how wordpress is programmed.

[WareTime]

Maybe it's a non issue then, just seems really weird that the makers of Wordpress are calling that out so prominently on the permalinks page.

[vaintheartiste]

I hear having too many directories makes the site slow such as www.website.com/blog/category/postname. It's important to have a hash @ the end of the URL as it tells wordpress to stop searching the database sort of.

The best permalink remains one which has a post_id within such as /%post_id%/%postname%/

One can always use a cache plug-in to make things faster ;-) How to configure the W3 Total Cache plugin

[la dominatrix]

Originally Posted by WareTime

I'm pretty sure it adds more than a few milliseconds. The more posts you have the worse it is. Won't matter for a clickbump site, but for an active site it probably will.

It made a huge difference to one of my recipe sites, with a daily post and photo