[CMS] Why Do Plugins Slow Down Page Loads and Hurt Server Performance?

Anyone who builds a site with a CMS (such as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla) has probably heard the saying: use fewer plugins and your site will load much faster. For example, if I want a Lightbox effect on my site, I can manually add the jQuery code, or I can just install a plugin. Both methods achieve the same result, but they can make a noticeable difference in how fast the site loads. ...

April 17, 2011 · 3 min

WordPress Plugin & Theme Installation Tutorial (For WP 2.9 and Below)

Someone asked me the other day what WordPress can do. That's actually a hard question to answer, because WordPress is extremely extensible — you can use plugins to add all sorts of features to your blog, and you can even make your blog not look like a blog at all ^^ WordPress also lets users install themes to dress up their blog nicely. If your skills are good enough, you can design your own theme too, but that's not what this article covers. This article is mainly about how to install plugins and themes. ...

June 1, 2010 · 4 min

Broken Link Checker - Automatically Find Dead Links and Broken Images in WordPress

When you look for files online, you often run into an annoying situation: you finally find the file you want, click the link, and get… “This page has been removed. Please contact the site administrator.” It’s really frustrating. But it’s not entirely the webmaster’s fault. Once a website grows, it has a lot of outgoing links, and the webmaster can’t check every one of them by hand. Some webmasters ask users to report broken links, but I don’t think that works well. Someone who has already hit a dead link is annoyed enough. Why would they bother reporting it? Here I want to introduce Broken Link Checker, a plugin made specifically for WordPress. It automatically checks your WordPress blog for broken links and broken images (the broken-image icons that Chinese speakers jokingly call “steamed buns”). Broken Link Checker can also email you when a broken link appears on your blog. It’s very convenient, but I’d recommend that first-time installers don’t turn that feature on right away. Many people find over a thousand broken links or images the first time they run it, and their inbox gets flooded XD ...

May 28, 2010 · 4 min

Gzippy - Enabling Gzip (Web Page Compression) in WordPress

In this post I’ll show you how to enable WordPress’s Gzip feature with the Gzippy plugin. First, a heads-up: not every hosting account supports Gzip. If your host doesn’t support it and you install Gzippy anyway, your site may break. If that happens, just remove Gzippy via FTP! So what’s the benefit of installing Gzippy? Of course there is, otherwise why would I bother XD. Gzip is simply web page compression. It can make your web pages smaller. A page that’s 100K might shrink to about 30K after Gzip compression, which makes pages load a lot faster. Plugin name: Gzippy Official website: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gzippy/ Download link: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/gzippy.1.0.2.1.zip ...

October 18, 2009 · 1 min

WP-Polls: A Poll Plugin Made for WordPress

Today, the site admin Tingfeng is going to introduce a plugin called WP-Polls. WP-Polls gives your blog Ajax-based polling, and it is completely free, has no restrictions, and won't slow your site down. You might worry that WP-Polls's theme isn't pretty enough, but that's not a problem either, because you can set WP-Polls's own theme and color scheme. ...

October 18, 2009 · 3 min

Subscribe To Comments - Automatically Notify Commenters That Their Comment Got a Reply

Today I want to introduce a plugin called Subscribe To Comments. It can automatically tell commenters that their comment has been replied to, so they don’t have to come back and check for themselves. Subscribe To Comments was recommended to me by Brother Sausage, and since I think it’s pretty useful, I’m sharing it with everyone. Subscribe To Comments Info: Download: Xun6 | 4Shared | Box.net | WordPress Virus scan report: VirusTotal ...

June 21, 2009 · 1 min