I presented on A4UExpo Europe yesterday on WordPress Optimisation, doing 40 tips in 40 minutes. Here are the slides:
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40 WordPress Optimisation tips
I was a guest on WPWeekly Episode 48 last saturday, where we discussed a lot of things WordPress, WordPress SEO, etc. It was fun being on with Jeff Chandler and David Peralty, and I think you’ll enjoy the interview, so go listen to it, like, now!
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I’ve been working with a plugin that was mentioned on the wp-hackers list last week, called debug queries, to optimize the performance on some of my sites, including this one. The plugin was pretty easy to use, and I’ve improved a bit on it. I’ve sent the patch to Frank, who authored the original plugin, and he was kind enough to immediately update the plugin.
When you’re logged in as an admin, this plugin now shows the following info in an HTML comment tag in the footer of your pages:
I’ve written down some of the things I encountered that you may encounter as well are the following:
A lot of WordPress internal settings and plugin settings are stored in the options table. Values in this table take two forms: those which are autoloaded (which is the default) and those which are not. One of the first queries to the database that WordPress does once it starts loading a page, is the query that loads all options with autoload set to “yes”. Hence, any call the an option after that, that happens on multiple pages, is weird. So when I saw this type of query happen a lot:
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'headspace_global' LIMIT 1
I was wondering what was happening. It turned out that that headspace_global option simply didn’t exist, so it can’t be autoloaded. This wasn’t happening with just this option, but with several options. The solution is pretty simple: just add the option as an empty option to your database. This might break some plugins though, and if it does, you should contact the plugin author…
This is actually something plugin authors have to take note of: doing a get_option to check whether a certain option is set or not, is actually more expensive than just setting the option and leaving it empty…
Adding an option to the database is done like this in your MySQL database:
INSERT INTO wp_options ( option_id, option_name, autoload) VALUES ( '0', 'test', 'yes')
It should be noted that I’ve emailed John Godley, who has built and maintains HeadSpace2, and this’ll be fixed in the next release.
This happens, of course. If you see a certain query being performed more than once during the pageload, that’s something to optimize. Check what is causing the queries, and then either solve them, or email the responsible plugin or theme author with what you’ve seen (be sure to copy all the queries you see).
The very first query WordPress does is a query to check whether the blog is installed, it’s a pretty useless query if your blog is up and running, so I wanted to get rid of it. There’s no pretty fix to this, so we’ll do it in the not so pretty way:
is_blog_installed()return true; as the first line of the function, and you’re done!It turns out, that of the 16 queries my site now still does for a single post page, 7 are for the related posts plugin I’m using, YARPP, and if you’re wondering: yes that’s making me reconsider the plugin. I’m going to try a couple other plugins and see how good they do in both relevance and (database) performance.
Have any experience in optimizing your WordPress performance by tweaking database calls yourself? Any cases I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments!!
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Optimizing WordPress database performance
A while ago Aaron released his SEO Toolbar for Firefox, and while I’ve been using it I’ve never actually shown it here on my blog, even though it’s become one of my default SEO tools. As this toolbar comes with a slew of features that are probably best described by just showing them, I’ve made a quick video:
Click here to view the embedded video.
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A short while ago I moved over to a new email program called Postbox, and I’ve been absolutely loving it for it’s labelling, archive and search functions. One of the people involved with Postbox is Sherman Dickman, whom I knew from when he was still the Product Manager at Mozilla, so I decided to interview him on Postbox, what it is and why it exists.
Hey Sherman, can you give us a short introduction of yourself and your work experience?
I first started working in the software industry at really terrific company called Broderbund, where I worked in the product management group on titles such as “Prince of Persia 2″ and “Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego.” After Broderbund, I was a program manager at Apple for several Mac OS technology components, including AppleScript and OpenDoc. I then spent seven years at Sun Microsystems in the Java Software group, where I was the product management lead on J2SE 1.4.
A desire to get back to user-facing software led me to Mozilla, where I met my co-founder, Scott MacGregor. We realized that we shared a similar vision for email and productivity, and from that, Postbox was born.
Can you tell us what Postbox is?
Postbox is a new desktop email application that dramatically improves the way people find, use, and organize email messages and content. We’re currently in public beta for our 1.0 version, and anyone can download the beta from our website.
What made you dive into creating Postbox?
Advanced Search
We didn’t feel our software tools were doing enough to help people stay productive. We’re literally drowning in information, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make sense of it all. For example, we found that many people simply keep everything in the inbox, essentially living out of their inboxes because it’s too much effort to keep everything organized within folders.
And while message volume is certainly a contributor to overload, we also found that messages were being used for functions they were never designed to support. We leave messages in our inboxes because they remind us of things we need to do, or because they contain a document or a piece of information. How many times have you emailed a message to yourself, and did that feel like an elegant way to work with email?
We’re building Postbox so that people can spend less time managing email, and more time using email to get stuff done.
What are the main reasons for people to switch to Postbox?
We can save people a lot of time by providing very fast ways to find and use messages and content. In Postbox, you can get instant access to all of your files, images, and links in just one click, and then perform useful actions on the content that you’ve found. For example, if a relative asks for more recent family photos, simply hit reply and search through all images stored within your email – directly within your message reply window.
Message Compose with Attachment Search
We also make it easy for people to organize messages by topic, which essentially creates a lightweight activity space to work within. People can quickly assign a topic to a group of messages, and then jump into that topic to get stuff done. This allows people to stay focused on just one thing at a time, while minimizing interruptions from unrelated messages. Topics can also be combined with Postbox search to get faster access to the content that is most relevant to your current activity.
Finally, because we’re a desktop application and do everything locally, you can use Postbox with either your work or home accounts, while maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of your email information.
What’s your business model?
We’re currently evaluating a variety of options, but no decisions have been made to date.
What are some of the features you will be adding in the near future?
We have some great features in the pipeline, but in the near term, our Beta 10 release will contain a new way to add custom signatures to your messages. You can create a variety of rich HTML signatures, and then quickly select which signature you would like to use directly within a new message window. It’s pretty slick, and it actually turned out to be kind of fun to use.
We’ll also be adding in support for additional content types to search for, and we’ll be providing new ways to view, organize, use and share this information within email and online.
Any closing thoughts?
Postbox works great with any POP or IMAP account, so I would encourage everyone to try it. We’re still in beta, so there’s a lot of active development going on. Since we release a new version about every three weeks, there’s always something new to check out.
Thanks Sherman for your time, and everyone, go try Postbox!
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Postbox, an interview with Sherman Dickman
Next month Amsterdam will see the first A4UExpo Europe, the European counterpart of the highly succesfull A4UExpo conference series in London. I though it would be interesting for all of you to do an interview with Matthew Wood, the genius behind all of this.
Hey Matthew, could you quickly introduce yourself and a4uexpo?
Sure, I’ve been involved in Affiliate Marketing for over 10 years. I started off by subsidising my university ‘drinking fund’ by developing, optimising sites for Google with a little Arbitrage, Google Adwords, Developing true Content Sites.
I even managed to travel a bit of the world whilst tweaking affiliate websites roving with my laptop through Australia, Asia, Fiji, Canada and the USA – Certainly a great affiliate lifestyle!
Things have become more serious though as I now employ a team of 7 who work from our offices in Bristol in the UK who develop more complex sites such as Pricecuts.
A4UExpo initially grew from our networking events that we organised alongside our forum for many years around the UK, with informal gatherings of affiliates, networks, agencies and merchants. However we realised we must change the format when over 600 people attended an event in London and we had to close registration early and limit numbers from each company!
This gave us the confidence to invest upwards of £100,000 in our first Conference at ExCeL in London back in 2007. Thankfully it was a huge success and we’ve since been back in 2008 and grown attendance by 30% – This April we boldly decided to expand the Conference into mainland Europe with our event at the RAI in Amsterdam.
You’ve decided to come to Amsterdam and make a “Europe” version of your conference, why?
We just love Amsterdam 
Seriously though, after both the 2007 and 2008 conferences we were besieged with requests to expand into mainland Europe, and we felt the time was right to take our conference model to a neutral territory for a Pan European Event. We didn’t want to programme a light version of the conference either, which is why we’ve gone for the two full days, brining over 68 Speakers from around Europe to the conference and offering an astounding 46 unique sessions to attend. This is even larger than our show in London last year!
The internet and Affiliate Marketing in particular is also very strong with good broadband penetration in most countries. Our mission with a4uexpo Europe is to spread the word and gain increased publicity for the channel to media planners, agencies, merchants and the press.
It’s time that as a community we all shout to the world just how effective Affiliate Marketing is. That way more budget gets assigned to Affiliate Marketing as a channel and we all win.
Of course we’ll need to show those brands how to embrace the sector effectively to get the most from it – and that’s where we can help.
Affiliate Marketing simply put is not an out of the box solution; it needs hard work and effective management to make it a success.
What’s the difference between the UK and the rest of Europe, from an affiliate’s stand point?
The UK along with Germany is recognised as being the most mature within Affiliate Marketing. I’d say in fact they are even more advanced that the market in the USA.
This does mean that lessons have been learnt from Publisher and Advertiser activity, and this knowledge can be passed on, and new opportunities can be discovered by knowledge sharing.
Whilst similar opportunities exist in all countries they are at different maturity levels. For instance Cashback or Loyalty, accounts for a huge proportion of affiliate activity in the UK at 25% compared to just 5% in Germany. However what is common across Europe is that SEM remains the key driver within Affiliate Marketing based on both Organic optimisation within Google and Paid Search Activity being conducted on a Performance Basis.
Other than local nuances across sectors and verticals, the opportunities for cross country collaboration, standardisation, and monetisation are immense. This is one of the key reasons to bring the whole of the Affiliate Marketing Sector in Europe together in one place, at one time. The business and relationships that could be formed by pro-active delegates is what makes it all worthwhile.
What do you look forward to the most on A4UExpo Europe?
Everything! The agenda this year is awesome; we’re really proud and honoured to have attracted so many knowledgeable experts from within Affiliate Marketing, Search and Peripheral Channels.
Naturally I’m looking forward to your sessions Joost, and the numerous conversion optimisation and SEO panels we have scheduled, and also the famous networking opportunities that we offer.
This April for instance we have three parties in Amsterdam only open to conference delegates. Our gentle (ish) pre conference bash at the Rosarium, the middle evening party where we’ll be heading to a lively Central Amsterdam Venue and Club and finally our After Show Party where we are planning on hitting the Urban Beach and then offering everyone the opportunity to head once again into central Amsterdam to a special venue that will be announced very soon, just next to the canals for the Queens Day celebrations.
The networking at a4uexpo is what sets us apart, especially in an Industry where relationships really can make the difference between an Affiliate Programme being promoted, or not.
Anything else you’d like to share?
Well, it would be rude not to offer your readers a discount to attend the event, therefore ‘YOAST10’ will give everyone 10% off the delegate rate which starts at just 279 Euros.
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An interview with Matthew Wood of A4UExpo
I’ve been working with Joachim Houtman on creating a guide to Magento SEO, much like my definitive guide to WordPress SEO. In the process we’ve created two modules for Magento, and an optimized blank theme!
Expect more from us on the Magento SEO front, as we develop more experience in the area together!
For now: enjoy our guide to Magento SEO!
Thanks go out to John Andrews for pre reading this article and providing us with very useful feedback!
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Finally, we’re pleased to announce the winner of our SunPress competition. We had a bounty of entries and after much debating we asked two of the entrants to go back and make their plug-ins a finished article.
Our final winner is David Fiske, who developed SunPress Exchange – a very clever plug-in to take sunshine’s RSS feeds and give you the ability to convert the prices to GBP/EUR/USD, and present it in a cool widget that you can theme to your own design. It could, for instance, look like this:
David apparently isn’t a Apple fanboy, so he’s opted for Amazon gift vouchers instead! David is recently married (congrats!!) and intends to spend the vouchers on the stuff that was missing from their Wedding Gift List!
In David’s own words:
“My original idea was to create a widget to parse Sunshine RSS feeds. A simple idea but nothing special. After searching the web, I noticed an interest in sunPress from overseas affiliates. I refined this idea to not only parse RSS feeds but to convert the currencies into Euros or US Dollars. The result is an RSS parsing plugin that can display accurate and up-to-date prices in British Pounds, Euros and US Dollars. Any Sunshine RSS feed can be used and each blog post can have a different feed specified, each displayed in a sexy looking box underneath each post.”
Read more?
Congratulations again to David and many thanks to everyone who took the time to enter!
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Winner of the SunPress competition!
I’ll try to list all the coverage of SES Amsterdam I’ve found online, please leave a link in the comments if I’ve missed one. Most of them are in Dutch, the first four are in English:
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Today’s the conference day of SES Amsterdam, the Dutch version of the internationally renowned series of search conferences. I’ve been actively involved in getting SES Amsterdam to happen, and have been the programming director, arranging speakers etc., so today is an exciting day!
Chaired by Henk van Ess, featuring speakers like Kevin Ryan and Anne Kennedey as keynotes, this should be a good conference. Next to that we have a lot of well known Dutch Search Marketers (and friends) like Eduard Blacquière, Wiep Knol, Peter van der Graaf, André Scholten and myself speaking.
I’m also very excited about the Site Clinic panel, which will feature Fili Wiese, Search Quality Analyst at Google, Roy Huiskes, Niels Meijssen and myself, and should be a nice session.
If you’re going here, come and say hi!
This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast – Tweaking Websites.
Want to make sure you’re trying just as hard or harder as your competitors to rank in the search engines? Use SEO SpyGlass to determine their linking strategies!
