A New Host? (Maybe Not)

It’s such a pain to move to a new host.  DNS changes.  Import/Export of WordPress. Debugging.  New security.  Redirects. Let’s face it, it’s a huge hassle, so I need to have exhausted all my options.

Despite the fact that I am pissed off at BlueHost for not having a faster server for me, I am trying to make it work.  Their suggestion from them was to reduce the number of plugins.  I reviewed them all and realized that I could safely remove many of the plugins I had accrued over the years.  I used to have 34 plugins and now I have 9.

Here are the ones I kept:

1. Akismet – So far doing it’s job
2. Jetpack for WordPress.com – really nice plugin
3. Webfonts – OpenSans and FingerPaint.  I love fonts.
4. Feedburner Feedsmith
5. Feedburner Widget
6. Google Analytics
7. WordPress Beta Tester
8. Quick Page/Post Redirect
9. Twitter friendly links – maybe don’t need it

I got rid of these and more:

1. Bad Behavior, Simple TrackBack Validation and WP-NoSpam
2. Dean’s Code Highlighter – I don’t put much source code in my posts anymore. The older ones are probably semi-broken now
3. Google XML Sitemaps – Google should be able to figure it out
4. SEO All-In-One – Google will figure it out
5. GZIP Output – It was only saving me 40k
6. Script Enabler – Again, this will mess up some older jQuery posts
7. jQuery Lightbox plugin – Most of the images I use are small enough to not require the lightbox
8. Vipers Video QuickTags – WordPress does this itself now, but I have to find the older posts and fix them

I also moved to a modified version of the WordPress TwnetyTwelve theme.  It runs pretty quickly.

Results
I have seen a significant improvement in the performance of the pages.  I may add WP SuperCache or Quick Cache to make it even faster.  I am hesitant to do this until I understand the current performance.  Additionally, I need to find and fix a bunch of older posts.

But, so far, so good.