I have been trying lately to speed up the performance of my blog. Steps so far:
- Remove about 25 plugins I really didn’t need.
- Remove plugins from my wife’s and brother’s blogs
- Switch to the TwentyTwelve theme
Still, I was getting CPU throttling from my host. It still wasn’t fast enough. I didn’t install a caching plugin yet. I want to optimize before I add in that step. The support desk suggested I use PHP 5.2 FastCGI. Here is what the screen looks like:
I wasn’t sure what to do. Lots of versions. I was confused why this wasn’t automatically upgraded. I didn’t know which choice was best. I narrowed it down to the 5.2 FastCGI option or 5.4 (Single php.ini). 5.3 just seemed dumb.
In the end, I chose 5.4. FastCGI might be good, but I am a “latest version” sort of guy. My WordPress version is 3.5-beta2-22334. I was going to go with the latest greatest.
Instantly, the WordPress UI started working faster. I think the pages on my blog are also acting in a manner I would be happy with. I am not positive, but I think I may be happy.
Hmm, always dangerous to say that. I’ll give it a few more days. Still, a major increase in speed with some clean up and support from the host.
Whatya think?