Slideshow Problem Helped Me Find a Permalink Issue |

Slideshow Problems Helped Avert Possible Future Speed Issues

Posted on September 15th, 2010 by Sandy in Plugins, WordPress

Researching Problems Really Does Help

WordPress never ceases to amaze me. As I was working on a new site this weekend I was having some major issues with things showing up Having Issues properly in Internet Explorer, 64 bit version. It seems that a plugin that I used before for slideshows was no longer working. Thinking it was me (hey, it usually is) I researched and researched. I deleted and started over. I used new plugins. Still nothing worked. So I continued to research the web and even called a couple of people. I’m not going to mention the original plugin right now because the developer is aware that there is a problem and that will be fixed in his next release. ( I wasn’t the only one having the problem) He’s very conscientious so I need to give him his due. There is a temporary fix for it (that’s why I won’t mention it here) but I didn’t know about it until after I decided on a different plugin.

My Permalinks Strategy is Changing

I was avoiding flash for many reasons. As great as it looks, it still doesn’t work on my 64 bit machine under IE. And so many people told me NOT to use IE. Well I don’t but my client still has many customers who do use it so it does have to be addressed. With all of the iPhones and iPads out there today, that has to be taken into consideration. (Why can’t everyone just switch to Firefox?!)

But the whole purpose of this post has to due with what else I found when doing my research. I somehow found myself on a page reading about permalinks (don’t ask me how). I found this sentence, “For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields” Huh?? For me this stood out like a red flag. From the very first WordPress site I ever built I was taught to use %postname%. i don’t remember whether someone told me or whether I read it. But seeing this statement I kept reading.

Then I found thus description:

%postname%

“A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI (see Using only %postname%). Starting Permalinks with %postname% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.”

WOW! considering every site I have ever built used this custom structure, I kept reading. And after reading a while it began it make sense. I found a major discussion of this among testers for WordPress, much of it was over my head, but this gist of it is, it can bloat the database and slow down your site considerably.

This is what I got out of it. All rewrite rules are at the moment held in a single database field. If you have just a few dozen pages and posts, you have maybe a few hundred rewrite rules in it and it’s probably okay.. But as soon as you start to have a few hundred pages (don’t we all want that?) and attachments, the amount of rewrite rules explodes as well as the field size. So adding just the %postname% can bloat the database quickly and definitely affect the speed of your site. The same thing with using %category% as the front end of yourpermalink structure. This particular post helped me understand why I wouldn’t want to use this method any longer.

So…what do you use? One that I have chose to use is /%post-id%/%postname%/ Another popular one is /%year%/%month%/%day%/%postname%/. These will speed up the database because it makes it easier to do the query and find the right post/page quickly. And a search of Google etc after I changed did nothing that created problems. (Although I’ll be watching)

I’m not really a programmer but after reading all of this it really made sense to me. To follow the entire discussion yourself go here, the you can make an informed decision.

Researching Your Own Problems Can Help

By reseearching one problem I managed to find something that could possibly help me from having major issues with sites in the future. And I’m sure my clients would be appreciative of the pro-active stance versus being reactionary after a problem occurs. For those technically inclined and who want more proofe., There is a helpful plugin that displays the type of permalinks being used and detailed information on the internal rewrite rules used by WordPress.

Now, back to changing Permalinks on all of my sites. (This was not on my schedule this week.)

What Permalink structure are you using and why?

PS. Just a warning. A little more research showed that changing my Permalink structure on existing sites did affect access to comments, readmore etc. So I do have some research on how to properly change the Permalinks overall. but I still will be changing this on all future sites right from the beginning. So be sure to test.