Wordpress Gurus: How to speed up blog with 1000's of Categories

Discussion in 'WordPress' started by mrspeed, Aug 29, 2007.

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  1. #1
    I have a site that I thought would be easier to maintain with wordpress. The problem is I have some many categories that it is slowing things down too much.

    Let me explain the site structure. I have a 2000 biographies of people. My main categories are A,B,C...Z for a total of 26. Under each letter are about 100 people. On each page for the people I was going to have a biography.

    In my side bar I used the "fold_page_list" plugin. So on the home page would be the letters A-Z. If a surfer clicked on B they would then see a list of people who's names began with B.

    I was able to load it all up and the site was very slow waiting to build the sidebar. I thought it was because all entries were "pages". If you look at the database design I don't think there is a lookup table for parent categories for pages but there is one for posts.

    I changed the entries to "posts" thinking it would be faster. It wasn't. If it was faster it wasn't noticeable.

    Any thoughts on how to organize this mess ?
     
    mrspeed, Aug 29, 2007 IP
  2. sat123

    sat123 Banned

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    #2
    wordpress gurus may not help..php mysql and even general web masters(experienced only) may help////
     
    sat123, Aug 30, 2007 IP
  3. mdvaldosta

    mdvaldosta Peon

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    #3
    using wordpresses built in object cache may help, as would wp-cache but I believe it still will be slow.
     
    mdvaldosta, Aug 30, 2007 IP
  4. mrspeed

    mrspeed Guest

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    #4

    I tried that early on but it didn't help. I even considered hardcoding the sidenav with include files and the doing conditional includes based on the category. It's be messy but would work.

    I think I may have come up with a new strategy where I only have 26 categories [A-Z]. I could probably then only show the titles in the category list and increase the posts per page to a higher number.

    I may be able to use the "related posts" plugin to make the site nice and crawlable as well.
     
    mrspeed, Aug 30, 2007 IP
  5. bloggerpreneur

    bloggerpreneur Well-Known Member

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    #5
    You Have Way Too Many Categories. I would Use a plugin like Ultimate tag Warrior and change all of those categories to tags.
     
    bloggerpreneur, Aug 30, 2007 IP
  6. mrspeed

    mrspeed Guest

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    #6
    Bingo ! I now only have 26 categories A-Z. I modded the template to show only titles for the category pages and I also modded "the loop" to show all posts in the category. It looks like a directory/sitemap for each letter now and the blog is fast now.
     
    mrspeed, Aug 31, 2007 IP
  7. Pixelrage

    Pixelrage Peon

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    #7
    How many categories does it usually take for Wordpress to start choking? I'm surprised that it can't handle 26.
     
    Pixelrage, Aug 31, 2007 IP