WordPress Blogs Performance

I have many of my websites hosted by Hostgator and recently they complained about my workload on the server caused mainly by WordPress plugins Workload. They gave me some useful suggestions on how I could improve the WordPress Blogs Performance and how I could therefore achieve a better response time of my blog pages.

I try to summarize below the main points for your convenience.

All in One SEO

This is a popular plugin, but the degree of automation is uses causes performance problems for sites — especially those which have other intensive plugins. Ironically, this can actually hurt SEO, as a slow loading page is ranked lower by most search engine algorithms.

Hostgator support recommends instead is Greg’s High Performance SEO Pack. This plugin will guide you through proper SEO for your site, and will do it without causing performance issues.

WP-Supercache

Hostagator recommended also to install wp-supercache across all wordpress sites and to configure them to serve cache using mod_rewrite and add the rules found in the .htaccess file of each wordpress blog. This will greatly increase performance and most likely solve any issue as cache is served as html and no php process is generated upon each page load.

Contact Form 7

Hostgator suggested not to used this plugin because it has been known to cause load on the server. Some alternative options are the Gravity Forms, the Dagon Design form or the Fast Secure Contact Form. I would be interested to know opinions about them or other alternatives.