Speed up WordPress by changing header.php
Does your WordPress blog seem to take forever to load the home page? And after finally presenting the home page, other pages and posts don’t really seem to load much faster than the home page. What the heck is up with this?
Not to get too techie on you here, but WordPress uses PHP (a widely used and free general-purpose scripting language) to deliver your pages and posts to your blog viewers. Your pages and posts are held in a MySql database… and when a viewer selects a page or post for viewing, PHP goes to your MySql database to retrieve the information and then presents it to the viewer.
Herein lies the problem of quick page or post delivery to the viewer. PHP is not the worlds quickest delivery system… and to compound the problem, the “header portion” of every page and post on your blog makes several PHP calls to your MySql database every time a viewer asks for a page or post to open.
What is the “header portion” of a page or post on your blog? It is the area that shows your blog name, blog description and possibly a menu of page selections. On this blog, the header contains my blog name (Blog Design), blog description (Blog and Website Design by Roger Gervin), background image with the “R G”, the horizontal menu items and the search bar.
I know, you are asking how could it possibly take so long to load this header information… and to be honest, other PHP database calls are being made while the header loads that aren’t really obvious to a viewer.
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Select page 2 below to see a list of the php calls in my header.php file:
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