Using a private taxonomy can give huge performance gains. I'm going to cover some examples of the things you can do, and the gains to be had. Setting Up Your Utility Taxonomy We'll be using this taxonomy to mark posts, but since it won't be public facing, the registration code is quite small: function tomjn_utility_taxonomy() […]
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article titled Post Meta Abuse, but I think some have misunderstood the problem at hand. Meta Queries are Bad? Searching for posts via post meta is bad, but grabbing post meta is not. For example, this is a hideously expensive/slow query: $args = array( ‘meta_key’ => ‘color’, ‘meta_value’ […]
Post meta queries bring down databases, cripple traffic scaling, and dramatically inflate page load times. Thankfully there’s an almost trivial solution. Searching for Meta The problem comes when you need to query for post meta. This is a data design failure. Examples include: A meta key for posts that should appear on the homepage Marking a […]
I see a lot of attempts to do Related Posts using WordPress plugins. However, a lot of these plugins are attempting to automate the process by comparing content. This is madness. It’s: Error prone Slow Unreliable It’s also overlooking the glaringly obvious. Related posts are posts that are about the same or similar thing. We […]