For low traffic usage, Wordpress performs fine and you may not notice that it can be quite heavy on server resources. However, if you do get more traffic than a few visits a day, then there is an essential plugin to speed up Wordpress by using a method called ‘caching‘.

Normally, everytime a visitor comes to your site, Wordpress connects to your database several times to output your posts and comments. What this caching plugin will do is save static versions of your pages once per hour and show that page to visitors instead of generating the pages from scratch for every single visitor.

I installed the plugin, wp-supercache, on several medium sized sites, and saw a HUGE decrease in server resources being used. Your server and host will love you for not using up resources and your visitors will love you for having a really fast responsive site.

Download and Install wp-supercache today!

For a recent project of mine, I wanted my Wordpress site to have posts listed on the front page, but wanted the option to include a unique thumbnail for each post that would sit pretty under the title.

I came across a nice tutorial after a little Google searching and found this great article on exactly how to do it.

It’s absolutely perfect, just that once you do this, all your posts need to have a thumbnail, otherwise there will be a missing placeholder where the thumb should be. In my case I wanted to have the ability to either use the feature or not to use it.

From using the foundation of Blogging Bits’ code, I just added a statement to check if the image has been added assigned to the post, and if not, the thumbnail code is ignored. If this is something you want to do, check out Blogging Bit’s tutorial, and if you want to add my modification for the option not to always need a thumb, here it is:

<?php
$thumb = get_post_meta($post->ID, "thumb", true);

if ($thumb != "")
{ ?>

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>">
<img src="<?php $values = get_post_custom_values("thumb"); echo
$values[0]; ?>" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="thumb" />
</a>

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<?php } ?>

 
Remember, I’m not a professional PHP programmer myself but I’ve tested the code and it seems to work. Good luck, I hope it helps!