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When you are on a shared server, you don’t need to pay attention to how much server resources your WordPress installation utilizes. Your hosting company pays attention to that and notifies you when some code go berserk and ends up eating too much cpu or something like that. However, on a cloud computing environment like media temple’s grid server, you have to be careful with how your WordPress installation uses server resources. Your hosting company won’t notify you until the resource consumption goes abnormally high. That’s not bad, so you don’t want to be notified everytime you use more cpu than normal because we are in the year 2008 and we may need server resources for many of the applications we use.

On the other hand, when time passes and your blog starts to get extraordinary attention, you may want to learn tips and tricks on how to optimize your wordpress installation and how to minimize resources it uses. Here are tips and tricks about just that.

First and foremost, you must use caching. WP-Super Cache is the best option for that. WP Super Cache caches your posts and pages as beautiful pure html files so your server doesn’t use resources for php output. Other caching plugins don’t do that (at least I don’t know of any other). Others usually just caches the content and continues to use php cycles to deliver output.

The second important thing you have to keep in mind is that WordPress’ custom 404 (page not found thingie) handler uses too much cpu cycles. This isn’t unique to WordPress. Any other CMS like Drupal, TextPattern, etc. who uses custom 404 handling also uses more cpu cycles than any normal, usual 404 page. What to do about that? Use Google Site Maps plugin in order to inform Google faster when you have deleted a post. This plugin automatically generates a Google compliant site map and submits that to Google everytime you make a change in your content. Apart from that, there are also urls that are seeked by robots and they also can generate 404 error codes when not found. One example in my mind now is the favicon.ico file. Favicons are used by many web sites for bookmarking urls. You have to place one in your root directory because every robot I know looks at your root directory for that file. Moreover, not only robots look for favicon.ico but also many browsers look for it when users want to bookmark your blog. Many modern browsers also look for it because they display it in the tab. The best practice is, go create one and place it in your root folder. Favicon.cc is my favorite place for creating favicons and downloading them into my computer and then put them on my host. It’s very practical and free.

Same holds true for your feeds. Use Feedburner for distributing your feeds. Since your feeds will be distributed by feedburner and not by your server, you will have this load minimized too. Your domain.com/feed will be checked (almost) only by Feedburner and this is at most once or twice a day.

There may be other examples for would be 404 files that don’t come with your WordPress installation. You can make up your own examples too. Either way, you have to find a way to create them or handle them. So far, I don’t know of any plugin which handles that issue. Maybe it’s a good idea to build one. It should check for common known urls on your blog which may be requested often by robots, search engines, and like, and maybe creates them for you.

Third, comment spam also puts another weight on your WordPress installation and that eats your valuable CPU cycles too. Akismet is NOT a solution for this because a comment or a trackback or a pingback will hit your server and be recorded for evaluation anyway. WP Spam Free solves this problem by not allowing comments from agents which are not a browser. Since many bots who works for dropping spam comments and trackbacks to WordPress blogs do not recognize and use JavaScript, this plugin checks whether comment owner’s agent can recognize javascript. It’s a wise solution. It also informs normal users who turned javascript off so that they don’t get surprised when they are not able to post comments.

Those three factors are what I have experienced so far with my grid server. I think this can be the first post in a series because as time goes by I would experience new cpu cycle hungry factors and find solutions about them. So I’ll post them too. One thing I am not sure about is wp-cron.php and admin-ajax.php files. It looks weird but it seems like they eat more cpu cycles when you don’t post frequently. But this is just a guess. I’ll post about that too when I am sure of them. So, please subscribe to my RSS feed if you find this post useful, there are more to come.

This is a remaining question and there aren’t any detailed views on that when I make a search on Google. Why not to use Blogspot or Blogger? Is it okay to use blogspot for a money-making blog? Does Blogger eat my share over adsense? What are the disadvantages of using blogspot as a free blogging service?

Well, those are the questions that remained unanswered. There has been a couple of weeks now that I host one or two blogs on blogspot and there is also adsense installed. As with the adsense share, I can clearly say that Blogger doesn’t have a share on your adsense income. You can see this in your adsense control panel too.

For any web site or blog, whether it is intended for making money or not, navigation is an utmost important issue. I can clearly say that blogspot is weak on navigation. Of course there may be third party templates for blogspot that provide a decent navigation but not everybody has the reach and technical knowledge to use them. The most ugly thing with any Blogger blog’s navigation regardless of which template it uses is the “older posts”, “newer posts” navigation. The url you get to when you click those navigation links are pretty ugly. They are neither user friendly nor search engine friendly.

On one hand, it is a fact that there are no use in such navigation in terms of search engine optimization because they are not time-less. Every second or third page of a blog is being changed constantly and there is no meaning in indexing them as page 2, page 3, etc. On the other hand, for the sake of usability, every url at this time should be readable by naked human eye. And this is a problem with blogspot.

Moreover, blogspot forbids to index labels for search engines by its robots.txt file. Look at any blog on *.blogspot.com/robots.txt and you’ll see that access is denied. What I told in the above paragraph is also valid for labels though.

Apart from those navigational issues, I can say that any blog on blogspot doesn’t have less chance than any blog hosted elsewhere. Blogspot itself is a competitive domain and so are blogs hosted on it. Fear not, you will be indexed quite normally when you blog on Blogspot.

As with the monetization part, it is extremely easy to put adsense on any blog on blogspot. However that doesn’t mean they are optimally placed. For instance, it is a huge trouble for an html/javascript illiterate person (who consists the majority of blog users) to place adsense within the blogpost, for instance under the title or under the post body. You have to use escape characters and there is a big chance that you end up with messing adsense code which is against the TOS.

Having said that, for people who can optimize adsense placements and are html/javascript literate, there is no reason not to suggest blogspot for a profitable money making blog on the web. At least it is a whole lot better than wordpress.com at this time where you cannot put ads on your blog in wordpress.com.

Hence, 6% percent of the Technorati top 100 blogs are on blogspot. Advantages are you are always ready to get dug, you are at the hands of Google.

Moreover, Blogger team is constantly making improvements in the overall quality of Blogger. You can see some of them in the Blogger Draft. On nice example of this is the comment box embedded below the post.

In the final analysis, there is no significant difference in terms of pro-blogging between blogspot and a blog hosted elsewhere.

I choose the long and hard way to monetize my websites and blogs. This way consists of writing quality articles and establish a user base. This is a long term strategy. It’s benefit is it is like renting your home. You have to buy or built a house from scratch and then give it to rent. This way, you can have a decent income afterwards, without having to do too much to keep that income.

On the other hand, some may need to have their blog monetized instantly. This can be fast and bring you a relatively less income however this is a method anyway.

To achieve this, you have to mimic blogs like boing boing. This imeans, you will become a news blog. By news blog, I don’t necessarily mean a political one or a blog about finances, that’s not necessary. You have to have editorial skills and you have to pick posts and articles, images, videos, any interactive thing that may interest people and then post about them. By “about them” I mean that you will not copy and paste them. You will select a blog post, and blog about that post. You will select quotations from that post and use them in your own post and comment on them a little bit.

That’s what boing boing does and they are very successful. They are successful in their editorial skills. They choose wisely, they don’t choose randomly. And remember, there are around 30 posts on boing boing every day.

If you believe that you have this editorial skill and you can also make wise selections around the blogosphere and the web, you may quickly establish a user base and a little profit by doing that. I assume you have already made the optimization about where to put ads. I am not going to talk about this here because that’s another story.

By blogging about blogs, you are going to build backlinks and they will help you grow in your search engine visibility. It will be much better if you keep this meta-blogging in a vertical manner. For instance, you can only choose to blog about blog posts that are about parenting. Or only about cars or only about gadgets. Get it?

Since you are going to post about 30 times in a day, this would bring quick attention for search engines. Search engines love updates.

Other blogs that keep this strategy are: kottke.org, the blog of Matt Mullenweg (he is not doing this for monetization purposes but he is a good example for what I am trying to tell here anyway), and many other blogs about web 2.0, widgets, themes, etc.

There is one other advantage in this. Such meta-blogs do not exist for a variety of topics. There isn’t any famous one about recipes, flowers, art, etc. which means there are already niches out there.

A drawback of this strategy is that you have to put content everyday. Because what you do is not time-less. You will be about actuality. You cannot say after six months, “that much content is enough for me to post less from now on”. That’s not possible. You will see sudden drop in your traffic and thus in your advertising revenue.

I can’t suggest this strategy for myself but this doesn’t mean that it is not working. It does work, I have done it in the past and I was successful. However, for myself, I want to build an hotel now so that people come and go and pay their rent… endlessly.