While checking network traffic in google chrome, I found that my website was making request to “b.scorecardresearch.com” and reputation is not good at all for this site. I did my research on wordpress forums and found that “addthis” plugin was making requests to this site and there is no way to restrict it.

I am writing this post, so that readers would know that one of WordPress plugins that makes request to “b.scorecardresearch.com” is addthis. I have decided to remove this plugin from my blog as I don’t want my visitors information to be traced and slow website.

This article is specific to my problem only, However I am sure it will help many others also.

I started with ways, which will less impact my blog and will take less time.

1. Disable WordPress Cron Job

This was my first step, disabling cron Job. In most of cases we are not using this feature. Mostly it is used when you schedule some article to publish on some day or time. To disable it, Open “wp-config.php” file and add below line at top of page.

define(“˜DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true);

What if I need this cron job ?

You can easily create a cron Job anytime, by following below process.
a. Log into your cPanel.
b. In the Advanced section, click Cron jobs.
c. Under Add New Cron Job, select the time interval. It is recommended not to add time interval less than 15 minutes.
d. Set the cron command to the following, replacing yourwebsite.com with your actual domain name:

wget -q -O – http://yourwebsite.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron >/dev/null 2>&1

The above command tells the Linux server to run wp-cron via wget, which will trigger the wp-cron.php script to do it’s job on your schedule instead of on each page view. This will lessen the amount of processes on the server.

e. Click Add New Cron Job to set the cron.

2. Disable Plugins

Now, Here comes actual reason for WordPress blog high CPU usage. I had many plugins and started to disable one by one.

• Yet Another related posts Plugin (YARPP) : After reading many posts on same topic, I found that many WordPress users were having performance issue because of this plugin. This plugin implements unique algorithm to automatically match related articles. If you don’t have any shared server and performance issue, this is must install plugin for high SEO. Unfortunately I had to uninstall it.
• All in One SEO Pack : This is also good plugin However imagine amount of computation used while trying automatically add metadata and all other SEO related stuff. So, I had no other option than disabling it.

There are many alternatives and light weight plugin suggested for above plugins, However on safer side, I decided not to install anything.

Even after all above stuff, My website started to disabled after 2-3 days instead of 1 day. It was some relief

I started digging up, Googling again and then decided not to use any theme other than WordPress provided.

3. Change WordPress Theme

This was something I was trying to avoid. I was using same theme for last three year and I was not in favor of changing look and feel of my website. As a last option, I uninstalled old theme and replaced it with Twenty Twelve (Standard Theme provided by WordPress).

Why I chose this theme ?

Well, it is standard theme provided by WordPress team. So, I thought nothing can beat performance of this theme. It is very simple and elegant theme.

Luckily, I know little bit about CSS, so I started to change (Only CSS and few PHP codes) this theme. After 2 days ( I spent nearly 4 hours ) I was able to get almost 90% of same look and feel of my old theme.

4. Install W3 Total Cache

I have seen many article on WordPress performance and almost every article suggested for some caching mechanism. As WordPress doesn’t provide any out of box functionality however there is brilliant plugin available absolutely free of cost named as “W3 Total Cache“. This plugin is used by more than 2 millions WordPress blog. It is delivering website with lightening speed at same time load on Server is very low.

5. Uninstall Jetpack Plugin ( I cant Believe it  )

At this stage, most of WordPress bloggers problem may resolve. However I was surprised when my website is disabled after one week. Web hosting support agent informed me that CPU usage still shows highest usage at some point (not always). Only plugin I had was JetPack. I informed my web hosting provider that its not possible because I am running simple WordPress site with almost no plugin.

It is well known and understood that JetPack will do all processing on remote Server. I tried to search WordPress support and found that I was not single person having problem with this plugin. There were many bloggers reported performance issue because of JetPack.

JetPack is very nice plugin which provides almost everything like Mobile Theme, Statistics etc. I decided to give it a try by removing it.

And result ? Everything was perfect.

I have shared all my experience on performance and high CPU Usage problems. After following all above steps, I tried my blog performance at GTmetrix and at time of writing this article, this blog performance was 95% (Grade A) using Page Speed API and 88% (Grade B) using YSlow API.

I would like to listen your story, your feedback is most welcome.

To start with it install the “Mingle Forum” plugin and activate it.

Create one page (may be with name Forum) in wordpress and write text “[mingleforum]” and disable the comments, trackback and ping-backs.

Now in the settings of Mingle forum, create a new Forum. I had created two forum for the demo purpose. You can see new Topic image in below screen shot. Whenever you will open the Page on which “[mingleforum]” is written, the forum will functionality will be opened.

The reason i have suggested for the mingle forum because its very flexible in terms of settings and very active updates are available for the WordPress.

Also there is online video available about the configuration of the Mingle Forum, you can check here.

I hope this will be very hopeful for lots of the bloggers.

Getting started with Google Speed Online API:

Go to Google APIs Console and navigate to “Services”.

Now go to “Page Speed Online API” listing and enable it.

Accept the terms of the service and navigate to “API Access” tab.

Copy the API Key displayed in “Simple API Access” section as shown in below image:

I am assuming that the W3 Total Cache is already installed. So go to “Performance | General Settings” and Miscellaneous section.

Click on the Save all settings after entering the API key provided by the google and also dont forget to select the check box saying “Enable Google Page Speed dashboard widget”.

Now go to the dashboard and you will see the following type of report:

I hope this article is very useful for most of the Web developers and the bloggers.

Instead of installing any plugin, i have done following code changes in “comments.php“.

Somewhere in “comments.php“, you will find below line of code –

foreach ($comments as $comment) :

Add following code just above the for loop

$comments = array_reverse($comments);

so, the final code will become

<?php
	/*Start By Jitendra*/
	$comments = array_reverse($comments);
	/*End By Jitendra*/
	foreach ($comments as $comment) :
?>

I hope, this little trick will be very useful for few WordPress bloggers.

How to reproduce the error ?

1. Go to HTML tab and embed few html code. i am using syntaxhighlighter, so my code is normally like enclosed in square bracket with text “sourcecode”. Go to Visual Tab it works fine.
2. Again go to HTML tab , save your article and close the window. (Remember you are closing the window when you are on HTML tab).
3. Now come to your post and navigate to “Visual” tab. you will notice that your HTML code is discarded. Don’t save anything.
4. Close the window again. (Remember, this time you are closing the window while you was on “Visual” tab.)
5. Come back again to your post and you will see that your code is just fine.

Conclusion :
If you close your window while you are in “HTML” tab, next time when you will come back it opens the code in same tab (“HTML”) by default and when you switch to “Visual” tab it discards the html code. So to avoid this problem, always close your window when you will be in “Visual” tab.

After some time, i found that Akismet uses that table as a log to display the reports about spam. Spams are automatically deleted by akismet, but entry for every spam was maintained in that table.

When i run below query to find the orphan comments meta :

Select * FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE comment_id NOT IN
(SELECT comment_id FROM wp_comments)

There were nearly 10k records which were orphans. To free up the memory, i run below query

DELETE FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE comment_id NOT IN
(SELECT comment_id FROM wp_comments)

With the help of above query, i free up nearlly 18MB of space.

Please leave your valuable feedback over the same problem.

If The server is having SU-PHP enabled :
You can create a custom php.ini file to customize your php configurations. If you are getting 500 internal server error, please create a file php.ini in your public_html folder and enter the following line:

“suhosin.Simulation On”

If you are getting same error under wp-admin login page then copy your php.ini file under wp-admin/ directory and check once again.

Increasing memory allocated to PHP

Also released with Version 2.5, the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT option allows you to specify the maximum amount of memory that can be consumed by PHP. This setting may be necessary in the event you receive a message such as “Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted“.

This setting increases PHP Memory only for WordPress, not other applications. By default, WordPress will attempt to increase memory allocated to PHP to 32MB (code is at beginning of wp-settings.php), so the setting in wp-config.php should reflect something higher than 32MB.

WordPress will automatically check if PHP has been allocated less memory than the entered value before utilizing this function. For example, if PHP has been allocated 64MB, there is no need to set this value to 64M as WordPress will automatically use all 64MB if need be.

Please note, this setting may not work if your host does not allow for increasing the PHP memory limit–in that event, contact your host to increase the PHP memory limit. Also, note that many hosts set the PHP limit at 8MB.

Increase PHP Memory to 64MB

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);

Increase PHP Memory to 96MB

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’96M’);

Below is the example, that how the URL setting breaks the site:

To fix this problem,

You have to change the entry in database, as you cannot even log in to admin panel of wordpress.

Go to Cpanel of your hosting site and open the wp-config.php to know the database in which tour wordpress application is save.

As you can see in above snap, the database name is “ilovenag_wrdp3”, off course it will be different for your website.

Now go to the above database as shown in below image:

As you can see in above image, go to “wp_options” and edit the row number 2 and enter the correct domain name. and your problem will be solved.

Now login in wordpress by admin and revert the changes you had made earlier.

Note : It is suggested that first you take the backup of wordpress database and then only perform the operations for the safer side.