I’ve noticed the site has been taking quite a bit of time to load lately. I have done a few optimizations to help things out. I have now made it so the front page only shows the last 5 posts instead of 10. That way the front page has less images and such to load.
I also installed the plugin wp-cache this plugin “works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.”
I’m hoping these changes will help. I might have to see about upgrading to a beefier server. I plan to test things out with the one in St. George when we are down there in June. It has a much faster processor, but the same amount of RAM.
I have been using this site to test the load times. Original it said 23 seconds for the front page to load. i now have it down to roughly 8.5 seconds which is quite an improvement.
update: I just found a derivative of wp-cache called wp-super-cache. It appears to have a lot more optimization and options. It even helps so sites do not suffer the digg effect.