Choosing widgets and add them to the sidebar could be in some cases a hog for your server performance. Just pay the necessary attention to the steps you complete, make as many page loading as you can and test your site appearance. If your pages are loading slow or not at all maybe removing some widgets from your sidebar it’s a boost for page load time.

Other useful resources are plugins for the WordPress. With this you can optimize the appearance of your site and the database behind the front page. I will make some references for two of them: WP-cache and Optimize DB.

WP-cache is doing cache for every page . This is a good option if you have pages with a lot of data (pictures, rich text etc.), because the change in page loading is quite significant. It’s easy to install (download .zip archive to your local machine and then upload them to blog directory (/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/) login to WordPress admin panel and be sure you activate it under Plugins tab. After those steps are completed you can follow the text presentation for WP-cache.

Optimize DB it’s a plugin which make your database on the server shrinked to an optimized dimension value. I installed it (/wp-content/plugins/optimizedb/), it’s enabled and I did the optimization of my database tables. At least a message for optimization done appears under plugin’s tab, but I’ve checked my tables before and after and no significant difference occurred. I will follow it up and if I see something to be mentioned I will let you know.

If you want more plugins you can find them on WordPress site. After installing one of them it is highly recommended to test your site appearance and if something goes wrong you can rollback by deactivating the plugin. Also a problem may occurred with those plugin from time to time, due to an upgrade of the WordPress version or due to a not upgraded version of the plugin. You can debug the appearance of your site by deactivating one by one all plugins, and see which one caused some trouble. Anyway to stay up-to-date and be informed visit the WordPress site periodically.

The wp-config.php file located on the root of your blog directory, contains some information that may help (it’s an essential file): somethings about the data base (admin name and password), the path to the database, some reference for the language of the interface. Keep it this way, but be aware that some plugins may change this file and add some lines to it. On the other hand you can add lines too, like this one:

define('ENABLE_CACHE' , true);

which is useful for internal object caching, used by the MySQL server.

I played also with wp-config.php. When I wrote this post, I took a look to the file and I saw that I forgot to put ‘ delimiters for the sentence. Because my JavaScript is disabled on my local machine, I wasn’t able to modify wp-config.php on the server so I had to download it, modify it and uploaded again on server. Because the autosave function for the WordPress is present almost every few minutes, making saves of instances (posts, pages), somehow an error occurred and I wasn’t able to save this post, and some warnings appear for a problem regarding wp-config.php and wp-login.php. The problem was that I modified the file using a rich text editor (Kwrite) that saved my wp-config.php file in an inappropriate format. So, be careful when you modify this file and make sure that is done using a plain text editor (like Notepad).

With these in mind just be careful what you are doing and be sure that you know exactly what you are doing. Playing hard with databases or widgets or plugins or system files may cause some pain in the ass for you.