Hear us on Your Website Engineer Episode 39!

Randy and I were return call-in guests on a popular WordPress podcast that aired Aug 31, 2011. Listen to us discuss DNS with Dustin Hartzler of Your Website Engineer on episode 39.

Your Website Engineer has served many thousands of downloads to the WordPress community and ranks within the top 10 when one searches for the term “WordPress” within the Apple iTunes Store. This episode marks Dustin’s 39th podcast on how to build your own quality website and runs for approximately 40 minutes.

In this episode we discuss Understanding DNS for Faster Website Migrations, how to best architect your domain name’s DNS hosting and how to manage the various records that point traffic to your various hosting providers.

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Understanding DNS for Faster Website Migrations

At beAutomated we strive to be consultants first and programmers second because we want to ensure our development work produces maximum benefit. In serving our clients we often get requests to assist with data and site migrations, and we usually end-up educating clients about DNS—Domain Name System—on top of discussing the various types of hosting plans available to them.

Folks usually get confused about DNS whereas it’s reasonably simple for most purposes. Probably the biggest cause for this confusion has been the routine push by web hosting companies to get their customers to move their name servers along with their website files and database data. Instead, one can use their registrar’s built-in DNS hosting to simplify the process and make it faster and easier to switch hosting companies when necessary as well as to divert other services such as email to separate hosting providers. Using this configuration approach can save on costs by providing needed flexibility.

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Hear us on Your Website Engineer Episode 35!

Randy and I were return call-in guests on a popular WordPress podcast that aired Aug 3, 2011. Listen to us discuss WordPress performance with Dustin Hartzler of Your Website Engineer on episode 35.

Your Website Engineer has served many thousands of downloads to the WordPress community and ranks within the top 10 when one searches for the term “WordPress” within the Apple iTunes Store. This episode marks Dustin’s 35th podcast on how to build your own quality website and runs for approximately 30 minutes.

In this episode we discuss WordPress Website Performance, how to tune up your WordPress powered website for user and search engine benefit.

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WordPress Website Performance

Performance is one of the major purposes behind custom software development, alongside functionality, security, interoperability, and support. Performance is of major importance not only to website visitors but to search engines such as Google.

Researchers also claim that website users are affected by speed, while speed decreases they increasingly begin to leave and try other links instead. WordPress powered websites are particularly vulnerable to performance problems due to the plethora of themes and plugins that often get applied to these websites on top of WordPress’ already extensive core. Many of the plugins available today do not follow best practices for performance, whether they are free, premium, or even custom.

You might be surprised to learn that every single plugin you have installed gets loaded with every single page request. If the plugin has nothing to do with the page being requested, most of its logic is usually skipped. If the plugin does filter or otherwise hook into the content of the page somewhere somehow, most of the logic within the plugin will be executed in realtime. Individual plugin logic may or may not be optimized for performance. Regardless of whether the plugin is performance optimized, every plugin will affect your website’s performance to some degree.

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