Does your WordPress site have a large number of users? Do you have tens of thousands, or more, of registered users? If so, you probably cringe every time you click on Pages, or Posts, or Users in your dashboard. You know it will take forever to render, and may time out.
All those pages require looking up some of your users. When you edit a page or post, you can change the post’s author. But your “Subscriber” users can’t be authors, so WordPress has to exclude them from the dropdown list. It uses a slow database query to do that.
The Users page, near the top, shows how many users of each type–Administrator, Editor, Subscriber–you have. To show that, WordPress has to count them. It uses a slow database query to do that.
Then you need this plugin. It’s free open source code released under the GNU Public License. In the background it generates indexing data. That data makes looking up users much faster, without changing the dashboard pages. (The magic of hooks and actions
It is a companion plugin to Index WP MySQL For Speed. You can use either, both, or neither.
How do I use this plugin?
Install it like you would install any WordPress plugin. Download it from the plugin repository on WordPress.org or install it using the Plugins > Add New panel on your WordPress dashboard.
Activate it, and it will start working.
You can change its settings by choosing the Index For Speed item on the Users menu.
What does it do for my site?
When you WordPress site has a very large number of users, your dashboard pages slow down. A lot. The way WordPress handles its users in its MySQL database does not scale up well. This plugin solves that problem by using faster database techniques.
Pioneering WordPress sites historically had hundreds of registered users, or even fewer. Efficiently scaling the numbers of registered users up to tens of thousands wasn’t a priority. The core team were focused on handling large numbers of posts and pages, and delivering them to viewers, and that focus was right.
Why is your big site’s dashboard slow?
When you edit a page or post, you can change the post’s author. But your “Subscriber” users can’t be authors, so WordPress has to exclude them from the dropdown list. It uses a slow database query to do that.
The Users page, near the top, shows how many users of each type–Administrator, Editor, Subscriber–you have. To show that, WordPress has to count them. It uses a slow database query to do that.
How does the plugin make it faster?
When you activate it, it works in the background to index your users by their roles so they can be looked up. If you want to know more, please put on your propellor beanie and click this link.