Adding Update Services

I've not been doing much SEO lately as I have been spending much of my time fixing GoDaddy issues (including a virus!) and then eventually moving to Host Gator, which so far seems like a good move.

Today was the first time I had to look into some SEO again and I was reading the Wordpress Codex on update services and decided to add several more of these services to my blog.

I still have more maintenance tasks on my to-do list for my site so SEO may continue to be on hold for the next few weeks.

PHP on GoDaddy Hosting with Wordpress

Just wanted to share something I saw in regards to the PHP version on GoDaddy. By default, GoDaddy deployed my system to use PHP 4.x. Now, I could upgrade this to PHP 5 any time I chose to but never did because there were warnings about how some sites wouldn't support PHP 5 very well.

Well, since I wanted to use the W3 Total Cache but it required PHP 5 I decided to upgrade. No surprise: everything worked fine with PHP 5.x. I knew Wordpress would work fine but there is always a little bit of paranoia.

One thing I did not expect though: my site performance improved noticeably with this change alone (before even installing the caching plug-in). Now I knew that the PHP engine is always improved from version to version but I didn't think the change would be visibly noticeable!

On that note: if you're going to be hosting Wordpress on GoDaddy I would suggest that one of the first things you do include changing your PHP version to the latest.

W3 Total Cache

For the last week I've been concentrating on improving my site's speed. I've read that improving speed can improve how search engine rank you. My pages were loading around 3 to 5 seconds using the Wordpress Super Cache plug in.

I decided to try W3 Total Cache and, wow, what an improvement. I did not anticipate things to improve as much as they did! Most of the time the pages are loading nearly instantly. I'd really recommend checking out this plug-in if you are not yet.