Fixing WordPress posting slowness

Those of us with WordPress blogs have noticed a serious slowness sometimes in posting with versions 2.0+ . You click ‘Publish’ and it just hangs, sitting there, seemingly doing nothing. Yet, while this is happening, if I open the blog in another browser window, the post has indeed published, yet the edit window still sits there waiting to finish.

Others have reported a WSOD (White Screen of Death.) Yikes. What’s going on?

These two posts explain the problem.

Why Posts Take Forever to Publish

WP-No Ping Wait

It’s not WordPress per se, but the ping process that is slowing posting down. Pings are done automatically by WordPress, they tell other sites you’ve just published something. However, either major ping services are overloaded and slow or there’s something in the new WordPress code that sometimes slows pings down. The above posts suggest a couple of ways around the problem. Some work for some people. However the following way will always work.

Do your pinging manually

First, In the Control Panel, go to Options/Writing. Remove “rpc.pingomatic.com”. Click “Update options.”

Then, whenever you post a new items, go to pingomatic.com or pingoat.com, and tell it to ping your site.

Yes, you need to do it manually. However it just takes a few seconds, and now posts on Polizeros, my main blog, publish within 1-2 seconds, rather than sometimes taking 30 seconds or longer to finish.

I’m sure WordPress will squash this bug, or whatever it is, in the next version. In the meantime, this is a quick, easy fix.