Wordpress is currently one of the most popular blogging/CMS applications. Here are some ideas for optimizing Wordpress and reducing the CPU consumption of this PHP script.

• Make a backup of your account first, and then upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress. The latest versions have optimized code that could reduce the CPU consumption of your site.
• For permalink structure, do not start with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. Instead try /%year%/%postname%/ or /%post_id%/%postname%/. Also don't worry about 301 redirects as wordpress will automatically handle that after the permalink change.
• Install WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache, which can be done from your Wordpress Dashboard under Plugins. Follow the links below for information on how to setup these plugins.
  • WP Super Cache (recommended)
  • W3 Total Cache
• Many themes are more CPU intensive.
  • Make sure your page loads are generating no errors in your Error Log (in cPanel under Logs)
  • Also, if you're using dynamic image resizing, you may want to disable this if possible.
  • If all else fails, contact the theme provider for assistance, or change to a different theme.
• Disable CPU intensive plugins, or plugins that you no longer need.
  • All related posts plugins (WordPress Related Posts, YARPP) can cause significantly high load in most cases.
  • WPRobot3 and other auto-posters can also cause high load issues, and should be disabled if they are causing issues
  • StatPress and other wordpress statistics software should also be disabled, as these too can consume too much CPU in certain cases. Use Google Analytics instead for statistics.
  • Any other plugins that are not vital to your Wordpress should be disabled.
• Manage Spam bots. Non-human visitors/posters (aside from web spiders) should be blocked. Use a captcha such as SI CAPTCHA to prevent comment spam.
• Lower the rate web spiders crawl your Wordpress blogs, if you have a large amount of blogs hosted under your account. High crawl rates can drive up the load on the server, as many bots try to index your sites.