WP-Optimize
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Do you have thousands of users on your WordPress site? Look them up fast. Find authors more easily. Speed up your laggy dashboard.
Index WP Users For Speed is a WordPress plugin designed to enhance the performance of sites with a large number of registered users. It optimises MySQL or MariaDB database techniques to speed up the display and search functions in the Users dashboard, as well as improving the loading times for Posts and Pages panels. This is particularly beneficial for sites experiencing slowdowns due to high user counts.
The plugin works by indexing users and adding metadata that allows for quicker database queries, eliminating the need for slow full table scans. It also includes WP-CLI commands for managing user index information and can schedule background updates to maintain performance without impacting user experience.
Best for: Websites with a large number of registered users that require improved dashboard performance.
What it does well
Where it falls short
This plugin can significantly enhance the efficiency of WordPress sites with many users, making it a useful tool for site administrators managing large user bases.
OllieJones's own description of Index WP Users For Speed, lightly tidied.
This plugin speeds up the handling of your WordPress registered users, especially when your site has many thousands of them. (Congratulations! Building a successful site with thousands of users is an accomplishment.) With optimized MySQL / MariaDB database techniques, it finds and displays your users more quickly. Your All Users panel on your dashboard displays faster and searches faster. Your All Posts and All Pages panels no longer lag when displaying. And, you can edit your posts to change authorship more efficiently.
Without this plugin WordPress sites with many users slow down drastically on Dashboard pages. It can take many seconds each time you display your Users dashboard panel. It takes just about the same large amount of time to display your Posts or Pages panels. While those slow displays are loading, WordPress is hammering on your site’s MySQL or MariaDB database server. That means your site serves your visitors slowly too, not just your dashboard users.
And, versions of WordPress since 6.0.1 have dealt with this performance problem by preventing changes to the authors of posts and pages in the Gutenberg editor, the classic editor, and the Quick Edit feature. Those recent versions also suppress the user counts shown at the top of the Users panel. This plugin restores those functions.
This plugin helps speed up the handling of those large numbers of users. It does so by indexing your users by adding metadata that’s easily optimized by MySQL or MariaDB. For example, when your site must ask the database for your post-author users, the database no longer needs to examine every user on your system. (In database jargon, it no longer needs to do notoriously slow full table scans to find users.)
When slow queries are required to make sure the metadata indexes are up to date, this plugin does them in the background so nobody has to wait for them to complete. You can set the plugin to do this background work at a particular time each day. Many people prefer to do them overnight or at some other off-peak time.
You can use WP-CLI commands built in to this plugin.
wp index-users status shows the status of user index creation.
wp index-users remove removes the user index information. This includes usermeta rows and options rows.
wp index-users rebuild rebuilds the user index information. Notice that activating the plugin always begins building the user index information.
This is a companion plugin to Index WP MySQL for Speed. If that plugin is in use, this plugin will perform better. But they are in no way dependent on one another; you may use either, both, or of course neither.
I offer several plugins to help with your site’s database efficiency. You can read about them here.
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