For those running on our WordPress-based easy web site service, we’re in the process of upgrading you all to WordPress 3.1. I’m also looking at your plugin list and replacing WP-SpamFree with WP-HashCash for performance reasons. And for those hosted on DreamHost (the majority of you), we’re upgrading to PHP 5.3 and adding the page speed optimization module, which reduces the amount of data send to web browsers making your web site pages load faster.
If you’ve been wondering how you could get some decent stats on your website visitors, you might Web Ninja Google Analytics plugin will both accumulate stats you can view in Google Analytics, and can give you a nice graph in your WordPress control panel to see at a glance how many hits you’re getting per day. This setup performs much better than WordPress.com stats and the stats dashboard widgets that go with it.
You can also get a little better site performance by setting up WP Super Cache. This plugin works by creating an html-based cache of your web pages that are sent out rather than hitting the programming and database on every hit. Most of our local church sites aren’t hit enough to make it worth setting up, but it will make the pages load faster.