Creating efficient WordPress Queries with WP_Query

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Creating eﬃcient WordPress Queries with WP_Query - By Krishna Neupane - @krishneup 1

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Introduction ● Enable us to perform complex database queries in a safe, simple and modular manner. 2

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Introduction ● Enable us to perform complex database queries in a safe, simple and modular manner. ● Can be created by initiating WordPress Query class 3

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Introduction ● Enable us to perform complex database queries in a safe, simple and modular manner. ● Can be created by initiating WordPress Query class ● Has properties & methods 4

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Introduction ● Enable us to perform complex database queries in a safe, simple and modular manner. ● Can be created by initiating WordPress Query class ● Has properties & methods ● Offers large number of parameter options to perform query. 5

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6 Let’s see an example

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7 Can we improve this?

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Only run the query you need, But how? 8

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WP_Query makes following queries by default ● Calculates pagination 9

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WP_Query makes following queries by default ● Calculates pagination ● Queries post meta and taxonomy terms 10

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WP_Query makes following queries by default ● Calculates pagination ● Queries post meta and taxonomy terms ● Calculates results 11

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We can improve by passing some parameters & techniques 12

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When you need to retreive only last n posts, without pagination, it is useful to use undocumented (it is documented only on code) parameter ‘no_found_rows’ => true. This will increase performance. 13 When pagination is not needed

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This is helpful when you need to show Posts without adding post meta information to the cache. This helps in performance. 14 Useful when post meta info will not be utilized.

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This is helpful when you need to show Posts without adding post term information to the cache. This helps in performance too. 15 Useful when taxonomy terms will not be utilized.

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Note: If a persistent object cache backend (such as memcached) is used, these caching parameter flags are set to false by default since there is no need to update the cache every page load when a persistent cache exists. 16

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This is useful when only the post IDs are needed. 17 Specify return ﬁeld parameters

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Do not use posts_per_page => -1 What if we have 100,000 posts? This could crash the site. 18

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Avoid post__not_in Helpful but can lead to poor performance on busy and large websites. Link - https://docs.wpvip.com/technical-references/code-quality-and-best-pract ices/using-post__not_in/ 19

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20 What’s the alternative techniques for post__not_in ?

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21 Let’s see it

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Do not use $wpdb & get_posts() - unless you have a solid reason 22

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Detect slow queries with Query Monitor plugin 23

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Utilize Transients feature when possible 24

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25 Provide a way to override. Your developer users will thank you.

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Using WP_Query for the search & ﬁlters 26

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27 Ways to pass search parameter for text search

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But, wait, there’s a problem By default, the default search engine for WordPress searches only the title and post_content. 28

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29 Use Relevanssi plugin integration

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30 Supercharge further adding ﬁlters to the WP_Query My favourite combination : Search & Filter Pro + Relevanssi Relevanssi - https://wordpress.org/plugins/relevanssi/ Search & Filter - https://wordpress.org/plugins/search-ﬁlter/

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WordPress 6.1 has WP_Query improvements 31 If the same database query is run more than once, the result will be loaded from cache.

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Final point Happy engineering ! 32

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33 Reach me via Website: www.krishneup.com twitter: @krishneup Email: [email protected]