Attachments to pages slow down the site – how do you deal with it?

  • The site I help run has a few pages which we update with new images from time to time, and so the number of attachments to these pages has built up quite a lot over time. The result is a LARGE number of rewrite rules for each attachment which was slowing down the site.

    Now like a lot of sites, we have no interest in the raw attachment pages anyway, so I took the unusual measure of removing all those rewrite rules — by hacking page_uri_index function in wp-includes/rewrite.php. I could see no way of getting the same results using hooks/filters (though, eg a filter on $attachments in that function would do the trick and I might turn my hack into that as it would make the core hack a single line.)

    I have seen people suggest detaching attachments by resorting to raw if simple SQL changes.

    My question is has anyone got better, cleaner, plugin-based suggestions for dealing with this issue?

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  • Thread Starter alanft

    (@alanft)

    to answer my own question, i have now restored the hacked rewrite.php and put this in my functions.php instead:

    add_filter('page_rewrite_rules', 'my_page_rewrite_rules');

function my_page_rewrite_rules($page_rewrite)
{	return array_filter($page_rewrite, 'my_page_rewrite_rules_callback'); }

function my_page_rewrite_rules_callback($var)
{	return (strpos($var,"?attachment=")==false);}

    which has reduced my rewrite rules from 780 to 196, i.e. a quarter of the size!

    this removes every attachment-based URL (where the re-written form includes the string “?attachment=”) from pages (via page_rewrite_rules filter).

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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