Dramatically slows down website

Well, the fact that it’s processing intensive and will slow down your site is in the FAQ. There are some large sites running wp-Typography, so caching plugins do work (but of course it might depend on the kind of cache and your specific server configuration).

The latest version even has internal caching, so it repeated requests for the same pages should be served much faster. I’d like to work with you to find out why caching (both within the plugin and via an external page cache) did not help in your case.

Without wp-typography activated the plugin load time is between 0,181 – 0,2 sec. per visit.

When wp-typography is activated the plugin load time is up to 0,7 sec. Furthermore there are more than another 60 MySQL-queries.

This makes my website loading way slower. My provider even had to move my website to another server due to experiencing these issues (which first came up just after using wp-typography) and slowing down the whole managed server. Might be only me experiencing this issue but that is what I can rate. I’d love to use it though.

Is this a shared hosting environment (virtual server)? The MySQL queries have to be from the transient caching. You might try to disable caching in the settings. On the systems I tested, the caching via get_transient and set_transient improved performance, but it might be different in a resource-starved environment. (If that helps, I will disable caching by default in future versions.)

As for the load time itself: If those numbers are for total page load time, they are in the ballpark of what’s to be expected on a first visit (further visits should be faster with some kind of caching). wp-Typogaphy parses the complete content area into a DOM and performs lots of regular expression replacements on the generated textnodes. Other than caching and using the latest PHP version, there is not much that can be done to improve the performance of these operations. That’s why the first FAQ mentions using WP Super Cache.

BTW: What version of PHP are you using? I’ve found that there is a huge performance difference for the plugin between e.g. PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.6.

Just in case you want to try wp-Typography again: As of version 3.2.0, caching is disabled by default and should work better in low-ressource environments.