YARPP blacklisted by web host

This is the first I’ve heard that WPEngine has such an official policy, and I’m saddened to hear that. I know others in the WP-specific hosting business who has not had any issues with YARPP, like ZippyKid.

I’ll try reaching out to WP Engine to see if I can help them get YARPP running safely on their systems. If you could contact your support representative with WP Engine, that would be good too. Feel free to cc me or give them my email: [email protected], where x=mitcho.

I’m in touch with the folks at WP Engine now via email. Marking this thread as resolved for the time being. Hopefully there will be good news in a little time.

Has there been any update on this? I checked in with WPEngine to see if they would allow YARPP and their answer was an emphatic “No”.

The reason WP Engine gives is that Yarpp uses too much resources and bogs down the servers.

Would indeed be nice if this could be resolved.

Have instead used nRelate but that no longer works with the multi-lingual plugin WPML. According to what I have heard, Yarpp does.

Since I work at WP Engine, here’s an official answer: Our issue with YARPP is that the plugin leverages FULLTEXT indexes on the wp_posts table.

FULLTEXT indexes on wp_posts is not good for overall WordPress performance once the size of an install gets large enough. Not just with us, but at a number of other hosts as well. Furthermore, since a pretty decent chunk of our customers come to us after outgrowing shared hosting, their sites have already made it to “large enough” status.

There’s a really interesting post (and comment thread) over on WP Tavern that covers the issues with related posts plugins and performance. If you have a few minutes, go check it out.

Hope that helps!

Boogah,

Thanks. Great with a specific explanation!

I have been using WP Engine for a few years now and I have been impressed by your customer support and am generally happy with your service. I think it is excellent for instance that you for example analyse plugin performance and advice people not to use some plugins.

But I am frustrated by the “related posts” functionality.

Initially I used Yarpp, until it became disallowed.

I did use nRelate, that you recommend, but it has become incompatible with WPML with the recent updates (of WPML). And WPML unfortunately takes priority. (the site does not work without it)

I am testing Reverb that you also recommend. But it seems that it can not handle multilingual contents.

I have seen it mentioned that Yarpp can handle multilingual contents and can work with WPML, which is why it would be very interesting for me. However, it is on the disallowed list so I can’t.

So now I’m without any functioning related-posts plugin, which is bad for keeping visitors on the site.

-Per

If you don’t mind spending a little time manually setting your related posts, Microkid’s Related Posts plugin is far more resource friendly than ones that leverage FULLTEXT indexes.

And since it doesn’t depend on a 3rd party service (like nRelate or the others we recommend on our disallowed plugins page) it might work with WPML. I can’t give any guarantees there, but it’d totally be worth spot checking.

Thanks for the suggestion.

To some extent it seems to me that it defies the purpose of a plugin for related posts. If I’m selecting the posts manually I can do it with simple links.

We have 5000+ historic posts and we publish a lot, so adding to the editing time for each new post is not attractive.

But perhaps as a last resort…?