Faster Dashboards
Earlier today we turned on code to change how we do authentication and turned off SSL on your dashboards. The main change you should notice is that things on the backend of your blog, such as your Presentation and Write page, should load significantly faster than they used to.
Why? When WordPress first started we thought having everything in the dashboard be over SSL would be pretty cool, but it ended up causing a ton of problems. If there were any external images or embeds called it would cause mixed content warnings for IE users, it caused a big load on our web servers and later load balancers, made it difficult to integrate with external partners, but most importantly it really slowed the dashboard down.
You can read about how SSL works on Wikipedia, but basically it slowed down every connection while it negotiated the secure bits and broke caching in a lot of clients.
We recognize that some people might value the security of SSL for their blog over the speed, so we’re going to try to make it an option at some point in the future. For now, enjoy the faster writing and editing on your blog.
Email Newsletter
December 15th, 2006 at 3:48 am
So, what does this mean securitywise? Does this mean we cannot access or write to our blogs from an outside source? I am dumbfounded when it comes to techjargon…
December 15th, 2006 at 3:31 am
It does load faster! This is so helpful in our impatient world where nobody can wait, and everybody’s moving and doing something!
December 15th, 2006 at 3:43 am
Thank you! Every one of us on 56k appreciates it!
December 15th, 2006 at 3:46 am
thank heavens for this.
thanks to you, too!
December 15th, 2006 at 3:48 am
I just went in and test-drove getting into my older posts in edit mode and YES there is a noticable and welcome differance in the speed of attending to that task.
I for one am very pleased with the result.
Happy Holidays
Mama Kelly
December 15th, 2006 at 3:49 am
Daijinryuu, all it means is that it is as secure as WordPress that you run yourself, or virtually any other website you use on the web besides banks.
December 15th, 2006 at 3:50 am
Dashboard is now flying. Coolness.
December 15th, 2006 at 4:09 am
Very Great News for me.. Thanks so much!!
December 15th, 2006 at 4:43 am
Yay! Thanks so much! Now it works a lot faster. No problems with Dial-up now!
December 15th, 2006 at 4:50 am
Good!!!
December 15th, 2006 at 4:50 am
Excellent development. I think this explains why I cannot access my dashboard yesterday, and now it loads much faster. Thanks!
December 15th, 2006 at 5:04 am
Oh, thank you so much! I am on dial-up and I really appreciate not having to wait so long anymore.
December 15th, 2006 at 5:05 am
Speed good! Waiting bad! Thx!
December 15th, 2006 at 5:15 am
Great work guys… that will make life soooo much easier!
V
December 15th, 2006 at 5:25 am
Ah cool. If there was one thing about WordPress which sucked (apart from our inability to use javascript – hehe, have to try!) it indeed was the oh-so-slow loading of the dashboard.
December 15th, 2006 at 5:49 am
w00t! Thank you!
December 15th, 2006 at 6:08 am
True,they definately are faster than ever before.I noticed the speed first and then saw that this was a new feature.Great going guys.WordPress is better than any other player in the market.
December 15th, 2006 at 6:17 am
thanks so much for this. the past few weeks EVERYTHING has been faster!
i’m using wordpress.com for my study abroad blog. i’m currently in hong kong and posting used to be kinda slow here, but now it’s perfect (well, nearly perfect). for a while the slow speed was a little annoying and i was considering switching hosts even though i love wordpress features. but don’t worry now, wordpress, i won’t cheat on you.
December 15th, 2006 at 6:53 am
It may be time to use the wordpress text editor more often.
December 15th, 2006 at 6:56 am
Thank you very much for this. I always wonderd about the slow loading of the dashboard and the blog. But now it’s so much better…
December 15th, 2006 at 7:54 am
Another great feature! It’s very helpful. Thanks guys! Cheers!
December 15th, 2006 at 8:50 am
This is really very helpful. Recently, I’ve started using dial-up and it would usually take really long time to call up my dashboards. Thanks for this improvement.
December 15th, 2006 at 8:55 am
Cool .. and it would definitely be a good idea to have SSL turned on or off as an option..
December 15th, 2006 at 9:42 am
Although, I suppose that our blogs are still secured…
December 15th, 2006 at 10:09 am
Yes, noticed a speedier dashboard…it will help my “low RAM” PC to open up the dashboard faster. Keep those improvements coming.
December 15th, 2006 at 10:09 am
Yes it’s faster now.
Firefox is not happy about the lack of SSL though.
December 15th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Tanks for keeping on making things easier…
and so cool new design!
December 15th, 2006 at 10:31 am
i dont want ssl… and am happy man.. thanx !
December 15th, 2006 at 11:25 am
Yes it does load faster, thank you…
December 15th, 2006 at 11:33 am
Nooo, bring back the bank level security, it was absolutely vital to my blog’s commercial activities!
Of course, I joke. My real response is ‘wooo-hoooh, keep up the good work’.
December 15th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
Again people, this is soooooo very cool. Lovin’ it, it really knocks your socks off.
Keep it up guys, hugs from me.
December 15th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Good! Now the Dashie will really take off!
BTW, hasn’t the layout of this blog changed a lot?
December 15th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
We appreciate all of the help!
December 15th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
Yea, its faster now, keep on coming…
December 15th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
It appears that manually entering
https://yourname.wordpress.com/wp-admin/instead ofhttp://yourname.wordpress.com/wp-admin/works… the SSL connection is maintained when clicking around with my tests… so people at public wifi access points still appear to have the SSL option.December 15th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
This is great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
December 15th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
Speed, glorious speed. Thank you!
December 15th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
The dashboard is one of the coolest features. I am having a blast with my blog! Thank you for providing us this opportunity to write, write, write!
~Beth
December 15th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
Thank you! Thank you for the constant updates/upgrades to WordPress!!!
WordPress is the best!!!
December 15th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
I have to say that site is really impressive in terms of speed (not to mention aesthetics). And you guys just keep on thinking of ways to make it even faster, and for that I thank you.
December 15th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
that’s a whole lot faster. excellent.
December 15th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
Lovely!
So it was you guys… and not my ISP behaving well!
December 15th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Oh, yea, It does move faster; I too went into edit mode of the old picture post; and worked much faster; feels real good. Thank you Matt.
December 15th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Nice change, Matt!
Firefox no longer complains about being insecure while writing and saving posts.
Count me as one who would pay for SSL access in the future, though.
December 15th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
Yeah!!!! Some of us are still stuck in the eternal waste land of Dial-Up Internet, as we are too pour to afford real internet connections. Thanks so much for this, it makes my updating at home so much easier.
December 15th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
That’s why wp gets bigger and bigger everyday, in terms of people joining in (reaching now 56K). That’s because wp CARES and people TRUST wp.
Thank you WP (with capital letters) You Rock!
December 15th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
Rado
Can you please send in feedback if you are receiving errors in Firefox when using the dashboard?
December 15th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
Excellent, you know you guys (WordPress) should really get an award. I know what I’ll do… I will give you an award, I am presenting you with Wa Salaam’s, Best Blog Service Award. Well, since this award does not offer any mention in a post, nor does it give you a button, banner or badge to showcase, I guess thats it… along with a thank you, so “Thank You”.
wasalaam,
December 15th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
Much faster, turning off ssl is a good idea.
December 15th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
Yeah, amazing it’s fast though..Thanks guys…
More power Wordpres….
December 15th, 2006 at 10:07 pm
I was just wondering why it wasn’t taking so long.
Thanks for constantly improving wordpress.
December 15th, 2006 at 10:39 pm
Thanks so much! I’m still running on 56k so this means the world too me. Merry Christmas WordPress!
December 16th, 2006 at 1:23 am
What’s hot? WordPress dashboards without ssl — speed —- yeehaaaa – love it!
December 16th, 2006 at 4:12 am
doesn’t this leave everyone at risk for man in the middle attacks?
there are a number of servers out there (and OS’s for that matter) that can do SSL at full line rate, i hope you guyz are looking at that stuff too.
wouldn’t want wordpress to become an open haven for theft like MySpace
December 16th, 2006 at 10:58 pm
speed is nice but we will miss SSL
December 17th, 2006 at 3:37 am
Excellent, much better.
December 17th, 2006 at 8:07 am
Uhhh. Call me a negative nancy, but I’m not exactly jumping up and down with joy that my login info can now be easily intercepted. Couldn’t the login page at least be under SSL?
I’m also concerned when I see other comments talking about paying for the SSL option. You didn’t say it on-direct, but if that’s the plan, what happened to the what is free [then] will remain free policy?
December 17th, 2006 at 9:00 am
We never said we would make it a paid feature, just an optional feature.
If you’re concerned about cookies being intercepted, which is a fairly low risk scenario, you can always tunnel your connection through something secure like SSH. That’s usually far better than relying on every website you visit to use SSL.
December 17th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Whee. Lol, it really is much faster.
December 17th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
As a new user, I though it was great already. now it’s even better! Thanks all!!
December 17th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
Well it’s good to hear you don’t plan to charge for that. And I realize you didn’t say that up-front, I just saw it mentioned in a couple other comments.
I’m not concerned about my cookie data being intercepted (after all, the passwords are already MD5ed in the cookies), I’m concerned about my POST data being intercepted when I submit a login form. I’m okay with most of the dashboard being unencrypted, but I feel like when you’re submitting passwords it should be secure. And the time difference between submitting a form over SSL and submitting a form over an unencrypted connection is negligible — and pretty darn close to negligible performance-wise for WordPress.com.
December 17th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
Nice work!
This makes it even more enjoyable to work with!
December 18th, 2006 at 12:27 am
This is loads better. I always thought you just had busy servers but this is excellent. Good idea guys. Cheers
December 18th, 2006 at 11:29 am
good
December 18th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
Hey, WordPress U R 2 good.
December 18th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
Faster is better, thank
December 18th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
yep, sure faster! well done. but hey, what happened to my post when i click on permalink? why can i not see the full post as in the past. not good at all
December 19th, 2006 at 2:28 am
thanks for keeping up the speed and design.
happy new year..
December 19th, 2006 at 3:34 am
Aha! And I thought that somehow the dial-up fairy was giving me a break…
December 19th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Great! SSL was a major problem for posting via slow GPRS channel. I even had posting breaks because of server timeouts.
Many thanks!
December 19th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
I am on high speed so I haven’t noticed much difference yet. But judging from the above comments, people are quite happy with the gain in speed from this change. I suppose it is great as it will hopefully make the servers more stable. Cool.
Great job guys. Wishing the folks at WordPress happy holidays and a great 2007.
December 19th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
While I appreciate the fact that you WordPress people have upgraded from the “RedBull/Grape Kool-Aid Powder/Melted Chocolate Bar In A Mug Level”, I still think that the “Mountain Dew Extreme Injected Into The Eyeball Level” you’ve graduated to is just not doing the trick. It’s still not fast enough. I can actually think an entire thought before it loads, and that’s just not fast enough. You need to get to the “Pouring Glucose Into The Funnel Straight To The Small Intestine Level”. You need to treat us users as though we were dehydrated hamsters and the Dashboard is our water bottle. My Dashboard should be open ten minutes before I think about it, my next twenty posts should be ready for me to edit, and my sandwich must be ready. I think this is the kind of sacrifice you people signed up for. Focus. WordPress? Focus. Roast beef on multi-grain. That’s it…
December 21st, 2006 at 4:10 am
I noticed the change, but reading this tells me why. There is nothing secure in my blog or anyone else here – we don’t record banking passwords etc, so unsecure sounds fine to me.
PS … I use gmail in secure mode, and its pretty darn fast.
December 21st, 2006 at 3:49 pm
awsome job! thanks for making this possible.
December 21st, 2006 at 7:17 pm
Cool. Love your platform.
Philip
http://www.HomelessManSpeaks.com
December 24th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Thanks. Merry Christmas to you all.
December 28th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Woah.. I didn’t noticed about this until I saw my URL bar. There aren’t any “HTTPS” anymore. Yay! ^^ Now it became much more faster.
Thank you, WordPress!