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.
- December 15, 2006
- Dashboard
WordPress.com News 
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…
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It does load faster! This is so helpful in our impatient world where nobody can wait, and everybody’s moving and doing something!
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Thank you! Every one of us on 56k appreciates it!
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thank heavens for this.
thanks to you, too!
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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
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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.
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Dashboard is now flying. Coolness.
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Very Great News for me.. Thanks so much!!
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Yay! Thanks so much! Now it works a lot faster. No problems with Dial-up now!
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Good!!!
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Excellent development. I think this explains why I cannot access my dashboard yesterday, and now it loads much faster. Thanks!
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Oh, thank you so much! I am on dial-up and I really appreciate not having to wait so long anymore.
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Speed good! Waiting bad! Thx!
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Great work guys… that will make life soooo much easier!
V
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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.
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w00t! Thank you!
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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.
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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. 😉
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It may be time to use the wordpress text editor more often.
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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…
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Another great feature! It’s very helpful. Thanks guys! Cheers! 🙂
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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.
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Cool .. and it would definitely be a good idea to have SSL turned on or off as an option..
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Although, I suppose that our blogs are still secured…
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Yes, noticed a speedier dashboard…it will help my “low RAM” PC to open up the dashboard faster. Keep those improvements coming.
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Yes it’s faster now.
Firefox is not happy about the lack of SSL though.
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Tanks for keeping on making things easier…
and so cool new design!
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i dont want ssl… and am happy man.. thanx !
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Yes it does load faster, thank you…
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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’.
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Again people, this is soooooo very cool. Lovin’ it, it really knocks your socks off. 🙂 Keep it up guys, hugs from me.
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Good! Now the Dashie will really take off!
BTW, hasn’t the layout of this blog changed a lot?
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We appreciate all of the help!
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Yea, its faster now, keep on coming…
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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.LikeLike
This is great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Speed, glorious speed. Thank you!
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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
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Thank you! Thank you for the constant updates/upgrades to WordPress!!!
WordPress is the best!!! 😀
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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.
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that’s a whole lot faster. excellent.
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Lovely!
So it was you guys… and not my ISP behaving well!
😉
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Rado
Can you please send in feedback if you are receiving errors in Firefox when using the dashboard?
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Much faster, turning off ssl is a good idea.
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Yeah, amazing it’s fast though..Thanks guys…
More power Wordpres….
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I was just wondering why it wasn’t taking so long.
Thanks for constantly improving wordpress. 😀
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Thanks so much! I’m still running on 56k so this means the world too me. Merry Christmas WordPress!
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What’s hot? WordPress dashboards without ssl — speed —- yeehaaaa – love it!
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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
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speed is nice but we will miss SSL 😦
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Excellent, much better.
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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?
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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.
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Whee. Lol, it really is much faster.
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As a new user, I though it was great already. now it’s even better! Thanks all!!
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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.
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Nice work!
This makes it even more enjoyable to work with!
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This is loads better. I always thought you just had busy servers but this is excellent. Good idea guys. Cheers
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good
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Hey, WordPress U R 2 good.
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Faster is better, thank
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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 😦
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thanks for keeping up the speed and design.
happy new year..
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Aha! And I thought that somehow the dial-up fairy was giving me a break…
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Great! SSL was a major problem for posting via slow GPRS channel. I even had posting breaks because of server timeouts.
Many thanks!
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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.
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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…
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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.
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awsome job! thanks for making this possible.
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Cool. Love your platform.
Philip
http://www.HomelessManSpeaks.com
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Thanks. Merry Christmas to you all.
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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! 😀
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