Do you load your server unnecessarily with the dofollow plugins?

Do you use dofollow plugins in your Wordpress blog to remove the nofollow attribute in your comments? Well, if you do, maybe you might not know that, those plugins can actually add a heavy load to your server, while processing pages with a higher number of comments, when experiencing a high traffic scenario.

Simply, this is what happens. When you install a dofollow plugin, when a page loads, the plugin will hunt down the nofollow tags and remove them from appearing in the page output to the browser. This is not the most effective method since what it does is using the system resources of your server to cure something that could have been simply prevented at the first place.

You know what they say right? Prevention is better than cure!

If there’s a page with 30 comments, this script will run a loop for 30 times to remove nofollow tags. And if you’re experiencing the Digg effect, this can really have a negative impact on your page loading times.

So, if the cure is so lame, why don’t we just prevent it at the first place? Well, all you have to do is make some minor edits to your Wordpress source files. I can tell you how to do it, but to make sure that ‘I’ don’t screw up your Wordpress installation, here’s a proven, reliable tutorial. Make sure you back your files before proceeding with the tutorial.

What this does is it simply removes the instructions provided for the Wordpress blog to put the nofollow tag there. So it will do what the plugin does at the first place, without wasting any resources.