Optimizing vBulletin from the Admin Side

A growing community of members more needs and demands. To retain your members’ interest in your vBulletin forum, you have to optimize it for maximum performance. If a user visits your community and finds that it’s overloaded with graphics and has a slow loading time, you bet that he/she won’t stick around for long and most probably won’t come back. The first place to be in when optimizing vBulletin is the Admin Control Panel. Here, you can tweak as much as 95% of what’s needed to optimize vBulletin. Contrary to popular knowledge, it’s not just for style and user management.

1. Enable GZIP 

GZIP is compression technology that reduces the output of web pages displayed to visitors thereby decreasing bandwidth usage. Enabling GZIP, however, will slightly put a load on the server since it needs to compress what’s being displayed. But if the compression level is set at 1, then the load will be hardly noticeable but the benefits will be felt.

To enable GZIP, go to vBulletin Options > Cookies and Header Options > GZIP HTML Output. Choose Yes and set the level of compression to 1.

2. Turn Off Memberlist Viewing 

This can be done under Settings > vBulletin Options > User Listing & Profile Viewing > Members List Enabled. Not everyone will have the patience to search through pages of names, but some actually use this feature. But if you look at the long-term benefits, disabling it is smart. First, it curtails excessive bandwidth usage and brings down server load. Next, it will close the window of opportunity for spammers to harvest usernames for private messaging blasts.

3. Enable Post Cache 

Doing this will cache posts for the number of days you specify in the AdminCP and will result in a significant speed increase and lower server load since the server won’t need much effort in searching your MySQL database. The downside, however, is that it will take up tremendous disk space so do this only if you have extra space.

To enable post cache, go to vBulletin Options > Server Settings and Optimization Options > Cached Posts Lifespan.

As the administrator, keep in mind that not everyone has Cable/DSL connection. Start by optimizing your vBulletin AdminCP and give your members a better forum experience.