Quote from Tom Holden on 2026-08-13, 9:52 am

We've just turned on a feature buried deep within settings that should reduce the time delay between submitting a post (or comment/reply) from tens of seconds to seconds. That's at the expense of delaying the sending of email notifications for it by a minute or so, which seems like a small price to pay for what is a slow-paced forum and blog.

This comes after years of frustration watching the lag grow, intermittently taking various measures that had little effect, seeking help from the developer of the forum plugin et al. Unnoticed by me, with updates for WP, PHP and the more than a dozen plugins coming at a near daily rate, there was this update from the Easy WP SMTP plugin that handles the mailing of notifications:

2.6.0 - 2024-09-25

• ...
• Added: Optimized Email Sending - improve your site's performance by handling email requests in the background.

It's an option near the bottom of a long page that is accessed via the Misc tab at the extreme right of the plugin's Settings, set to Off by default. There it has sat unnoticed and unchanged for almost two years, until yesterday.

I've re-enabled the WP Mail Logging plugin which I had disabled months ago because I thought it might be contributing to the delay. It helps in discovering and analysing email problems the site may be having.

This post is a bit of a test itself to see if it publishes quickly. Hopefully everyone else will see a big improvement when replying or posting anew.

Tom