Can I use multisite functions in a single-site installation?

Question

I'm trying to display some statistics of my Wordpress site in the footer. One of these statistics is the amount of users that are signed up.

There is a function called count_users() to display these statistics as show in the Codex: count_users(). But this function seems very server intensive, especially since it will be called on every WordPress page.

I started looking for less server intensive alternative and found one called get_user_count() Codex: get_user_count(). Unfortunately, this only seems to work on Multisite installations.

Is it possible to enable this and other Multisite functions for regular installations??

Answer 1

get_transient / set_transient example:

function my_get_user_count() {
    $usercount = get_transient('usercount');
    if (!$usercount) {
        $usercount = count_users();
        set_transient('usercount',$usercount,600); // ten mins
    }
    return $usercount;
}