Tutorial – WordPress optimization

Introduction

Wordpress is an easy platform with its benefits. As I have seen many requests on how to speedup a website such as the arcane theme or blackfyre for example, I have made a list of points that you should look into. These information can be very effective as without taking any precautions, you could end up with a website that even a snail can beat if it would be a race against time.

To prevent the lackness and slowlyness of your instalation and theme, these are the things you should always keep behind your head.

But first, why would wordpress site’s speed matters?

When a person lands on your site for the first time, you only have a few seconds to capture their attention to convince them to hang around or leave.

According to a report by the microsoft team, a 2 second delay already could damage the happyness of your costumers. The loss on reveneu such as google ads will lower by 4.3% in just a day.

Not only that, but Google now includes site speed in it’s ranking algorithm. That means that your site’s speed effects SEO, so if your site is slow, you’re now losing visitors from impatience and reduced rankings in search engines. Yikes.

Allright, lets jump right into it.

— Shared VS VPS – who will win? —

First of all, Never use a shared hosting. If you have a shared hosting and planning to use the theme arcane for example, then you might just quit. No offence, but shared hosting is such a bad option when it comes to hosting your website.

A shared hosting means that more people using the same server as you do. Reducing the costs majorly so everyone can create their website. However, if one user would let the server crash, your website will be effected as well.

Also, shared hosting does having their limits. For example, if your server doenst run the latest version of php, your hosting provider wont change it. Only when they need to cuz of themselves.

A VPS server is the best option for this. A virual personal server ( the name says it already ) is an server for you alone. Meaning you can do tons more then with a shared hosting.

To make it even better, make sure you use plesk. This software can be perfect for WordPress installations on your server. More information of that can be found here.

— Caching plugins everywhere. —

If you get beated up by something, its that people always saying about caching your theme. Why doing so much trouble while a simple plugin can already speed up your theme by 30%?

Yes, we are talking about Redis.

Introduction to Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. It supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperlog logs and geospatial indexes with radius queries. Redis has built-in replication, Lua scripting, LRU eviction, transactions and different levels of on-disk persistence, and provides high availability via Redis Sentinel and automatic partitioning with Redis Cluster.
You can run atomic operations on these types, like appending to a string; increment the value in a hash; pushing an element to a list; computing set intersection, union and difference; or getting the member with highest ranking in a sorted set.

In order to achieve its outstanding performance, Redis works with an in-memory dataset. Depending on your use case, you can persist it either by dumping the dataset to disk every once in a while, or by appending each command to a log. Persistence can be optionally disabled, if you just need a feature-rich, networked, in-memory cache.
Redis also supports trivial-to-setup master-slave asynchronous replication, with very fast non-blocking first synchronization, auto-reconnection with partial resynchronization on net split.