Summary: Learning about the WordPress Optimization and what can affect or improve out WordPress sites Performance.
Performance factors
Several factors can affect the performance of our WordPress website. Those factors include but are not limited to the hosting environment, WordPress configuration, software versions number of images and their file sizes.
Shared Hosting
This is the most common type of hosting. Our site will be hosted on a server along with many others. The hosting company manage the web server for us, so we have very little control over server settings and so on. In most shared hosting the user can access the file system of the website root via SFTP and many of the common domain/hosting tasks via a web hosting control panel.
Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is similar to shared hosting but more locked down to a set of software stacks that the users can run for a particular set of usage scenarios. Hence the hosting provider manages the software stacks for the users but with the condition of limiting the software selections. The users typically don’t have to access the file system and manage any tasks via a web hosting control panel. Some hosting providers will offer more choice in the selection of software or plug-ins in the upper tier of the hosting plans.
Virtual Private Servers and Dedicated Servers
In this hosting scenario we have control over our own server the entire file system, SSH, and the ability to install/configure any software on an independent operating system dedicated to the server. The server might be a dedicated piece of hardware or one of many virtual servers sharing the same physical hardware.
Number of Servers
When dealing with very high traffic situations it may be necessary to employ multiple servers.
The WordPress database can be easily moved to a different server and only requires a small change to the config file. Likewise images and other static files can be moved to alternative servers
Load balancers can help spread traffic across multiple web servers but requires a higher level of expertise. If we are employing multiple database servers the HyperDB class provides a drop-in replacement for the standard WPDB class and can handle multiple database servers in both replicated and partitioned structures.
Geographical distance
The distance between our server and our website visitors also has an impact on performance. A Content Delivery Network or CDN can mirror static files across various geographic regions so that all our site visitors have optimal performance.
Server Load
The amount of traffic on our server and how it’s configured to handle the load will have a huge impact as well. For example if we don’t use a caching solution performance will slow to a halt as additional page requests come in and stack up often crashing our web or database server.
How to improve performance on WordPress
Minimizing Plugins
The first and easiest way to improve WordPress performance is by looking at the plugins. Deactivate and delete any unnecessary plugins. Try selectively disabling plugins to measure server performance.
Upgrade Hardware
Paying more for higher service levels at our hosting provider can be very effective. Increasing CPU and memory (RAM) or switching to a host with Solid-State Drives (SSD) or NVMe can make a big difference.
Caching
Caching plugins can be easily installed and will cache our WordPress posts and pages as static files. These static files are then served to users reducing the processing load on the server. This can improve performance several hundred times over for fairly static pages. We can get a list of relevant plugins by searching for cache in the plugins directory.
Content Offloading
Using a CDN can greatly reduce the load on our website. Offloading the searching and delivery of images, JavaScript, CSS and theme files to a CDN are not only faster but takes a great load off our WordPress server’s own app stack. A CDN is most effective if used with a WordPress caching plugin, described above. Some newer CDN will also include Full Page Caching (FPC) or Edge Caching which will cache the entire HTML content of the website.
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