
Speed Up a WordPress Website in 8 Steps - joaoperibeiro
http://joaoperibeiro.com/speed-up-wordpress-website-in-8-steps/?2
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throwawaydbfif
WordPress is garbage unless you statically cache the generated html. I haven't
been able to keep the servers running on even medium traffic sites doing
anything else. It's simply far too slow.

On anything short of a supercomputer you can get about ten requests per second
with the stock setup and zero content/plugins. Adding anything to the site
just makes that number worse.

My rule has become don't use WordPress for anything but html generation. It's
not a serious CMS for anything else

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alexpatin
Ever used the WP-API? It is a REST API and you can bypass the native
templating system and even the WP admin entirely. There are plenty of people
are building web apps with WP/WP-API as the back-end. WordPress is a lot more
than it used to be.

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godzillabrennus
The Wordpress backend still has scaling issues with many popular plugins.
Helping a site with 100,000 customers in a woocommerce database migrate to a
more robust ecommerce solution because it takes 15 minutes to log in
currently.

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mwpmaybe
I recently wrote up my Caddy+Varnish+PHP-FPM solution for WordPress[0]. It's
fairly complementary to the steps detailed in the OP. The site absolutely
flies now: 50-75ms response times cf. 200-300ms per Google, A+ on SSL Labs cf.
unencrypted HTTP/1.1, and the $10/mo VPS rarely cracks 1% CPU utilization
despite it being a modestly well-trafficked site. Our organic search position
has improved significantly.

Caddy was maybe an odd choice but it performs well and it's been a breath of
fresh air after dealing with some gnarly NGINX and Apache configurations in
the past. So far it's been easy to maintain and there's a clear CDN migration
path (Fastly). I'm using Docker's official PHP-FPM images[1] to serve multiple
sites with some isolation, sharing Caddy, Varnish, and MariaDB instances.

I'm not sure if this solution has value for anyone else but I've been plugging
it here and there in case there is!

0\.
[https://gist.github.com/mwpastore/f42f6f1309a7b067519f4c08e1...](https://gist.github.com/mwpastore/f42f6f1309a7b067519f4c08e18b0b6a)

1\. [https://hub.docker.com/_/php/](https://hub.docker.com/_/php/)

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basch
have you tested what happens if you substitute in HHVM

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mwpmaybe
I have not. The whole purpose of an architecture like this is to turn
WordPress into a glorified static site generator, so it doesn't particularly
matter how fast (or slow) the application server is. At any rate, I thought
PHP 7 was about as fast as (and even faster than, in some cases) HHVM?

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basch
it might be now, which is why i asked if it made a difference. does a page
need to be visited once to be added to the cache?

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mwpmaybe
No, not for s-maxage seconds.

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fowkswe
This fails to mention the most dramatic fix, which is to host it on NGINX
rather than Apache.

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SahAssar
Nginx vs properly configured apache makes little difference on for a small-to-
medium site. What makes a difference is fastcgi caching, it's an important
difference.

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falcolas
Agreed. An overloaded WordPress site with a minimal 5 minute page cache can
now handle a HN storm. Throw in a CDN for the static assets, disable
commenting, and it could likely handle the front page of Reddit.

Amazing how fast a site becomes when it's no longer recalculating every
response.

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benbristow
For commenting you can always use Disqus which would take the load off your
database.

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RachelF
Also fails to mention enabling SSL which shortens load times.

This might not be an option for those on free Cloudflare plans, though.

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RKearney
TLS comes with the free Cloudflare plans.

