Having a fast website is essential to providing a great user experience to your visitors (no one likes slow websites). It is also a very important factor for your search engine rankings. Your visitors expect a fast website across all platforms – Desktop to Mobile. A study done by Kissmetrics stacks up page abandonment rate alongside page load times.
If you have a growing WordPress website and attract a fair number of visitors chances are that you are hosted on a VPS (Virtual Private Server). On a VPS it is very important that you fine-tune your server and all software running on it to avoid sluggish performance. It is a common misbelief that moving your WordPress site to a VPS will magically improve its performance, this is not the case. A VPS does offer you a lot more flexibility to control your environment over a traditional shared hosting account, but a poorly setup VPS can further degrade the performance of your site. With great power, comes great responsibility.
Optimizing your Wordpress site is a two-fold process, one part of the optimization is done on the server and the associated software running on it and the second can be the actual website and associated content on it.
Cache. Cache. and more Cache.
Processing code and running queries take time. Caching is a great way to overcome this – a cache keeps the processed data ready and serves it to your visitors without delays.
The varnish is a web cache that runs on Linux, it listens on port 80 (the usual HTTP port) and connects to a web server such as Apache running on an alternate port on the server, such as 8080. Varnish stores/caches the copies of your pages and when requested by a visitor it serves those pre-built pages without having to process them over and over again. However, there are a few very important things to note with varnish, the first being, Varnish is not a web server, it is merely a proxy sitting in front of a web server such as Apache, this implies that you would still need to run Apache on an alternate port on your server (such as 8080) and varnish, in turn, connects to Apache on the backend and listens on port 80 in the front end. Secondly, Varnish cannot cache pages over HTTPS (Port 443), so you would still need to run Apache listening on the secure port to serve HTTPS requests.
Read: Installing Varnish on cPanel
W3Total Cache
W3Total Cache is a free and highly recommended WordPress caching plugin and it significantly improves the performance of your website. It offers:
Page Caching (separate from Varnish)
Minifies (shrinks) your JS and CSS files
Browser Caching – adds required tags to your content that instructs browsers to cache them for a longer duration.
Easy Integration of CDN – You can integrate a CDN such as MaxCDN or Amazon CloudFront, very easily.
Enable Compression
Compressing your content is another great way to achieve faster load times. This can be achieved using the W3 Total Cache plugin.
PHP Caching
If WordPress is processing PHP code very often, PHP caching becomes a necessity (assuming you have implemented the other caching methods stated above, there should be very little PHP code to be processed already). We recommend APC Object Cache or Zend OPCache.
Using a CDN such as MaxCDN or Amazon CloudFront had dramatic effects in your page load times, especially if your blog/website uses a lot of static content and media.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver webpages and other Web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and a content delivery server.
This service is effective in speeding the delivery of content of websites with high traffic and websites that have global reach. The closer the CDN server is to the user geographically, the faster the content will be delivered to the user. CDNs also provide protection from large surges in traffic.
We offer all of the above services on our Managed VPS offerings as well as wordpress optimized Dedicated Servers!
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