Doesn’t matter if you are running a small blog or a high-traffic website based on WordPress, optimizing your WordPress should be one of your top priorities. Page speed is so important today that even Google’s ranking algorithm has been adapted to this. Moreover, a slow site means less visitors and that is the main reason you should be concerned about. In this post, we will do an overview of some of the key optimization techniques that could help your to get the best performances of your WordPress site and your
Linux VPS.
The WordPress optimization techniques will be limited by the hosting service you are using. If you are using shared hosting then you will have little control over your server setup and you will not be able to perform advanced optimization techniques. Note that many managed VPS providers won’t give you full control (root access) to your VPS. That is why we always recommend using our
Linux VPS hosting powered by enterprise SSD drives to run a WordPress web site. If you get a VPS from us, you will have full control (root access) over the server to perform server-side optimizations. We recommend switching
from Shared to VPS ASAP. You’ll see a lot of improvements of your site’s performance, even by switching to a VPS alone, without any further optimizations.
LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL/MariaDB and PHP)
Using a solid software stack like LEMP will certainly help you to get the best of your
WordPress installation. The LEMP stack consists of Nginx which is used to run the busiest sites on the Internet. It will significantly improve the performance of your WordPress site and your server. If you don’t have LEMP installed on your
WordPress server, go ahead and
install Nginx, MySQL and PHP-FPM using our guide. You can find more performance improving tips about WordPress and Nginx
here. Running the latest version of the software is very important too, so make sure that all your WordPress code, Nginx and the other
server software are up to date. Updating your PHP to
PHP 7 will be very beneficial too as PHP 7 is considered as twice as faster than PHP 5.6. Also, according to some benchmarks, PHP 7 uses 30% less memory and serves 3x more requests.
Reducing the server load by disabling the unused services running on it will have a huge impact on the performance of your site. The server will handle more traffic without crashing some of the important services like your database server.
Caching
Caching is very important if you like to speed up your WordPress site. By implementing some good caching techniques you can improve the performance several hundred times. We will review some of the most effective caching techniques.
Server-side Caching
Adding an opcode caching like OPcache to your PHP will improve its performances significantly. This is very simple method as OPcache comes with the PHP core by default. Just make sure that your PHP version is greater than 5.5, although we recommend using PHP 7 with WordPress.
Caching Plugins
To cache your WordPress posts and pages as static files you can can use some caching plugin. Installing a caching plugin in WordPress is fairly simple, just as any caching plugin in WordPress. However, you may need to take care of the post-installation configuration. Almost all caching plugins provide user documentation so you can easily learn how to configure the plugin for maximum performances. You can check our tutorial for w3 total cache
here.
Leverage Browser Caching
Another caching technique that you can implement for your WordPress site is to leverage browser caching. Browser caching means the client’s web browser will download and store the assets like CSS, JS and images into the local storage for a certain amount of time, which can reduce the number of requests for each page and will greatly reduce the server load. To enable leverage browser caching simply add the lines below into your .htaccess file:
## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##
If you are using
Nginx instead of
Apache as a web server, add the following lines in the server block for your domain name:
location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js)$ {
expires 365d;
}
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Other WordPress optimization techniques
Many of the techniques we mentioned earlier cannot be performed if you are on a shared hosting as they are server-side optimizations and require special access to the hosting environment. That is not the case with the ones that follow. You can do the following optimizations even on a
shared hosting account
Add gzip compression
Gzip compression is necessary in order to decrease the size of data that is being sent from your server. Enabling Gzip compression is fairly easy, just add the lines below into your .htaccess file:
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
# Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent
</IfModule>
In case you are using Nginx, add the following lines in your your Nginx configuration file:
gzip on;
gzip_comp_level 2;
gzip_http_version 1.0;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_min_length 1100;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
# Disable for IE < 6 because there are some known problems
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6].(?!.*SV1)";
# Add a vary header for downstream proxies to avoid sending cached gzipped files to IE6
gzip_vary on;
Use only essential plugins
Using plugins in WordPress is essential, but you need to be aware that using unnecessary plugins and plugins which are coded inefficiently may affect your site’s performance. So, our recommendation is to install and enable the WordPress plugins that you truly need for your project as well as to make sure that those plugins are not slowing down your site.
Use good themes
If you are using a well-coded theme for WordPress site you are more likely to have a fast-loading website. Some theme developers tend to include fancy effect on their products which always comes at a cost. There are so many well-coded WordPress themes out there, both free and paid, that wait to be found. You just need to do a quick research and you will likely select a theme which will help you to speed up the loading time of your WordPress site.
Optimize images
Yes, images are important. But, think about how badly the images can affect the loading speed of your website. Unoptimized and large images will load slowly which could cause the visitor to leave the site. To save time, bandwidth and improve your search engine ranking you need to take care of the graphics displayed on your website. Optimize the images by using some of the WordPress plugins developed for this reason, like
WP Smushfor example.
If you have troubles with optimizing graphics, try to consider whether images are necessary to represent something. Maybe you can reduce the number of images by replacing them with text.
Minify CSS and JavaScript files
Minifying the CSS files could be good, especially if you are not able to combine them into a single, optimized file. The same applies for the JS files. Likely, there are many plugins that could help you with this, including our previously-mentioned plugin W3 Total Cache.
Content Delivery Network
Sometimes the geographical distance between the server where your website is hosted and your website visitors can influence the loading speed. A common solution for this problem is using a Content Delivery Network or CDN. By using a CDN service you can offload the static files as well as the images so your website visitors can have better experience. This will reduce the server load and will significantly improve the site’s performance.
Of course, you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our
Linux VPS Hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to help you speed up and optimize your WordPress site. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.
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