Introduction
Owning an online blog, eCommerce of a website can be a stressful duty. Nowadays we have a lot of plugins, tools, and hostings like AWS that let us manage our WordPress. It doesn’t matter the size of your site on WordPress or the type of content you manage it, optimization isn’t an option but a duty. Optimization can relate to areas such as server load, a number of server requests, software performance, hardware performance, graphics size, etc., each of these topics should be of your concern in order to deliver the best performance in your site and provide your customers a better user experience. Here we are going to recommend the best procedure to optimize a WordPress site in AWS.
Table of contents
- Introduction
- Recommended Plugins and Services for WordPress site optimization
- Improve your Google Ranking to having a high-performance WordPress
- Server Side Optimization
- Web Server Optimization or Migration
- Database optimization (MySQL)
To start working in your WordPress Optimization, the easiest way to begin is installing a list of basic plugins. Every day there are more plugins that allow us to do many things in our site and they will continue existing. The important issue here is to identify the best plugins and the ones that will help us the way we want in our site. We start this blog with a list of the most famous plugins that should be installed in a WordPress site. Some of them can be very useful no matter what kind of website you manage.
If you still do not have your site, in our blog “How to create a website” we tell you how to do it, just click here.
Recommended Plugins and Services for WordPress site optimization
W3 Total Cache
A highly trusted and complete plugin helping in several areas including: Performance, SEO, among others, however, it seems you can have troubles when activating this plugin on some sites. So our recommendation is to enable it on a development environment and make sure everything is working correctly and then, launching to production.
WP Smush – Image Optimizer
One of the best and fastest plugins currently availables on the market, very user-friendly and best performing image compressor for WordPress. It supports JPEG, GIF and PNG images, those can be automatically optimized on the upload process.
Better WordPress Minify – Minification of JS, CSS & HTML
In a few words, you need to compress all your application or css stylesheet code in less lines without spaces, compressed.
WordPress simplifies this work by providing us some awesome plugins for this. What we recommend is using “Better WordPress Minify” It will help us to do this task and increase our performance and ranking on search engines.
Enable a CDN
A Content Delivery Network – CDN like Cloudflare or Cloudfront. This helps you to get the static files faster since we are getting the files near a Region where we are located. Example: If we are in texas, the static files are mirrored in the Texas Region hence faster to deliver the files instead of delivering the files from NYC or California.
Wordfence – Security and Performance
We must always have security on both, our CMS and our Server, so we enable layers of security on our website or eCommerce and our server. Wordfence is a great plugin for security you can diagnose, scan the site and files on the server, evaluate the site performance, see the live traffic, etc. A very useful plugin which gives us a lot of tools for our site.
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Improve your Google Ranking to having a high-performance WordPress
Server Side Optimization
If your environment runs on AWS Cloud and you have an instance running WordPress and the same instance is running the Database, this could be affecting your site performance.
Here we have some recommendations for you.
Upgrade your EC2 instance
If you notice your site is performing slow, you may probably need to check your instance type, several applications run under a wrong type of instance, that’s why Amazon provides a wide selection of instance types to fit your website or application needs.
Web Server Optimization or Migration
Apache:
If you notice your site is performing slow, you may probably need to check your instance type several applications run under a wrong type of instance, that’s is why Amazon provides a wide selection of instance types to fit your website or application needs.
Nginx:
Nginx is a highly performance web server which handles more efficiently the requests, consumes less memory and increase the Request per sec at least 2-3 times. It is a well known high performance web server which currently serves around the 50% of the websites in the world and to obtain the best performance it should be tuned too.
Database optimization (MySQL)
One of the most important prerequisites for achieving optimal MySQL performance is indexing. It is an internal MySQL feature that allows faster gathering of data.
There are other methods which can be used for MySQL such as using of persistent connections, query caching, among others. However, they may require some tuning from the Apache and MySQL configuration files.
Using AWS Relational Database Service
Amazon RDS allows us to provision optimized servers to operate relational databases on the cloud. It is a cost effective service and frees you up to focus on managing your business.
As the members of the House Stark say, “winter is coming”. Is no secret that the holiday season is approaching and we must prepare ourselves for the Christmas sales this year.
So if you own an eCommerce site or offer any kind of online sales for any service on WordPress, or even if you are a blogger, you must optimize your site to boost your customer’s user experience, increase your online sales and get your ROI.
