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Speeding up your WordPress Site - WordCamp Toronto 2015
The document provides a comprehensive guide for improving WordPress site performance, covering aspects like user experience, search engine optimization, and on-call issues. It discusses tools, techniques, and operational improvements both within WordPress and in the hosting environment, including database optimization and server technology choices. Additionally, it offers resources for further reading and monitoring applications and server performance.
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Speeding up your WordPress Site - WordCamp Toronto 2015
- 1. Speed up yourWordPress site Alan Lok WirelessLinx Inc.
- 2. Motivations User experience1 Search engineoptimization2 Your wallet Less on-call issues! 1: http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2012/02/28/4-awesome-slides-showing-how-page-speed-correlates-to-business-metrics-at-walmart-com/ 2: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
- 3. What is aLAMP stack Database PHP Engine Your app Operating System Web Server Performance gains can be found in each layer Reverse Proxy Cache
- 4. Internal Tune-ups Digging intoyour WordPress site to make it better
- 5. The simple stuff Updateyour plugins Remove unused themes and plugins 404 errors
- 6. WordPress plugins tospeed things up W3 Total Cache Super Cache Zen Cache
- 7.
- 8. ProďŹle your application Analyzeyour application with a PHP proďŹler such as BlackFire.io or xdebug/ cachegrind Look for high number of apply_ďŹlters, mysql calls, and wp_cache_get
- 9. ProďŹle your DOM Makeyour page render faster too
- 10. Database Check your slowquery log Debug: log your database queries Try to âexplainâ your query Trim un-needed data (comments, deleted posts, etcâŚ)
- 11. Have you beenhacked? Hacked instances are typically slower because of additional JS/PHP payload Check your installation / hosting environment Some command line tools: wp-cli, ďŹndbot.pl Online tools: https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/ and Google Webmaster Tools
- 12. Operational Improvements Improvements youcan make outside WordPress
- 13. You get whatyou pay for There is no such thing as âunlimitedâ hosting or space Ensure you are paying for the level of performance you expect given the trafďŹc estimates Diminishing returns on performance when buying more resources
- 14. Database MySQL versions andvariations (MariaDB, Percona, Community) DB Engine: Convert tables from MyISAM to InnoDB Some* my.cnf tuning InnoDB buffer size, Query Caching HyperDB for database splitting* Some performance references: http://www.liquidweb.com/kb/mysql-5-1-vs-5-5-vs-5-6-performance-comparison/ https://www.percona.com/blog/2011/10/10/mysql-versions-shootout/ http://vbtechsupport.com/657/
- 15. Web Server Technology Webserver technologies: nginx vs Apache PHP process management in Apache php-fpm vs mod_php vs hhvm prefork, vs worker/event mod_pagespeed, php-opcache When does it matter? More food for thought: http://blog.bitnami.com/2014/06/performance-enhacements-for-apache-and.html https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/apache-vs-nginx-practical-considerations http://hhvm.com/blog/9293/lockdown-results-and-hhvm-performance Credit: Digital Ocean
- 16. HTTP changes Content compression Expiryheaders for content type Cache directive References:⨠https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7234⨠http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html⨠https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efďŹciency/http-caching?hl=en
- 17. Content Delivery Reducing numberof access to your web server will reduce your costs (bandwidth and CPU needs) Consider using public CDN for shared JS/CSS Pay for a cheap CDN and use a plugin to rewrite your assets to the CDN
- 18. Web Application Protection* SaaS:Sucuri / CloudFlare / Incapsula / Akamai Plugins: WordFence / Better WP Security Spam Protection: Akismet PHP: suhosin Server: mod_security *not an exhaustive list or endorsement
- 19. Monitor your site ApplicationPerformance Monitor (eg. New Relic, AppDynamics) Server Monitoring (eg. LongView, CloudWatch, DataDog) Last mile / Page Health (eg. Pingdom, New Relic Synthetics, Gomez)
- 20. Thanks! Twitter: @alan_lok Web: http://wlx.ca Slideshare:www.slideshare.net/alanlok1
Editor's Notes
- #3Â You should care about speeding up your site: bounce rate and conversions can be positively influenced by a speedier page. Users are expecting things to appear instantly (say under 3 seconds). Anyway you can make the perceived response as quick to 1 second is very important. Google ranks a site based on response time. This is a known fact since 2010. Your wallet goes two ways: if your site takes a lot of computation resource to generate a page, you will be paying a lot of money to service your audience. A even more important factor - remember how I said conversion rates can be boosted with a faster site? Walmart grew incremental revenue by 1% for each 100ms improvement. Lastly, donât you hate your site being down because you maxed out on resources or had a badly configured LAMP stack?
- #4Â Really, you can gain performance in any layer. Some are easier than others. Do what you can in each layer.
- #6Â There are simple stuff to make your site better Update your plugins. More often than not, when the author release a new plugin, it addresses issues that are security or performance related. Even if it doesnât make the site faster, it will prevent bad things from happening. Of course, this also leads to the second point of removing unused themes and plugins. You know those twenty-fifteen themes and other good stuff? Remove them. The 15th plugin you tried that you didnât like and have deactivated? Remove them. Keeping these files on the server, while deactivated, still exposes you to attacks. Not really a performance gain but it will protect you from further performance loss. 404 Errors are performance killers. Many users decide to install these 404 redirection plugins so that they can display pretty error pages. For legitimate purposes this is a great tool. However if you have assets that are missing, each of these pages will bring up the WP framework in order to show this pretty error page (that are likely not shown to the user as they are requesting an image). Worse, some 404 plugins wonât report 404 to the user, causing further issues.
- #7Â What do these plugins accomplish? Object cache DB cache Page cache CDN rewrite Do they work? Depends on your hosting provider, setup and dynamic nature of your site. Some providers such as WPEngine asks that you not to install these plugins.
- #8Â Lower number of HTTP requests If you can reduce the number of requests, it give the server more headroom to serve more traffic. TCP slowstart contributes to the slower nature of serving initial bytes, but it gets faster very quickly. Optimize your images, CSS, CSS sprites, JS minify, HTML comment removal. Every little bit counts. Lots of ways to optimize your images - from using lossless compression toolboxes like ImageOptim that combines a bunch of image optimizers into a GUI tool, CSS clean-up/optimize tools, JS minify, and also removing HTML comments. Saving bytes is big business. This also means serving images that are sized right for your audience, not the 4MB image you uploaded form your DSLR to the website that will be displayed in a postage stamp (and could have been resized to 21k) Personalize with AJAX is a good idea. This means the base page can be cached while dynamic portions of the page be updated just for you. Reduce: Lower number of HTTP requests Combine CSS/JS files or inline them Data URI CSS sprites Lower size of response HTML/JS/CSS minification Image optimization (eg. ImageOptim) Reuse Reuse JS and CSS file for whole site where possible
- #9Â Analyze your application with a PHP profiler. If you are not doing this regularly, you should be! No one says this is easy. Lots of free tools out there - xdebug with cachegrind client is a good first choice to see the number of calls and time taken. However I understand how it can be difficult to read at times. You can try Blackfire which has a good web tool, tree view, rudimentary analysis and profile deltas so you can see if your optimization has made an impact. Paid tools exists in the form of application performance management (APMs) such as New Relic. Some hints on profiling an app: memory usage, overall CPU time, number of external IO requests. Looking into the CPU time, look for calls that are highly used or calls that occupy high CPU cycles. Some quick ones to look through will be apply_filters, mysql calls and wp_cache_get.
- #11Â Checking your database calls are important. Profiler and general log can be used to see how many access are being done to generate a page. If you wrote the plugin or theme and accessing database, please be responsible and use as little database call as possible (or cache with transient). Note that transient are database calls too so use it wisely. Lastly, explain your queries if you are interacting with the database directly with various tables. Your custom tables may have been optimized at one point, but you might have been asked to do something that made the request unoptimized. Lack of indices or pulling too much data can cause the database to churn or send excess data.
- #12Â Signs of hacking, whether it is visible or not, can cause slowdowns. Checking for integrity of the site is not just good practice, but can keep the performance of the site up. Some hacks can cause high number of file operations that slow down the site, others can be making outbound traffic. Once a site is hacked, it has the potential of being harvested into a bot net that turn against other WordPress site (and increasing load). This is a public service announcement so that us site owners can do our part to prevent or close down these loopholes if or when it happens. Watch for pharma and other injected links, as well as increased file operations / abnormal network activities
- #14Â Please do everyone a favour and stop paying $2.99/month for an unlimited domain hosting account. There is no such thing as unlimited as you will quickly understand the performance penalty you are paying on this oversubscribed hosting box that has 3000 other clients on it. Also they will likely throttle you to number of PHP-related page responses. Conversely, do not buy a Ferrari just so you can drop your kids to school that is 300m away. There are diminishing returns where the users donât feel it and you canât get any faster.
- #18Â Public CDNs: Google Hosted Libraries, MaxCDN, CDNJS Paid CDN for content: MaxCDN, CloudFront, Azure CDN, Akamai, CloudFlare
- #19Â Name dropping a few things to look at. Not an exhaustive list
- #20Â Monitoring your site is important to understand the health of your site, not just for uptime, but changes to your code, hosting or the environment around the hosting. All of these are equally important but some are more expensive than others.