The Las Vegas WordPress Meetup Group is tomorrow at @thebeatlv – meetu.ps/4tgd8

— Shelby DeNike (@sdenike) October 19, 2011

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=262369270447952

Below I am going to cover a few things that I have researched(Don’t expect any hard numbers you will simply have to take my word on this of search Google for articles showing full comparisons/numbers), tested and implemented for Fauxzen.com.

Server Setup:  After shopping around I found that RackSpace seemed to offer the cheapest cloud server weighing in at about $11 a month. Originally I chose to go with CentOS, but after create an exact Ubuntu Server install and comparing the CPU/Memory usage I found that Ubuntu Server had far less overhead than CentOS. Keeping with the memory/cpu usage as well as reading many articles about performance from a web server I chose to go with NGinx instead of Apache.  While the initial install and setup was a little more complex than Apache once up and running I haven’t had to look back.  I should clear up that I have been using Apache for the past 10yrs to NGinx seemed a little foreign to me until I did some reading.  Of course the server has MySQL and the only thing I have really customized with it at this point was to enable query-cache. Of course there is a ton more that can be done with MySQL… but thats for another article.  Ohh and for php I am using php-fpm with APC enabled.

DNS: I first debated about using Route53 for my DNS since its cloud based.  After doing some research there were a few things that made me decide to look elsewhere.  First off  keeping with the cheap budget it does cost $1 and if you are looking to go as cheap as possible … well thats another $1 per month for each domain.  Second thing which was not really a deal breaker, but could be for some is that there is no interface for it.  Everything you wish to manage with your DNS with Route53 has to be done via their API or you can use some of the 3rd party services people have created to manage your DNS, just seemed like a bit of a small hassle.
The other option that I found, which I am a big fan of is CloudFlare.  CloudFlare is a cloud based DNS host and then some… ohh and Free.  They help prevent spammers/bots from accessing your site, which in the end saves you X page views over the course of the month as well as X bandwidth which is a huge plus.  They also cache parts of your site to make so that it is always online, this feature is awesome I have actually tested by turning my server off and trying to load my site and it loads a static version.  They also give you a nice run down of stats that are updated every 24hrs, the pro version updates stats every 15mins.

Statistics: Some people will argue thatusing Google Analytics is not as accurate as using something like AWstats, Webalizer or even writing your own which reads the server log files in realtime. This option works good enough for me since I am not running in click tracking ads etc etc.

Email: Google Apps for your domain is an awesome free product and allows you NOT to have a mail server running on you setup.  Besides the performance gain from NOT running this on your server, you also get the benefit of letting Google handle your Spam… which if you have ever done admin work mail can be a total pain.

CDN:  While this kind of goes away from the whole aiming to be as cheap as possible, its a nice feature to have.  The cost involved with using a CDN can vary on who you go with, and the traffic that your site is generating. I chose to go with Amazon S3/CloudFront, the cost is pretty much next to nothing once you get all setup and there seems to be a bit of a noticable

Frontend/Backend:  WordPress is used through the site, with minimal plugins as well as a child theme running on Genesis.  I tested out a few theme frameworks and found that Genesis gives you more bang for your buck as well as seems to be fast when compared to other frameworks on the market, and has a great customer base to help support it…. and yeah I know this is not Free either.  I am using a total of 13 plugins, I could honestly probably disable a few others as I don’t use them often. Speaking of plugins since I didn’t configure a local mail server of any sorts on this install I had to install WP-Mail-SMTP plugin which allowed me to use a POP mail account for WordPress mailing. I am also using Disqus for my commenting, this works great with CloudFlare when your server is not reachable.

So far the site/setup seem great especially when you look at the total price being under $15 a month for a cloud based setup which doesn’t place all your eggs in one basket and gives you an almost true 100% uptime for all of your services.

1. Theme – If at all possible you want to look over your theme. While there are a lot of great theme developers out there, there are also a fair share of 15yr old kids out there that put together a theme for a class project in their HTML programming class. Often times in themes (I have done it myself) during the development you might include certain Java scripts that you really don’t use but forgot to get rid of upon the release. If you remove the excess code it can often speed up the loading of your site as well as help cut back on the CPU usage generated on every page load.

2. Images – Being on the Internet dating back to Windows 3.1 I have had to deal with slow loading pages and how to combat against them. I think a lot of that art form was lost over the years with faster Internet connections to each house hold. While having a faster connection it may not seem to make much of a difference how large and image is that you have on your site, but when the server has to serve a 1mb image time and time again it can cause high load and strain on the Web Server itself. By optimizing the images before you place them on your site can help aid in less load on the server, as well as your site loading even faster since it is less that the visitor has to download. If you are on a Windows machine you can download a program called IrfanView, its free and does wonders for optimizing images for the web. Adobe Photoshop does it as well, but that is priced a bit higher than the free mark.

3. Plugins – While we all enjoy our plugins since there is a plugin to accomplish just about anything, each plugin can cause CPU/Memory usage. While you dont want to disable them all take a look and see what really needs to be running and what you can go with out. Another good thing to do with plugins is shop around, chances are that there have been quite a few plugins released that do exactly the same thing. Read the reviews in the WordPress forums and see what others are saying. When it comes to stat plugins, take a look into something that is hosted off site such as Google Analytics. Since its not hosted on your account the load will be placed on Googles servers, which they dont have a hosting company breathing down their neck when things get busy and Google Analytics is an awesome service and can help you monitor your SEO even. If you decide not to go with Google Analytics, you can always just base your stats off of the stats program that comes with your host such as AWStats, might as well just use what is already being ran on your server. While disabling some plugins will help lower the load, enabling some will also help. Probably one of the best ones that you can install and enable is WP-Super-Cache. Installing this caching system can often times in itself drop the load that your site is causing by up to 50%. it works by creating a static page and serving that to your visitors instead of generating a new page on every load.

4. More Tweaks – If you are still experiencing issues even after all that you can try some of the following as it can sometimes cut back the load especially if you write a lot of articles and do multiple revisions before you publish.

If you edit the wp-config.php you can add the following snippit of code

// Disable the post revisions
define(’WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

Applying this will make so that WordPress stops tracking post revisions. For most people this will be totally fine to have this disabled. Once you disable it you will want to run the following command in MySQL. If you are not familiar with MySQL you should have access the phpMyAdmin as most hosts give you access to this in some form or another.

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;

Once you have run that it should show that it removed X entries, those were all the past revisions even for posts that you have already published.
You may have noticed that WordPress autosaves your posts while you are typing. Every time that it saves it is going to use the servers processor to run the needed queries against the database and save your post. While this is wonderful and all, you may choose to raise the interval to a higher number. The higher the number means its not going to save as often, and will not hit the CPU as often either. To make the adjustment open the wp-config.php file again and add the following line and adjust the number so something that you see fitting. It is in seconds.

define( ‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 1200 );

Doing all of the provided steps should help you lower the load your WordPress blog is putting on the server and provide a faster loading site for your audience.