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[Tutural] How to increase your site performance without spending a penny!

Lakuma

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May 4, 2022
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As we all know, site performance is critical to the user and in the eyes of Google. The faster your site loads, the higher you will rank.

I'm going to share with you what I have done to increase the performance of my several WordPress sites and forum sites.

The first thing is to stop using shared hosting and find a reliable but affordable KVM VPS. I know this will cost you a little more money, but for a few dollars more, you can have your own VPS with dedicated resources for your site(s). I've found several good deals for a VPS on https://lowendbox.com/tag/kvm/ and https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers. Black Friday deals are usually the best. To give you an idea, I found a 4GB, 2 CPU, 80GB HD, and 1 static IP address with unlimited bandwidth for $40 a year with racknerd.com. This is enough to run several WordPress sites with dedicated resources.

Or you can get a free VPS (requires a CC) with 4 CPUs and 24 GB RAM here: https://babia.to/threads/tutorial-get-a-free-oracle-vps-lifetime-with-custom-linux-images-×-4-cpus-×-24-gb-ram-×-200gb-storage.58891

Follow these steps to improve your VPS speed:

On the backend:​

  1. After you install a fresh new image on your VPS (I recommend Ubuntu). Be sure to update it with the latest web stack via SSH:
    1. Run these commands once a month if you're running Ubuntu:

      apt-get update
      apt-get upgrade
      apt-get dist-upgrade

    2. About every six months or so, it's best to keep things tidy and cleanup some space by running these commands:

      apt-get autoclean
      apt-get autoremove
  2. I use a free control panel to manage my VPS and sites. I highly recommend FastPanel. It's completely free and easy to use. It uses Nginx by default and allows me to switch PHP versions for each site on the fly.
    1. Another free alternative to CP is aaPanel, I'm not familiar with it, but I've heard good things about it.
  3. Use the latest PHP version; at this time, it's 8.1.
    1. Some plugins might throw an error or not work at all if they're not updated to work with PHP 8.1.

      1653356511120.png
      Here's an excellent article on benchmarks for various versions of PHP on various CMS's (the higher the number of requests per second PHP can handle, the better).
  4. Enable HTTP/2 - This is huge! On the same TCP connection, several requests can be sent quickly, one after the other, and responses can come in any order. This means that the client and server don't need multiple connections. For more details, read this article on HTTP/2.

  5. Within the FastPanel CP, enable the following:
    1. Go to your site card, Options -> Static Content and Enable Gzip, Use Nginx for static files, Сaching period (days) for 365, Gzip compression level, and choose something 7 or higher. The higher you go, the higher the CPU usage. Depending on how many sites you have, balance this out among your sites accordingly. I haven't noticed a significant return on performance by setting the Gzip compression level higher than 7.

    2. Site card -> Settings -> HTTPS -> Check Enable HTTP2. While there, go ahead and check/enable Redirecting to HTTPS. Be sure that you've already enabled SSL for your site before enabling this.

    3. On the left-hand side, click on Settings -> Services and install redis.

    4. Applications -> jpegoptim, optipng, php81 (if not already installed), Redis, fail2ban if you want to secure your VPS with a firewall.
  6. Last but not least, be sure to setup a backup schedule either within FastPanel or using the popular Updraft Plus plugin. If you use the Updraft Plus plugin, be sure to take the time to configure it for "Off-Site" backup either to Google Drive or Dropbox. You'll thank me later!

On the front end:​

  1. Use the minimum number of plugins possible. For a content-only website, it should be less than 12–15. For a store or an advanced site on which many users and visitors can log in, 25–30 might be acceptable (of course, that depends on the weight of those plugins). If a plugin has many options and features, avoid it. Use a lightweight plugin that only does what you need. If it doesn’t exist, do you actually need that feature? Sometimes less is better. And faster, in this case 🙂

  2. Use a well-known template that is optimized for performance.

  3. Use a caching plugin such as WP Rocket. Enable as many options as possible without breaking your site.

  4. Use Squoosh to significantly reduce the size of your images before uploading them to your site, but don't squoosh them too much. Using the most recent compression code, ex-Google engineers created this website to improve image performance.
    1. Consider using the WebP image format in place of JPEG images. Keep in mind that you will need to configure WP to serve these types of images or use the WebP Express plugin. (Be sure to back up your entire website first before installing WebP Express, some reviews state it breaks NGIX sites and/or all images. (Just have a way to revert back if you need to.)
Bonus for the technical:
  1. You can use a plugin called Query Monitor which allows you to quickly determine poorly performing plugins, themes, or functions.

    Query Monitor.jpg
After making all the settings from above, here are my results from my VPS with 4GB, 2 processors, 8 plugins, and 4 other high-traffic WP sites running on the same VPS.

SpeedTest.jpg

Finally, give your site a test on GTmetrix.
I hope this helps you. If so, please give this a like.jpg , it's appreciated.
 
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@Lakuma Thanks for the info, just a query how do you set up mails on this. Not necessarily for Emails, but even for basic WordPress / woo-commerce mails, so that they don't end up in spam.
 
@Lakuma Thanks for the info, just a query how do you set up mails on this. Not necessarily for Emails, but even for basic WordPress / woo-commerce mails, so that they don't end up in spam.
Good question. It's best to sign up with a reputable SMTP service that is known to deliver safe emails directly to users' inbox.

Here are a few well-known SMTP services. Keep in mind there are different prices/plans for mass marketing email campaigns, but for general transactional emails you can use the following:
  1. SendInBlue (300 free emails per day)
  2. Google SMPT (500 emails per day)
  3. Amazon SES (62,000 emails per month if you are an EC2 user)
  4. Mailgun (5,000 free emails per day)
  5. TurboSMTP (200 free emails per day)
Here a nice article with a grid to compare services: https://www.wpoven.com/blog/free-sm...ils/#Comparison_of_Free_SMTP_Server_Providers
 
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You are on point completley with your tutorial. Kudos to the well thought out and well documented to-do.

I personally use RunCloud Pro as it simplifies building and managing servers/WP installations, etc. UpdraftPlus is a life saver.
 
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Reactions: Lakuma
Don't use the page caching feature of WordPress caching plugins (like WP Rocket) if you are already caching BEFORE PHP is called.
 
Last edited:
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Reactions: iKalanko
Don't use a the page caching feature of WordPress caching plugins (like WP Rocket) if you are already caching BEFORE PHP is called.

So, don't combine plugin page cache with Nginx page cache.
 
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Reactions: GersonM and Lakuma
Don't use the page caching feature of WordPress caching plugins (like WP Rocket) if you are already caching BEFORE PHP is called.

So, don't combine plugin page cache with Nginx page cache.

It defeats the optimization goal.

This if DEFFENITELY not my case! Using just Nginx page caching was good but when I added WP Rocket it significantly increased the the page rendering performance, hence why I included it in this guide! I'm not just randomly throwing these steps together in hope that it works.

What I have written down in my original guide are my actual steps that I currently use and tested extensively on multiple websites that I've setup.
 
This if DEFFENITELY not my case! Using just Nginx page caching was good but when I added WP Rocket it significantly increased the the page rendering performance, hence why I included it in this guide! I'm not just randomly throwing these steps together in hope that it works.

What I have written down in my original guide are my actual steps that I currently use and tested extensively on multiple websites that I've setup.

Ok. I guess that's good for you. I will not be fighting this matter.
 

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