WordPress performance and speed combo
There are different ways you can say or measure the performance of your web page. For example my plugin, wpbenchmark.io, is focused mainly on server hardware performance. It tries to measure database speed, CPU speed, file system speed, etc. That is definitely a strong point when you are choosing your hosting.
But to be honest, our visitors, people who visit our website, don’t really care about that. What they care about is how fast the page loads. Of course the faster the hardware you have, the faster the page will load but the hardware is not the only thing that defines page loading speed. It can be greatly affected by caching, by choice of location, even by web server type. You can measure that with your browser and third-party tools.
Here I am just giving a few tips about the setup that I have so far discovered as the best and fastest combo for WordPress. This combo consists of several elements. If you put them together surprisingly they work pretty well and I have definitely seen an improvement, regardless of hardware speed:
- Litespeed web server, which can be either the paid version or OpenLitespeed, which is free.
- Object caching inside WordPress itself. That could be Redis cache, SQLite cache, or basic file system-based object caching. Even though I would prefer to have Redis, you can use SQLite cache if Redis is not available.
- Litespeed Cache plugin for WordPress. This plugin is made by the Litespeed team and is doing some tricks and tweaks together with a Litespeed web server. That’s why you really need that one.
- Using the latest PHP version possible.
- Having enough memory for opcache in your PHP and hopefully running PHP as FPM.
If you put these things together I’m pretty sure that the final page loading time will significantly decrease.
If you have or know any other tips or tricks, please let me know. I will be happy to test and share them with other people.