A fast-loading Wordpress site doesn't have to be a unicorn! Follow these proven steps to optimize your WordPress site's speed on our hosting platform:
Hosting environment:
Brownrice SmartVPS hosting is optimized for Wordpress with webhosting speed in mind - utilizing things like SSD's with dedciated resources for your VPS, optimized Apache configs with http compression enabled, http/2, optimized MariaDB (database) configs, autotune, and php-fpm with the latest PHP versions to speed up load times.
The first thing you should do is confirm that you are on our latest Gen7 VPS template from within the dashboard. Just navigate to your VPS hosting service in the dashboard and confirm that your "VPS OS" is on AlmaLinux release.
If you find that you are on one of our older Gen6 or CentOS templates, please contact our support for a free upgrade!
VPS Resources:
As much as we'd love to sell you more VPS resources, typically a slow site isn't due to a lack of hosting resources or any limits being hit. If it is, likely you are getting emailed about it constantly and already know this is the case - and you should definitely upgrade (as recommended in the email).
You can review your performance metrics via our dashboard to ensure that your hosting isn't bottlenecking! Feel free to contact our support if you need any help determing this!
PHP version:
You should ensure that your site is on the latest available PHP version that the site will function on. You can adjust your PHP version on a per-site basis via our dashboard, as outlined here.
Note: If your site throws errors on a given PHP version, try a different version! If your site has to run on older PHP versions (older than PHP8+) you likely have an outdated WP core, theme, or plugin and that should be addressed. The newer versions of PHP are always faster, so you should aim to use the newest version available to you via the dashboard if possible.
Keep WordPress, Themes, and Plugins Updated:
You should always ensure that your Wordpress core, all Themes, and active plugins are kept up to date! This is done via your wp-admin area, or if you need a hand with this we can do it for you if you sign up for our Wordpress Management Service!
Use a Lightweight Theme:
Wordpress is an opensource application and on its own is very fast. Bloat and slowness comes with added code, which is usually in the form of themes or plugins. Your theme is the foundation that you build the site on. It's important to choose a good theme that's designed with performance in mind and will be supported by its developers for years to come.
You should ensure that your theme is a well-coded, lightweight theme that is optimized for speed. Avoid bloated themes with unnecessary features and scripts. If you are having speed issues you can rule out a theme by enabling a different one for testing, such as one of the default Wordpress themes.
Audit plugins:
You should only run plugins that are absolutely necesarry for the site. On each and every page load every single plugin and every line of code in each of those plugins has to be executed. This means that the more plugins, the slower a site gets. This is always true, though some plugins are optimized better than others and don't affect performance as much.
You should be very mindful about which plugins you install, ensuring that you are using only well-coded lightweight plugins that are necesarry for the site to function. Plugins that aren't needed should be removed or disabled whenever possible. You should ensure that any plugin you install has positive reviews and is being maintained by its developers.
If you are having speed issues, try disabling all of your plugins and test again. If this speeds things up, start re-enabling your plugins one at a time and re-test to see which plugin is the biggest contributor to your speed issue.
You can also use Wordpress code profiler to determine which plugins are memory hogs so that you can remove or replace them.
Note: If you install any "one time use" plugins that you just need to run once for some task (such as wordpress code-profiler) and don't need to be running all the time, be sure to disable or remove those once done!
Utilize caching:
Caching is extremely useful to speed up page load times and TTFP (time till first byte) and is supported by default on the Brownrice SmartVPS platform. Please follow our caching FAQ to get this setup.
Note: This caching FAQ goes over not only Wordpress image/page/database caching, but Image Optimization, Lazy Load, and browser caching as well! An optimized Wordpress site should be using all of these techniques.
Database optimization:
If you have a larger website with a busy database it might need some cleaning/otimization. You can use a plugin to handle that! There are many different options available, but advanced-database-cleaner is a good option here.
Note: As with most one time use plugins, you should disable or delete this plugin once you are done with it!
Use a CDN:
While definitely not required, a CDN can help speed up page load times by serving heavy content (such as images) from a geographically closer location. Your brownrice SmartVPS works great with Cloudflare, and you can follow our guide to using Cloudflare CDN with your SmartVPS to set that up if desired!
Note: This definitely complicates things and is for advanced users, or those who know what a CDN is and want to leverage that to speed things up. Most users don't need this.
Monitor, test, and debug!
All of the things outlined in this FAQ are very helpful, but it's always recommended that you take a scientifc approach to speeding up your site. You should first take a baseline speed test of the site using a tool like Pingdom Website Speed Test or Webpagetest to get a baseline. Then you can tweak your site as outlined in this FAQ and test again for quantifiable results!
It's important to pay attention to any external elements taking a long time to load, which will be shown in the test results "waterfall" graphs. Remote elements like external fonts, images, icons, embeds, etc. taking a long time to load could be slowing down your site! If this is the case you'll want to remove those elements, or replace them with something speedier.
Note: If you see that "server response time" or "time till first byte (TTFB)" is slow, typically that's not due to server performance (if it were, we'd know about it as it would be affecting a lot more than just your site). Speeding up these metrics is actually done from within the application, as per the steps outlined above.