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Managed WordPress hosting is not that much more expensive than regular shared hosting for a low traffic site. For instance, Godaddy now has a Starter Managed WordPress plan for $6.99 (now on sale for $1). Even one of the best known Managed WordPress hosts, WPEngine, only costs $29. It's supposed to be less complicated, because they do all the back end work managing WordPress for you.
Not sure if it's been suggested already, but set up W3 Cache, as well as CloudFlare (both are free). Make sure you follow a quick guide on the preferred settings (disk enhanced for shared hosting, for W3 Cache).
I've seen huge improvements with those two combined, should get your site below 1.5 seconds.
@Porter, sounds super interesting although I know many think W3 Cache is problematic. Since I just switched to hosting:siteGround I'm going to see how it goes for the next month, collect data and then maybe I'll try the caching duo you suggest for a month and compare results.
Thanks!If you're against either for any reason, both are viable on their own. I use both myself, but I've used them individually. I've heard to stay away from compressing / minifying javascript, but html and css seem to work fine. The rest of the caching is basic, and not really prone to error. Like I said, if you use both, make sure you follow a guide on how to set them up with your hosting (shared, vps, etc).
Using a caching plugin is pretty much a waste of time these days, and tend to cause more problems than they resolve. Back in the day, when broadband had slower speeds, and cheap shared hosting was skimpier on resources, they made a difference. Nowadays, not so much.
These days, if you have a site that's got heavy traffic, you're better off implementing any server based caching that might be available at your host (and you're likely not using basic shared hosting at that point, anyway) 🙂
I would say keep an eye on the size of the images you use, and while I like what WP SmushIt does at compressing images, sometimes Yahoo's service just vanishes for a bit, which causes problems with the plugin. YMMV.
If site speed is still a concern, and you're using Akismet, you could also keep an eye on your commentsmeta table... the comments history they added in will pile up, especially if your site handles a lot of comment spam. I was able to shrink a site's database by 40Mb once... Akismet had never once "cleaned up" after itself, even though at the time it said it did.
They don't even give that as an option anymore in the newest version, strangely enough. And still no option to turn off comment histories and save the database space.
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After DarkAnother good host is Namecheap (web-hosting.com). We use them for smaller clients. We now have a good, well tuned stack of NC Hosting, W3TC and MaxCDN which is very performant for little cost and most of all repeatable and predictable. CloudFlare is also used when needed.
For our VIP Customers, we put them on our RamNode VPS which is amazing. Our site renders in under 500ms to Australia, which considering the round trip to Seattle, is quite impressive. Scoring on Pingdom, Webpage Speed Test and GT as well as Page Speed Insights is fantastic.
The VPS does take a little more tuning and attention, although to be honest since we've settled on an NGINX platform it is much easier than Apache; of all things.
Anyway, probably too much techno talk for this thread, but if you want a good solid partner with stellar support (chat support always solves our issues in under 5 minutes with no hassle) Namecheap / Web-Hosting with W3TC and MaxCDN is fantastic.
Using a caching plugin is pretty much a waste of time these days, and tend to cause more problems than they resolve. Back in the day, when broadband had slower speeds, and cheap shared hosting was skimpier on resources, they made a difference. Nowadays, not so much.
No, that's simply false. Caching cuts loads times for my sites on average by 50-70% (I use Total Cache). I'm sure that server-side caching would be even better (this is a good point that @Summer and others made earlier in the thread). It's true that they can cause problems as well (read: it's either set up wrong or you forget to clear the cache when you meant to), but cached is typically significantly, noticeably faster than non-cached, and in particular for sites on servers lacking resources.
For images, if that's an issue on this site, use Imsanity and Smush.it (the yahoo lossless compression thingamajiger). If you're concerned about the Yahoo service going down, EWWW is a viable alternative as well.
Agreed, [email protected] re caching. It also probably helps to define what we mean by caching both locally and server side. There's no question the correct local / client (browser) and server side caching will do wonders.
Probably W3TC complexity scares people off, but it really isn't that hard to set up properly and gain drastic results. Though, we've found huge benefits from nginx with fastcgi / fpm caching. Really, why push the caching to complex beast like WordPress when the web server can handle it really well, and nginx really shines there.
Our best performance comes from nginx with fastcig / fpm and zend optimizer. W3TC then has no page cache turned on (nginx is doing it) but all other caches, including fragment / transient are memcached.
Google speed test even notes the server responds slowly.
@coralseait : at first I thought you advocating staying away from wordpress caching plugins and then you seemed to endorse W3TC. Can you clarify please?
@joseph Lee : that's a great resource. I'm scoring 85+ each time. I'm now on site ground with just this site which is a huge improvement over godaddy. I don't usually get more than 50 visitors a day though so I don't think I need a rocket ship yet 🙂Since I'm running on apache server what do you think of including this in my .htaccess?
# Set up caching on static resources for 1 year based on Google recommendations <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On <FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav|js|css|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$"> ExpiresDefault A29030400 </FilesMatch> </IfModule>[email protected], @coralseait No, I'm pretty sure I mean what I say. 20-25 years of doing tech support has given me a pretty wide base of experience with upset and confused customers to draw from 🙂
@bionary that was me, and I think also Brad who were advocating against plugins for caching. You might find a few others here against it, or slowly changing their minds against using it in every situation as technology and coding practices improve over time.I used to use caching plugins back in the day, and I've seen their usefulness diminish over time, compared with the need to produce engaging content and maintaining site and uptime integrity. Am I going to hound my contributors about uploading a 2.3Mb image for their post? Hell yes. Am I going to worry about my video site loading in 5 seconds for someone coming through a network hub in Dallas while it loads in 4 seconds for someone coming through a network hub in Dulles? No, not anymore, especially when most of my content is subject to the whims of YouTube, Vimeo and Yahoo.
Most people, especially people with brand new sites, who are new to making and maintaining their own websites, will never ever need a caching plugin for any website they build. The most they do is cause heartache, suffering, and arguments after people with experience tell them they don't need it, but they push back because they found an article via Google from 2007 extolling the necessity of caching and of X plugin over Y plugin and decided that they must do that exactly also so their brnad new website will start generating $10,000 a month income for them.
People who put together sites built from RSS feeds, both blog posts, videos, endlessly complain about how their site isn't updating properly, and then are surprised when their site works as expected after turning off their caching plugin learn this the hard way, every day.
Do sites getting a million visitors a day implement some sort of caching or distributed load balancing? Absolutely, and they are likely paying $5k per month or more for a hosting solution who gives them the expertise to do it properly. Does someone whose site is on a $3.95 per month shared hosting plan and might see a million visitors total after 5 years need a caching plugin? IMO, absolutely not. If plugin based caching was so critical, why do so many dedicated WordPress hosts forbid people from using them on the sites they host? Because they have learned from experience with WordPress over the years, and/or have implemented a better caching solution systemwide and don't want to deal with the endless streams of calls to tech support when those individual plugins start causing end user pain.
What does it matter if your site loads in 1.75 seconds when you're only getting 100 visitors per week? And don't get me started on how impossible it is to get a full featured content heavy site to load that fast on a mobile device, not with the massive caching systems the mobile providers have on their networks.
The large news sites, media sites, sports sites, I would venture a guess that most of them don't worry about their pages loading in 2 seconds or less... they have too much content to present to too many people to worry about something so trivial in the broader picture of presenting the most relevant, engaging, compelling, funny or argument-inducing content possible.
Build the site, produce the best content you can, grow your audience, then worry about shaving an extra half a second off your site load times later... you may find out that you don't even need to, and find something more worthy to obsess about.
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Darkalso, as @bionary found out, if your hosting is lacking in resources, don't add to the suffering and implement caching... just do some digging and find a better host.
As an end user, you shouldn't have to apply bandaids to your site to compensate for poor infrastructure or hardware choices of the hosting company you first hitched your wagon to.
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark@binoary We have three scenarios or stacks for caching, in all three we use W3TC to some degree:
1) Small / Low volume site on Namecheap Shared Hosting with MaxCDN. W3TC handles page cache in disk enhanced mode and browser cache settings. Minification is in Manual Mode and pushed to the CDN. There's no DB nor Object cache.
2) Small / Medium volume site on Namcheap Shared Hosting with CloudFlare and MaxCDN. W3TC handles cache as before. CF is used for DDoS and other simple protections. CF does NOT handle minification.
3) Large or Very Performant Site on RamNode VPS. Nginx fastcgi / fpm handles Page Cache. W3TC handles Database, Object and Transient cache via Memcached. Minification also goes to Memcached, Browser cache is mostly setup in W3TC with a few things in the nginx settings.
Of course some sites we don't bother with caching, but when we do use it, typically is one of the above scenarios. The best performance is 3, but again we have to maintain the VPS so more work is involved (although, interestingly not that much more these days).
We're also watching keenly on SPDY and how the CDNs are going with their implementations of it, as we do use MaxCDN / NetDNA quite a bit.
I'm not going to argue the point further after this post, but if your goal is to get your site faster, as the OP had said was his goal, then caching would help with that that.
It may or may not be a worthwhile use of time to set up (and yes, for low-traffic sites it's perfectly fine without), and there very well might be better things that could be done with that time (and of course good content outweighs just about anything else). But in 95% of cases, caching will make your site faster in a way that's measurable; in my experience, in a way that's a significant percentage (30-50%) of the overall load time (and more significantly, I might add, than lossless compression of images, which should make the site maybe 2-5% smaller overall, depending on the number of images being loaded and how large they are).
Here's a complete comparison of some of the more popular caching plugins for WordPress; this should sum up everything quite well and give you a feel for how much faster your site is likely to be with caching vs. without.
No argument, just a disagreement about approaching troubleshooting and problem resolution 🙂 I think the root of that is that you might have missed the original point of why I said don't go caching.
It's necessary to evaulate each problem individually, not just say "install a caching plugin" as a response to everyone who complains about slow site speed. That can potentially make problems worse before people get frustrated enough to look for the real cause of their sites being slow.
In the case of his original post looking for solutions to his speed problem, adding caching first, while his site was still hosted on GoDaddy, and before digging deeper into the root cause would only have caused him more problems. Those new problems may have pushed him farther away from a resolution, likely with him blaming Genesis for all his new site woes, with him possibly becoming a disgruntled former Genesis customer because the approach to what his site's real problem was was never attended to.
That's a big problem with erroneous troubleshooting... better to try to figure out what the problem really is first, and don't add complicated subsystems like caching or CDNs when those don't resolve the true underlying issue, and may even mask them further.
And while I have never said caching doesn't makes sites faster, I still believe that 80-90% of the WordPress sites out there are wasting their resources & energy by using or worrying about using a caching plugin. And I'm curious what guidelines @coralseait's group uses to determine whether or not to bother with implementing caching, because I'm guessing it's smack in the bullseye of what I was saying 🙂
And referencing my previous statement about outdated information... the article you refer to is already a year old (not a dig at the work they did, just an observation) and likely is based on testing on plugin versions that aren't up to date with current active versions in the repository or even current versions of WordPress (just noticing how many plugin devs are starting to require WP 3.7 or higher for their plugins, skipped right from 3.5 to 3.7.1).
WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After DarkWe typically look case by case, as one would expect. As we use the same repeatable hosting and stacks we can predict how things will generally perform at any given desired price point or performance point.
Generally we leave caching alone for typical local demographic site or one that targets a niche or small audience. If we know some media and traffic surges are possible we'll prepare with W3TC and possibly MaxCDN and/or CF. Likewise if we know the site is likely to publish controversial info or gather the attention of any undesirable groups we'll prep CF.
Image heavy sites we use the CDN and for small, but global targeted sites (say a local BnB or Resort) we'll likewise put them on the CDN for geo caching. Our Australian market is somewhat unique being near the Diantree Rainforest and Great Barrier Reef so even small local sites target overseas very much, so a CDN makes really good sense in these circumstances. We actually don't mark up the services, so it is very cost effective for our customers. We could make a killing on it, but we don't care to.
Photographers, we always suggest the CDN because they typically want the best image quality, without compression and so delivering on the CDN is a good idea for them, esp with the parallel downloads.
Regardless, we use W3TC because we are familiar with it and fine tuning the granularity of the caches for our needs. I understand fully how the complexity scares people, but for our needs it is perfect.
Of course we are always watching the developments. I would say on our hosting platform 90% of sites would benefit from the page cache and/or the browser cache but as summer points sometimes they don't need to. The VPS is a different ball game of course.
Build the site, produce the best content you can, grow your audience, then worry about shaving an extra half a second off your site load times later… you may find out that you don’t even need to, and find something more worthy to obsess about
This is where I am now. I moved the site to siteGround. Everywhere I have tested it the site loads in under 3 seconds; So I think that is good enough for now 🙂
Thanks to all who have contributed to this stimulating discussion!
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