WordPress is one of the best content management systems (CMS) for blogging. The best thing about WordPress is that it is free and open source, yet powerful. It is dedicated to the continuous growth of the community that develops plugins and themes. According to Wikipedia, WordPress shares more than 12% of the 1,000,000 largest websites on the Internet. This makes WordPress unrivaled among this type of CMS.
But like a double-edged sword, WordPress is so powerful, but so are the resources. The more complex the system, the more resources it takes up. If it’s just a normal WordPress installation, you don’t need so many resources. But if you add more and more plugins and more and more complex themes, it takes up so many resources. So why not uninstall all plugins?
Let’s see what WordPress plugins are used for. The goal of WordPress plugins is to extend WordPress core functionality and add more functionality to WordPress. Since WordPress plugins are developed by the community or individual developers, not all WordPress plugins are good. Most of them are dead or abandoned projects. This can cause a lot of problems for the WordPress blog itself. High CPU load is one of them.
WordPress blogs with low traffic typically do not suffer from high CPU load or high memory usage. But when it comes to high-traffic blogs, you have to consider CPU load and memory usage. Otherwise your blog will slow down and worst case scenario your account will be suspended. Being suspended is a very bad experience and you will lose visitors, which is bad for your website SEO.
Follow these tips to optimize your high-traffic blog:
1. plug-in
The WordPress plugin system is one of the most powerful features of WordPress. Developers or the community can easily make plugins to extend WordPress functionality. In addition to its easy-to-use API, it also has complete API documentation. There are many examples and articles on how to develop WordPress plugins on the Internet. But this is a double-edged characteristic. Even though it is powerful, not all plugins are good. Some of them are dead projects or discontinued, and worse yet it leaves security holes for your WordPress blog. So my suggestion is to use WordPress plugins as little as possible. Only use highly recommended (highly rated and most downloaded) and live plugins (not discontinued). Always test the plugin on a dummy website before uploading to the actual website. One mistake can spell disaster for your website. So choose carefully.
2. theme
The WordPress template/theme system is also one of the best features of WordPress. You can easily change the theme and customize it. You can find many free or paid themes. I recommend you use a simple, easy-to-read, and beautiful theme for your high-traffic blog. Because if your theme is complex, it will take up more resources on your server. For example, sliding featured posts is a great feature for users. But not for server load. Minimize your theme (CSS, images and JavaScript) so it will optimize your server load.
3. Optimize script
Script optimization refers to deleting unnecessary scripts and modifying script algorithms to optimize. Scripts include php, css, sql and javascript. Check your script execution times and optimize, optimize, optimize.
4. Use Cache mechanism
Caching mechanism is one of the most important things for high traffic blogs. There are many WordPress plugins that do caching. There are four types of caching mechanisms: database cache, page cache, memory cache and object cache. Database and page cache you should have. There are some plugins that can do this, but I highly recommend installing Database Cache Reload and Super Cache. These two plugins are the best for caching mechanisms.
5. Host the image to another server or use a cdn
It might be better to host the images on another server or use a CDN. Hosting the image on another server or CDN reduces the CPU load on the server. Imagine if you have 1k images stored on your server. You have to serve 10,000 visitors every day. This will use up your CPU resources and as a result your website will be slower to respond. In addition to images, you can also host css and javascript files on another server or CDN.
6. Analyze your traffic
Use and analyze your analytics or traffic monitoring applications. I recommend Google Analytics and Awstats. Google Analytics analyzes your traffic sources, daily volume, and more. Based on this data, you can decide where your website should be hosted, say if most of your traffic comes from the United States, then host your website within the United States. And use Awstats (found on Cpanel) to analyze your traffic to find out when it’s time to traffic less. You should perform backups or updates at this time.
7. Regularly optimize databases and backups
Optimizing the database is also important, if you have a lot of data on your MySql database, it will create data overhead. So you need to optimize your database regularly to maintain the performance of your MySql database. And you should back up your database regularly to prevent disaster.
8. Upgrade to VPS
Finally, when you get 5K traffic per day, you have no choice but to choose VPS (Virtual Private Server). Buy a minimal or medium VPS just to get started. Later, as your website grows, add more resources to your VPS.
That’s it for now. Last words, good luck with your blog and happy blogging.