Digital Marketing

Steps to optimize a high traffic WordPress blog

WordPress is one of the best content management systems (CMS) for blogs. And the best thing about WordPress is that it is free and open source, but powerful. You have engaged a growing community developing plugins and themes. And according to Wikipedia, WordPress shares more than 12% of the 1,000,000 largest websites on the internet. This makes WordPress unbeatable in this type of CMS.

But like a double-edged sword, WordPress is just as powerful but it also sucks resources. More complicated will be the system and more resources taking it. If it’s just a simple WordPress installation, it doesn’t require as many resources. But if you add more and more plugins and more complicated themes, it will take a lot of resources. So why not uninstall all plugins?

Let’s see what WordPress plugins are for. The goal of WordPress plugins is to extend the core WordPress functionality to add more functionality to WordPress. Since WordPress plugins developed by the community or a personal developer, not all WordPress plugins are good. Most of them are dead or abandoned projects. And this will cause a lot of problems on the WordPress blog itself. And a high CPU load is one of them.

Low traffic WordPress blog will generally not cause problems with high CPU load or high memory usage. But when it comes to a high traffic blog, you have to think about CPU load and memory usage. Otherwise, your blog will slow down and worse, your account will be suspended. Getting suspended is a really bad experience, you lost visitors and that’s not good for your site’s SEO.

Follow the tips below to optimize your high traffic blog:

1. Accessories
The WordPress plugin system is one of the most powerful features of WordPress. Developers or the community can easily create plugins to extend the WordPress functionality. In addition to its easy-to-use API, it also has full API documentation. And there are many samples and articles on the internet on how to develop a WordPress plugin. But this is the double-edged feature. It is even powerful, not all plugins are good. Some of them are dead or discontinued projects, and worse, they leave security holes in your WordPress blog. So my suggestion is to minimize the use of WordPress plugins. Use only highly recommended (high rating and most downloads) and live plugins (not discontinued). Always test the plugin on your dummy site before uploading it to your live site. One mistake could bring disaster to your site. So choose carefully.

two. Topics
The WordPress theme / template system is also one of the best WordPress features. You can change themes and customize them easily. And there are many free or premium themes that you can find. I suggest you use simple, easy-to-read, and beautiful themes for your high-traffic blog. Because if your topics are complicated, more resources will be needed for your server. For example, a slider featured post, this is a nice feature for the user. But not for the server load. Minimize your themes (css, image and javascript), so it will optimize your server load.

3. Optimize script
Script optimization means removing unnecessary scripts and modifying them to optimize the scripting algorithm. The scripts included php, css, sql, and javascript. Check the execution time of your script and optimize, optimize and optimize.

Four. Use cache mechanism
This is one of the most important things to have for a high traffic blog, the caching mechanism. There are many WordPress plugins for caching. There are 4 caching mechanisms: database caching, page caching, memory caching, and object caching. Caching of pages and databases you should have. There are a few plugins to do that, but I highly recommend installing db cache reloaded and hyper cache. These 2 plugins would be the best for the caching mechanism.

5. Host images on another server or use cdn
Host your images on another server or use cdn might be better. Host images on another server or cdn will reduce the server CPU load. Imagine if you have 1k of images stored on your server. And you have to serve 10,000 visitors a day. This will consume your CPU resources and the result will be that your site responds more slowly. Besides 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 application. I recommend Google Analytics and Awstats. Google anayltics to analyze your traffic sources, daily traffic and many things. And from this data you can make a decision about where you should host your site, for example most of your traffic comes from the US and then you host your site within the US and analyze your traffic with Awstats (available in Cpanel), to find less hours of traffic. And you must make your backup or update at this time.

7. Optimize database and backup regularly
Optimize the database, it is also important, if you have a lot of data in your MySql database, it will generate general data. Therefore, you should regularly optimize your database to maintain the performance of your MySql database. And you should backup your database regularly to prevent disaster.

8. Upgrade to VPS
At last, when you get 5K traffic per day, you have no choice but to go for VPS (Virtual Private Server). Buy the smallest or medium VPS just to get started. And then as your site grows, add more resources to your VPS.

That is all for now. Final words, good luck to your blogs and happy blogging.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *