Table of contents
- Overview – Basic overview about Scaling WordPress
- Challenges – Challenges we face on high scale Websites
- Solutions – How we can fix scaling issues
- Conclusion – Final Thought
- Q&A – Ask Me Anything
Overview
Scaling WordPress performance is essential for maintaining a fast, responsive website, especially as traffic grows. In this discussion, I will outline the issues we encounter and provide solutions, along with techniques to enhance performance.
Challenges
- Slow Website
- Impact on SEO
- Bad User Experience
- Traffic Loss
Solutions
- Choose Quality Hosting
- Update WordPress Core, Theme and Plugins
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Caching
- Optimization – Images , CSS , JS and Database
- Lazy Loading
- Code Cleanup and Optimization
- Decouple WordPress
Code Cleanup and Optimization
- Apply CSS styles at the block level and segment CSS into page-specific styles
- Fix CSS/SCSS using stylelint
- Preload/prefetch/dns-prefetch CSS, fonts
- Async/Defer JavaScript
- Use next-gen image format like avif/webp
- Use web fonts locally with display swap property (display:swap – Render Text and apply font once loaded)
- Set image width and height so that browser render image accordingly to eliminate CLS issues.
- Minimize the number of auto loaded fields within the wp_options table of the database.
Code Examples
- wp_resource_hints – Hook for preload, prefetch stylesheet, fonts.
- script_loader_tag – Hook for adding async/ defer on enqueued files
- Using below filter hooks remove http/https protocol so that the browser deducts automatically
-> script_loader_src
-> style_loader_src
Decouple WordPress
- Codebase – In the primary server we should only have codebase like EC2
- Database – Database should be in different server such as RDS
- Media – All files under uploads folder should be in different storage server like S3 Bucket
Conclusions
Optimizing WordPress performance is essential for a smooth user experience. Techniques like caching, image optimization, CDN, and efficient coding practices can significantly enhance website speed and scalability. Regular maintenance and monitoring are key to sustaining these improvements, ensuring your WordPress site remains fast and responsive.
Q&A
Feel free to connect with me at hello@sunilkumarthz.com
