Speeding up Wordpress and systems like WooCommerce

Wordpress is famous for being a resource hog, and now that all NodeHost servers are upgraded and running high level CPUs and half a GB of memory for every page load I was thinking it was time to say why and how Wordpress can be slow no matter how fast the server.

Wordpress is a powerful system that on each page load can do a lot of background checks, and one is to rebuild the page visuals so the main and best way to speed up your Wordpress site is to install a cache plugin.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ WP Super Cache will make static copy's of pages that does not have dynamic elements. This allows Wordpress to give users the page content faster.

The next is to use a CDN like CloudFlare that will route the network access closer to the user. Using CloudFlare helps improve not only performance for users on your site but the backend. Also CloudFlare is free!

https://helpdesk.nodehost.ca/en/article/setting-up-cloudflare-and-https-for-free-4fn0y/

You can also setup image compression that will lower image sizes.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/ This is a great plugin for anyone with a lot of photos on a Wordpress site. It allows image compression over your enter site for free, and best of all it's got over 1 MILLION installs on Wordpress sites.

Databases get slow the more you use them thanks to how some plugins cache resources. A great step is to clean the database and run optimization scripts.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-optimize/ WP-Optimize is an effective tool for automatically cleaning your WordPress database so that it runs at maximum efficiency.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-sweep/ This plugin cleans up a lot of old junk files and records.

Did you know some themes are really bad for performance and can actually include a lot of junk scripts you dont need that will only slow down your site and visitors.

https://woocommerce.com/storefront/

Recommended by WooCommerce Happiness Engineers — is to use Health Check. https://wordpress.org/plugins/health-check/

You can also use the WooCommerce Speed Drain Repair plugin to help improve performance in the admin interface. https://wordpress.org/plugins/wc-speed-drain-repair/

There is no getting around the fact that Wordpress is large and unless you take the time to optimize Wordpress it will always feel bloated and slow. Take your time and optimize as you go, and take the time to look into optimizing tools before you use them.