Optimising WordPress is a fairly straight forward process, and in doing so it’s possible to squeeze a serious amount of speed and power out of a cheaper server.

Go ahead and ssh in!

WP Cron

Cron is a system that runs programs (or commands) at scheduled times. WP Cron is the WordPress implementation that mimics this. Due to the necessity for WordPress to be compatible on various systems it’s not, by default, done “natively”. Instead WordPress triggers the appropriate hooks the next time the website is accessed. It’s possible to fake this with tools like Pingdom which hits your site every minute to report downtime, but we’ll go ahead and create a full cron system.

The first step is to disable WP Cron, and it’s crazy simple.

nano /var/www/html/wp-config.php

Scroll down and insert this line (near the bottom), feel free to add that other command if you are missing it.

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

Now we can edit the crontab, Linux’s built in cron system

Install all the WordPress

As part of this installation guide I’ll be showing you how to install the cli, setup the database and configure wp. It’ll be a relatively long post, however by the end you’ll have a working WordPress installation. Without further ado!

The CLI

The CLI is incredibly useful, it allows us to install WordPress, take database backups and anything else you might want to do in the web interface. Installing it is simple! From a server ssh connection:

cd /tmp

I always like to work out of the temp directory when downloading and installing files, just incase I mess up or leave a file behind.

So, what we’re going to want to do is download the cli installation script.

Free SSL certificate? Don’t mind if I do.

SSL is important, even Google is using it in the ranking algorithms now but historically it could be quite costly. Now that we have full server control, albeit virtual, we can use the Let’s Encrypt client to get a certificate for ourselves. And, as always – in a ridiculously straightforward way.

At this point I’m going to make a few assumptions. In order to get an SSL certificate you must own the domain you are trying to get it for. And additionally, it must be pointed at the server you are trying to authenticate. You can do this by setting an A Record to point the domain to the IP address.

It’s possible to do this step at any stage, but I much prefer doing it before installing WordPress in order to make the process smoother.

Firstly, ssh into your server and then run the following commands.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install letsencrypt

We are updating the repository list and then installing the letsencrypt client. This has actually been renamed to certbot however the version included in the Ubuntu 16.04 repositories is perfectly fine for now!

PHP-FPM?

By default, Nginx doesn’t have native PHP processing. However, getting it up an running is a cinch. We will use php-fpm, fastCGI process manager. We’re going to install this and then tell nginx to pass php processing to this module.

sudo apt-get install php-fpm php-mysql

We’re actually installing 2 packages here, php and a mysql helper package for communicating with the database.

Guess what, you just installed PHP. However, by default it is setup with an insecure setting – we can change that.

MySQL or MariaDB?

MySQL has become the golden standard when working with PHP, however due to concerns about the acquisition by Oracle some of the original developers have forked it and created MariaDB. It is designed to be a “drop in replacement” that follows all the same API standards as MySQL. Let’s get to it!

The first thing you’re going to want to do is ssh into your server.

ssh yourname@server_ip

Now need to know the version of Ubuntu we’re using. At the time of writing this I installed 16.04. But you can check yours by running:

lsb_release -a

Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS
Release:	16.04
Codename:	xenial

MariaDB provides a nice web interface to determine the repository we need to interface.

Nginx or Apache?

Apache has been around since 1995 and powers more websites than any other software. However, under heavy load performance hits a bottleneck and ultimately suffers. Nginx, Engine X, was designed to address some of these issues. If you’ve been on a shared host, chances are you’ve been using Apache. We’re going to setup Nginx – hey, performance matters. We might as well do it right, right? 

The first thing you’re going to want to do is ssh into your server.

ssh yourname@server_ip

Nginx is part of the Ubuntu core repositories, which means we can use the apt package manager for a sleek installation.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx

The first thing we’re going to want to do is update the local index before installing nginx. You’ll be asked to confirm the installation. Type Y to begin.

Motivation

Hosting a website is awesome but rarely simple. Often you get poor performance and expensive costs just for going down the “setup my hosting for me” route. Instead, I’ll show you how you can get back control and performance for nothing more than the cost of a month’s lunch.

First things first, forget those hosts who promise you everything, unlimited this, emails that. They are bloated, expensive and the shared drives are simply useless. Instead, let me introduce you to Digital Ocean.