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How I improved my WordPress GTmetrix grade

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I’ve managed to improve my GTmetrix page speed and Ylow grades from the mid 70’s to 98% for Page Speed and 97% for YSlow with a page load time of only 1.18 seconds. Here’s a link to the report (if the link is dead feel free to re-run the test). In this post I’m going to outline my configuration so that anyone interested in replicating my results can save themselves some effort.

Here’s a screen shot of my grade after I’ve implemented the solutions that I’m about to outline in this post. If you’re still in doubt feel free to run the test yourself but be sure to use the secure URL at https://odinsql.com to avoid any redirection delay.

How I improved my GTmetrix page speed and yslow scores.

OdinSQL.com GTmetrix Page Speed and YSlow grades

Does GTMetrics even matter?

If you’re wondering what value a high Page Speed and YSlow grade have, I can attest that the quicker page loads have dramatically improved the volume of traffic that Google and the other search engines are now sending my way which has resulted in more revenue. In short this article has huge Search Engine Optimization (SEO) implications as well as providing a better overall experience to the impatient hordes accessing your site.

So let’s get into how I’ve managed to pull off such a fantastic score and what you can do to duplicate my results.

Hosting

In order to implement the methods that I’m about to outline you’re going to need fast, low latency hosting. If you’re using crappy shared hosting you’re going to need to replace it with at least a VPS with sold state drives (SSD). Two companies that fit the bill which I would recommend are RamNode and Vultr. RamNode is faster of the two but is slightly more expensive. If managing a VPS isn’t something you’re capable of, I would recommend checking out CloudWays. CloudWays adds server management on top of DigitalOcean, Amazon or Google’s “cloud”. You won’t be able to implement the image compression method that I outline with CloudWays but they do have great caching built into their software stack. If you have the traffic that would justify the expense you may even want to go all out and lease a dedicated server. Choopa.com which is the parent company of Vultr offers both managed and self managed dedicated servers. For the vast majority of WordPress sites a dedicated server would be a completely unnecessary expense.

Web Server

The combination of Nginx and PHP-FPM is significantly faster and with lower memory requirements than Apache. (Yes, I know that you can configure PHP-FPM to work with Apache) Nginx is fast and works spectacularly under heavy load. If you want to greatly improve your sites performance while using the same hardware Nginx is going to be an essential component to making that happen. I’ve previously written about how I was able to configure a $10 per month virtual server to serve up 15,000 page views per minute using Nginx.

Theme

I’ve spent countless hours trying to find a free theme that’s both good looking, functional and isn’t full of unnecessary fonts, JavaScript and CSS includes without much success. Every one of the many free themes that I’ve implemented had fairly major flaws. I’m not saying that there aren’t any good free themes I’m just saying that I wasn’t able to find any that met my needs. I had read many positive reviews regarding Genesis framework and finally decided to pay the $100 for the framework and the Metro Pro theme from StudioPress. I could have probably spent the better part of a week coding my own custom theme but I value several days of my time more than the $100 that I invested in this theme. As it is I spent the better part of two days just configuring Metro Pro. I’ve seen about a 30% increase in page views since making the switch and if even half of that is due to the theme it will pay for itself within a couple of weeks.

Combine and Minify

Having too many external files that need to be downloaded can slow down the rendering of you site greatly. I have several plugins that I use and It seems like every plugin has it’s own css and js include. Without combining and minify-ing I had around 15 CSS and JS files each. Ideally WordPpress would come up with a better solution that having every plugin add it’s own css and js include so that this whole combining and minify process wouldn’t even be necessary.

I spend the better part of a Sunday afternoon installing, testing, uninstalling and retesting a multitude of wordpress plugins that are supposed to combine and minify my css and js including “Better WordPress Minify”, “WP Super Minify”, “W3 Total Cache”, “Combine CSS”, “Combine JS”, “WP Optimize By xTraffic”, “Autoptimize” and “Speed Booster Pack”. Each plugin had dozens of positive reviews. Unfortunately the majority of them didn’t work nearly as well as was claimed.  A couple performed well but the plugin that managed to improve my score the most and that I’m actually using and recommend was “Speed Booster Pack” it’s free and it actually works.

Image Compression

Images that are needlessly large in file size can take a really long time to download. Back in the mid 1990’s I used to have to painstakingly tweak image export settings for each any every image. Fortunately things are a lot simpler now. You can just upload your images and let a WordPress plugin losslessly compress your images without any manual intervention.

Up until a couple of weeks ago I had been using the SmooshIt plugin which would upload your images to a yahoo server which would then optimize and resize them before putting them in into your media library. Unfortunately yahoo has plans to discontinue this service and the plugin was nagging me about paying for a pro version, for some number of dollars that I can’t remember but wasn’t willing to spend per year. I opted to giving optimizing the images on my own server a try and found the CW Image Optimizer plugin. CW Image Optimizer requires that LittleUtils is installed on the server which is what is doing the actual image optimization on your own server instead of shipping them off some place else. Installing LittleUtils can be a bit of a pain it the but to install correctly. I’m happy with the results but I wish that there was a simpler installation method.

Once LittleUtils was installed I re optimized all of my images by using the regenerate thumbnails plugin.

Caching

Don’t make your server work harder than necessary. If your content doesn’t change every few seconds you should be implementing some form of caching. When a client makes a request to your site instead of looking up the data in the database or compiling your PHP it’s much, much faster to save a copy from when someone else made the same request to a file or in memory and server that version instead. Properly implementing a caching strategy can literally (not figuratively) improve your servers performance by 1000 times or more. My current caching configuration includes w3 Total Cache configured to use Memcached for caching queries and WordPress objects, OPCache configured in PHP-FPM and an Nginx proxy cache configured to cache pages to disk.

I’m only using a $10 VPS which doesn’t give me much memory to work with. If I had at least 2GB of ram I would configure Varnish to use memcached for the page cache.

Content Distribution Network (CDN)

For those of you not in the know, a content distribution network basically copies your static content such as your images, js, css, html and cached pages onto their servers that are closer to the people that are visiting your site than your own server and serves the copies instead of downloading the content from your server each time it’s requested. This results in your server being put under less load and your visitors downloading your content more quickly. Faster page loads equal happy users and happy users spend more time on your site resulting in you making more money. If for some reason you’re still not using a CDN head over to CloudFlare.com and sign up for a free account.
I’m actually using the $20 a month pro plan now but the free plan should have a positive impact for anyone that’s not currently using a CDN.

 

That’s it for this post. I hope that some one out there found some of this information at least mildly useful. If you think that I’ve left something out or would like me to go into more detail please leave a comment or send me a message via my contact form and let me know. If you would like to stay update regarding my blog posts please join my newsletter by entering your name and email address in the big black box on the right hand navigation menu.

The quick and EasyEngine WordPress on Ubuntu 14.04

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In my previous post I discussed how to to configure WordPress so that it’s super fast. If you haven’t read over that yet I would recommend reading it and then come back over to this post.

In this post I’m going to cover the easiest way to get WordPress up and running on a newly deployed copy of Ubuntu 14.04.  We’re going to do this using EasyEngine. Not only is it the easiest way to get WordPress installed on Ubuntu It’s also the easiest way to get a (LEMP) stack installed on Ubuntu.

If you haven’t heard of EasyEngine before, you wouldn’t be the only one. I just found out about it a few days ago.  EasyEngine is designed to make it easy to configure your server, create new sites and deploy WordPress.

This method is going to save you a significant amount of time and effort compared to the methods I’ve outlined previously.

If you’re considering moving your WordPress blog from a shared hosting account to your own virtual private server (VPS) I would personally recommend either Linode or DigitalOcean. I currently use them both and they are both reasonably priced and have excellent service. This site is being hosted on a Linode VPS.  If you sign up for either one of them using the links in this article and remain a happy customer I will receive a $20 hosting credit.  In addition DigitalOcean will add a $10 credit to your account.    The methods that I outline here are just as applicable to any other Ubuntu 14.04 server as they are to a VPS with Linde or DigitalOcean.

Log into your Server

Let’s get started first you’re going to need to open a terminal on your server and log in. If you’re not sure how to do that follow your hosting providers instructions.

Update Everything

Now  make sure everything on your server is up to date.  You may be asked to enter your password again after the first sudo command. At the end of each line press enter.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

 

“sudo” Allows permitted users to run commands with elevated permissions.

“apt-get update” looks to see if there are any new versions of the software you already have installed.

“apt-get upgrade” actually upgrades the software to a newer version if one was found when you ran “apt-get update”

” apt-get dist-upgrade” will actually download, remove or install software that has been added, removed or upgraded from the distribution

So now everything on your server should be updated, upgraded and better than ever.

Install EasyEngine

This next step is where all the magic is at.

wget -qO ee rt.cx/ee && sudo bash ee

sudo ee stack install

“wget” can download a file from the internet in this case it’s downloading a file and naming it “ee” from  “rt.cx/ee” then it runs “ee” in “bash”

The second line tells EasyEngine(ee) to install the stack of MySQL, PHP, Nginx and all the dependencies.

 

Check if everything is working

Let’s take a look and see if everything is up and running correctly. To do that we’re going to need a web browser.

sudo apt-get install lynx

lynx localhost

The first line is going to download and install the lynx text only web browser onto your server.

The second line is going to try to open the default web site being hosted on your server.

You should see something pretty much like this.

Nginx Welcome page in Lynx

Nginx Welcome page in Lynx

Hit “ctrl+q” to quit lynx

 Install Nano

sudo apt-get install nano

Nano is a very simple text editor that we’re going to use to edit a configuration file.

Make EasyEngine more secure

I’m going to recommend making a few changed to the default EasyEngine install.

EasyEngine installs some administration tools on port 22222 to a site named 222222 by default that are used for managing PHP and MySQL. I don’t recommend having unnecessary services and applications running. Let’s disable  these admin tools.  I’m of the opinion that they pose a security risk if you want to re-enable them and secure them via your firewall at a later point you could do that

sudo ee site disable 22222

Here we tell EasyEngine (ee) to disable the site 22222.  What ee actually does is  remove the symlink for the sites config file for 22222 from “/var/nginx/sites-enabled/”.  Think of a symlink as being like the directions or a map to another file.

We didn’t actually delete the contents of the file 22222 we just removed the directions to it from the site-enabled folder. Nginx uses this folder to keep track of which sites it should server.

If at some point you decide that you want to add it back in you can recreate the symlink like this

sudo ee site enable 22222

This tells ee to create a symlink for the 22222 file in “/var/nginx/site-available/” int the “/var/nginx/sites-enabled” directory.

now let make a small change to Nginx config

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

This will open the nginx.conf in the nano text editor. Find the line.

add header X-Powered-By “EasyEngine 2.x.x”

Change “EasyEngine 2.x.x” to something else. Maybe “Fluffy bunny web server” It doesn’t really matter. The reason we’re changing it is that  if there’s ever a bug in on of the packages that are installed by EasyEngine that could allow hackers access to your site or server,  you don’t want to be broadcasting to everyone on the internet that you’ve using it.

Hit “ctrl+x’ to exit from nano you’re going to be prompted if you want to overwrite and save changes hit “y” for yes.

 

Hopefully none of this has been too painful so far now were ready to create our first wordpress site on your new server.

Create your WordPress site using EasyEngine

Creating a new WordPress site with WP Super Cache enabled with EasyEngine

sudo ee site create your-site.com –wpsc

With this line you’re telling EasyEngine(ee) that you want to create a new site in this case “your-site.com” and to also install and configure the server side portion of WP Super Cache so that your site will be nice and fast.

You should see something like this

EasyEngine User & Pass

EasyEngine User & Pass

Write down this username and password

Write down the username and password that was created by EasyEngine when you created your site.  You can change it once your into your wordpress admin but you’re going need it to get in.

 

 

That’s it your new WordPress site is now installed and configured on your Ubuntu server.

You’re going to need to either alter the hosts file on your computer or update your DNS records for your domain before you’ll be able to access your site on your new server. I would recommend creating a free CloudFlare account and using them to host your DNS and use their free content distribution network (CDN).  As I’ve outlined in step #7 of my post 7 steps to make WordPress fast.

EasyEngine can do more than just configure WordPress sites.  I would recommend on heading over and taking a look at everything at it’s capabilities.

 

If you need a great virtual server I highly recommend that you
Sign up for a Linode SSD VPS

 
After reading through all of this you’ve decided that you would rather leave the management of you server in the hands of professionals have a look at

CloudWays Managed VPS

CloudWays offers VPS management on top of DigitalOcean’s network

If you have any comments,questions, suggestions or problems please leave post a comment here.

Error 0x80004005 VirtualBox Windows?

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VirtualBox error 0x80004005

Have you experienced  this error or an error very similar to this error after upgrading virtual box?

Result Code:

E_FAIL (0x80004005)

Component:

Machine

Interface:

IMachine {480cf695-2d8d-4256-9c7c-cce4184fa048}

 

VirtualBox error 0x80004005 on Windows

VirtualBox error 0x80004005 on Windows

This error was encountered on VirtualBox 4.3.20

 

The Solution is to either downgrade to an earlier version of VirtualBox or remove you existing anti-virus software and install Microsoft Security Essentials prerelease.

I hope that this post helps to save someone else the frustration that I’ve just endured.

7 steps to make WordPress fast

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Wordpress logo

WordPress logo

By default WordPress is slow. Not a little slow or kind of slow but really slow. WordPress’s slow page load times are costing you money. Whether you are a small business using WordPress as your content management system a blogger making a bit of money from advertising revenue, you should follow these 7 steps that will greatly decrease page load times and increase your revenue.

I’m not going to lie to you and claim that each of these steps is easy but for someone who is fairly computer literate and willing to learn something new you should be able to make it through them with only a moderate headache and well-earned sense of accomplishment. If you would like to forgo the headache you could always hire someone to do the dirty work for you.

#1 Hosting

If you’re using a cheap shared hosting plan you need to stop it now.  If you’re making more than $10 a month of your website or if you plan on making more than $10 a month off of your website  sign up for a cloud based virtual private server(VPS) with a solid state drive.  To be on the safe side you need to plan on spending the greater of $10 or $10 per 30,000  page views per day at peak utilization.   (For example. if your site is doing great and you’re getting 60,000 page views per day on averaged but every Friday you update your blog and you’re getting 140,000 page views on Friday  you would  do the math like this 140/30 * 10 = $46.60)  For the vast majority of you that means you should plan on spending $10 a month. If however you were following this very simplified formula and you came up with a number greater than $100 you should hire me or someone else that is qualified to evaluate your hosting needs more accurately. You should also consider setting up managed hosting.  Do not take this as an opportunity to try to save a couple of dollars.

Select a plan from either Linode or DigitalOcean. I’ve personally used them both and have had excellent experience with both.  As of the time of writing these are the only two companies that I’m willing to recommend.  (Full disclosure this site is being hosting on a Linode VPS and if you use one the Linode or Digitalocean links in this article and stay with the service for 3 months, I stand receive a $20 hosting credit.) In addition DigitalOcean will add a $10 credit to your account.

#2 Setting up your VPS OS and software

Once you’ve selected your hosting plan you’ve got your virtual server but you’re going to need to install and Configure the OS and software.  I would recommend the latest long-term release of Ubuntu Server. Currently that would be 14.04.  it’s relatively simple to install all of the necessary software using apt-get. Installation of the OS should be as simple as selecting the Ubuntu 14.04 from either Linode or DigitalOcean immediately after choosing your hosting package by following the onscreen instructions.  Now we’re needing  to install the web server. Thankfully DigitalOcean has created an excellent tutorial on how to set up and configure Nginx. Nginx web server is able to serve up pages faster while using less memory than the older and more commonly used Apache web server. After you’ve completed the Nginx tutorial ,You should have a working static website . Now you’re ready to install MySQL, PHP and WordPress we’re going to head back over to DigitalOcean you should be able to skip to step two in this tutorial on how to get WordPress up and running on Nginx.

Edit: for an even easier way to install and configure everything read my post “The quick and EasyEngine WordPress on Ubuntu 14.04”

If you’ve done everything correctly you’re probably exhausted but you should be staring at an empty word press site.

IMPORTANT! You’re now the one responsible for keeping your server secure and updated.  I would recommend logging into your server at least once a month and doing “sudo apt-get update” followed by “sudo apt-get upgrade”. You can automate this by following this Ubuntu tutorial. You should also configure a firewall and Fail2Ban.

#3 Move your site to the new server

Install the duplicator WordPress plugin on both your old and new server.  Follow the directions provided by the plugin to backup everything from your old site then copy the backed up files over to your new site and restore them. You should now have a copy of your site on your new server.  One last thing for this step disable any plugins that you have installed that you are not using.

#4 Install Smoosh.it

Install the Smoosh.it wordpress plugin. Smoosh.it will optimize your images making them smaller files that download more quickly. You can even use it to batch process the existing images on your site.

#5 Install and configure WP Super Cache

Install the WP Super Cache plugin  and select the “Use mod_rewrite to serve cache files” and the “Compress pages so they’re served more quickly to visitors” options under the advanced tab.  This is the step that will result in the greatest increase in server performance. Instead of each page request needing to be generated by PHP on each page request a static version of the page will be generated on the first page request. For a period of time (3600 seconds by default) a static and compressed version. will be served by Nginx. Nginx is very good at serving static files quickly and you’ve now turned WordPress into a static file generator.

#6 Install WP DB-Manager

Install WP DB-Manager and use it to optimize and repair your DB. You should use this plugin to schedule the database to be Optimized and Repaired at least once per Month. If your site is frequently being updated and many comments are being posted you should schedule this to occur once per week.

If you’ve made it this far you’re doing great.  Your WordPress site is on your own new VPS and should be amazingly fast but there’s still one more step before your site is live on the new server.

#7 Set up a Free CloudFlare account

Sign up for a free CloudFlare account. Cloudflare is a content delivery network CDN.  The way cloudflare works is that you use them to manage your DNS records.  You’ll need to log in to your domain name registrar to update your name servers. Then when someone makes a request to your site they send that request to the closest server on their network which has a cached version of your site which it then serves to the requester. This results in a much quicker response time for the end-user and significantly less load on your VPS. Their free service is fast but they offer an even faster paid service with additional functionality.

 

You’ve done it! You’re WordPress site is now incredibly fast.  If you’re still in the need for greater speed many WordPress templates make way too many requests to external js and css files and should also be optimized.

 

If you need a great virtual server host for your WordPress site I highly recommend that you
Sign up for a Linode SSD VPS

After reading through all of this you’ve decided that you would rather leave the management of you server in the hands of professionals have a look at

CloudWays Managed VPS

CloudWays offers VPS management on top of DigitalOcean’s network

 

I’ve been a bit brief in some of my descriptions on how to make WordPress Fast. If you have followed all the steps in this tutorial and you’re having an issue or need further details, please ask a question in the comments and I’ll update the article to address your concerns.

 

Why I chose WordPress over Hugo or Jekyll

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At some point during the past few months I decided that to promote myself and my abilities and possibly even make a few dollars via advertising I should start blogging about my experience with past and current projects.  Keeping that in mind I set on my quest to find the proper blogging software to meet my needs.

What exactly did i want in a blogging platform?

  • Easy to use.
  • Hosted on my server.
  • Good performance.
  • Secure from hackers.
  • Easy to update and customize.
Wordpress logo

WordPress logo

Why I was initially hesitant to use WordPress

It’s slow. Not just kind of slow or a little bit slow, it’s incredibly slow.  It’s slow because it’s a huge code base written in PHP. On the server-side WordPress is slow because by default PHP is parsed, interpreted, and compiled at run time. When you have thousands of lines of PHP code to compile on each page request it gets slow. I’ve never been a fan of large applications written in PHP. I’m not saying that PHP is horrible or that it doesn’t have an appropriate niche, it’s great for a contact form on a website that doesn’t see much traffic but writing a large application in a dynamically typed scripting language that is compiled on each page request will never make sense to me.  I could pay for a really beefy server to try to fix the speed issue but I’m too cheap to do that.

On the Client side  pages load slowly because of the large number of included style and JavaScript includes. WordPress has a history of security related bugs that have led to many sites being hacked and defaced.  I would rather not have to deal with cleaning up a mess like that. Creating custom WordPress templates is not as simple as some people like to claim.  Even modifying an existing template can take a non inconsequential amount of time reaching through several different include files.

 

 

 

 

Hugo logo

Hugo logo

What is Hugo?

Hugo is an application written in the Go programming language used to generates static websites from templates and mark down files.  What I initially liked about Hugo is that it’s written in go which is a language I’ve recently been working a bit with.  It was shiny and new and missing a bit of functionality but I was exited about getting to work.  The template system would allow me to have complete control.  I could be easily create and customize my own design. It generates static files eliminating one of the most common methods that hackers use to gain access to a site.

Nginx serving static files puts my existing server under very little load. Hugo is awesome and seemed like exactly what I needed.   I got to work creating customizing my template. After that I realized that i wanted search functionality so I downloaded installed and configured OpenSearchServer. I used jQuery on my static search page to display the results from searching my open search server index. I was a bit concerned about how I would allow a second author access to my blog but I’m sure that I could figure out something when it came time to deal with that.  While this was going on I still didn’t have my site up live yet. I was spending all of my free time trying to reinvent the wheel instead of writing my blog.  I started looking into how some of these issues were addressed In Jekyll which is basically another static site generator but written in Ruby instead of Go. With no luck my enthusiasm was waning. I needed to get a site up.

 

 

 

How I ended up with WordPress.

Around this same time an acquaintance of mine that makes his living by writing and publishing an Apple related blog in France approached me about speeding up his WordPress blog.  He was on a low cost shared hosting package.  His site was often slow and occasionally unavailable.  This led to me giving WordPress another look.  I ended up moving him to a $10 a month VPS with Linode which should be more than sufficient based on his level of traffic. This is the same plan that I’m using to host this site on.  On top of that came Ubuntu then came Nginx, PHP and WordPress with the WP Super Cache plugin which basically converts WordPress into a static site generator and the iThemes Security plugin to help prevent some of the common security issues.  I moved the DNS over to CloudFlare.com which is providing a free version of their content delivery network. If you’re not already using them I would recommend on setting them up on every one of your sites. By the time I was finished his site was actually pretty fast.  Page load times went for an average of over 11.5 seconds to an average of just under 3 seconds.  I came to the realization I have other things to do than spend my time reimplementing basic blog functionality in a static site.

Hugo is pretty cool but it wasn’t the right application for my needs. WordPress is far from perfect but it works pretty well as a blogging platform and with the right combination of software, plugins and setting its inherent slowness can be overcome.

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