So, you’ve got a VPS hosting plan! Congratulations on that. There are a few practical things you can do to optimize the benefits of VPS. Here, we explain seven valuable tips you can utilize for WordPress VPS optimization.
VPS represents a form of virtualization that divides a physical server into multiple virtual servers. It’s like you are sharing an island with other natives, but your area is protected from everyone. VPS offers better privacy, security, and dedicated resources than shared hosting. This means you can tune up your site to maximize your VPS hosting plan.
Here we go.
Tip No. 1: Right Amount of Bandwidth and Storage
The first thing you must ensure with your VPS is that you have opted for the right amount of bandwidth and storage. Now, what is the right amount? Right is subjective. It depends on the kind of website you have and the variables associated with that. These variables include traffic, website speed, size, and onsite data, among others.
To give an idea about the right amount of bandwidth you need, consider analyzing the data for bandwidth data of the past year for your site. You will get an idea of the pattern. There will be times when the bandwidth will be exceeded, and at other times it will be utilized less. Observe these peaks. Now take a note of the average bandwidth consumed. With these three points, you can quickly see how your bandwidth needs vary. It would help if you opted for the bandwidth that can optimally run your site without crashing. Also, don’t opt for a costlier (and therefore with too much bandwidth) plan either. Strike a balance between cost and space to find what’s just right for you.
Storage is another case. While past analysis is helpful for bandwidth, storage needs anticipation of the future. How much storage will you need in the next six months, 12 months, and a year and a half? What content are you planning to put on your website? What are your plans with your website? A practical plan will give you an idea about the storage need you will have shortly. Again, the storage required should not be too massive and too moderate. Leave space for expansion but not too much, not too little. Avoid extremes, and you should be fine.
Tip No. 2: Find the Right Servers
Your VPS’s performance depends on the server it is running on. Cheap VPS plans come with poor server combinations, and you enjoy proper configuration with premium ones. With premium managed WordPress hosting of Nestify, you never have to worry about server configuration. The expert team of engineers at Nestify takes care of VPS optimization.
Make sure you check the following points:
- Linux
- NGinx
- SSD
- MySQL (5.6 or higher).’
- PHP 7 or higher
Ensure you have the correct servers with you, and you are already halfway ahead of your competitors.
Tip No. 3: Keep WordPress Updated
WordPress periodically releases updates for WordPress core. This includes many fixes and security features. Make sure you keep WordPress updated on your site. This will help you to keep your VPS optimized for your website.
Also, make sure all the plugins and themes you use are updated. Security issues with older plugin versions can hamper your website’s optimal functioning.
Running your site with the latest PHP and MySQL can bring a performance boost not offered by earlier versions.
Tip No. 4: Keep Sufficient Memory
Your website may be complex or straightforward. It runs on processes that take up memory. If you think your site deserves more memory than what is allocated, you should check your memory allocation. Expanding memory can do the trick.
You can change the memory allocation setting in WordPress.
To do this, locate the wp-config.php file.
Once you open the file, locate the line /* That’s all. Stop editing! Happy blogging. */
Now, just above this line, add the following line:
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘[enter the memory limit]’);
In place of ‘enter the memory limit,’ you can add 128M, 256M, or 512M as per your need.
Tip No. 5: Use Server Targeted Caching
Apart from leveraging browser caching, you can try your hand at server-targeted caching.
There are a couple of caching engines available.
Some of these are as follows:
Varnish Cache is a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It is a kind of web application accelerator. Depending on server configuration, it can speed up delivery up to 300 – 1000 times. The speed of the network binds it.
Memcached is a memory cache daemon. It is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. It speeds up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached is free and open-source.
You can download Memcached from GitHub.
OPcache
OPCache works for sites that run on PHP. OPcache improves PHP performance. It stores precompiled script bytecode in shared memory. Thus, removing the need for PHP to load and parse scripts on each request.
Tip No. 6: Optimize Robots.txt
You can limit how bots function on your site by optimizing the Robots.txt file on your website.
Add the following code in the robots.txt file at the root:
User-agent: *
Crawl-Delay: [number of seconds]
Now, in place of ‘number of seconds,’ you can add the time after which the bot can make the following request (3600, i.e., one hour can be helpful for most sites)
Tip No. 7: Disable Hotlinking
Hotlinking is a method by which the images on your website can be sourced by url. Thus, it puts a tremendous load on your server if many photos on your website are hotlinked on a website with high traffic.
You can disable hotlinking by using security plugins for WordPress. Some of these provide hotlinking protection. You can check our look at 10 WordPress Security plugins for 2020
You can also check out the Top 13 tools to optimize images for WordPress.
