I heard rumblings last year that Google would start altering their rankings based upon speed of page loads. This was confirmed a couple of weeks ago on the Google Webmaster’s blog, and – while they say that their new speed standards will only affect 1% of searches – you can bet that portion will rise in the future.
A few weeks before Google’s announcement, I decided it was time to start looking at site performance. I moved a couple of my sites, including this one, from my Dreamhost Shared server, to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) on The Rackspace Cloud. Additionally, I implemented a few other performance enhancements that I’ll cover below. From all of these changes, I cut load time of pages on kadavy.net by 75%, and my Webmaster Tools performance graph now looks like this.
Also, Googlebot now crawls my site 90% faster. A summary of what’s to follow:
- I reduced average page-load time from 12 seconds to 3 seconds, saving my visitors almost one week of time per month.
- I did this by first switching from a Dreamhost Shared server to The Rackspace Cloud.
- I then used the W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin, and served my media files from Amazon’s Cloudfront CDN, from multiple subdomains.
Great web publishing platforms like WordPress have made it easy for just about anyone to publish information and have it seen by the world, but as Google starts favoring sites that have the resources and knowledge to optimize page load time, some publishers’ messages may not have the reach they once did. Exacerbating this problem is that information on website optimization is somewhat complicated and assumes a considerable amount of technical knowledge. I hope to share my experience with improving the page load time of my WordPress site in as plain of language as possible. I’m a designer by training, and get by how I can as a developer. So, maybe some folks out there who know more than I do about this stuff will have some knowledge to offer. Maybe I did something completely wrong, in which case, let me know in the comments!
Servers: What’s the difference between Shared and VPS?
With shared hosting – such as Dreamhost‘s – your sites are all on one machine with a whole bunch of other sites, sharing all of the resources (CPU usage and RAM usage). You also don’t have much control over the configuration of your server, such as what PHP modules are activated (of which, there are probably way too many), and the configuration of your PHP.ini file.
With a VPS – The Rackspace Cloud, specifically – your “server” is a piece of a machine, with CPU and memory resources dedicated just for your piece of it. You can choose what flavor of Linux you have installed, how your Apache server is configured (if you want to run Apache at all), how your PHP is configured – you can control pretty much everything. The drawback is that you have to administer it all yourself. This was challenging for me to figure out, but as you can see the speed payoff is pretty amazing.
Why not use Dreamhost’s PS?
As I evaluated my options, I considered simply upgrading to Dreamhost PS. All I would have had to do was press a button to do this, but I had heard not-so-good-things about Dreamhost PS – and most importantly, my MySQL database would have still been on a shared server. I would have to pay extra if I wanted my database on a nicer server. This seemed pointless to me, and didn’t sound like a VPS at all. I wasn’t keen on administering my own server, but after help from some nice people at Jelly (especially Chris Chandler from Flatterline) things are going okay so far.
How much does the Rackspace Cloud cost?
I’m not really sure yet, because I haven’t gotten a bill, but it looks like you can get started for around $12 a month, with a server with 256MB of memory. There are bandwidth and storage fees on top of this, but they seem pretty low. The coolest thing about The Rackspace Cloud so far is that you can scale your server up and down in a matter of minutes, and only pay by the hour, based upon the size of the server. My two WordPress sites, totaling about 60k pageviews a month, are currently on a 1024MB server, which I hope will cost me less than $50 a month, but I’m starting to make money on my properties, so the expense is worth it for me. If you don’t have much revenue, it may not be worth it for you – or you could increase your revenue: something I hope to write more about in the future.
Using the Rackspace Cloud
Once I signed up for Rackspace (they called me within 15 minutes of signing up, to confirm, before I could start using it), I signed in and created a server. When doing this, you can pick the flavor of Linux that you want to use. I didn’t really know what this meant, but I was advised by a friend to choose the latest version of Ubuntu they had. So I chose 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I also could have chosen one of various Windows servers. After selecting the Linux flavor, I was able to name my server, and select the size of server that I wished to use. I started off with 256MB, but I very easily scaled up later on. After a few minutes, the server was all set up, and I got a confirmation e-mail, with my dedicated IP address, and login and password.
Setting up the rest of the LAMP stack
Now that my Linux was set up, it was time to install Apache, MySQL, and PHP. I SSHed into the server using Terminal on the Mac. That command looks like this (but I used my actual IP address):
ssh root@111.111.11.111
Setting up Apache, MySQL, and PHP – and phpmyadmin – was super easy thanks to this great article in the Ubuntu Documentation.
Transferring the Data
Now I was ready to get the data over to my new server. I SSHed into my Dreamhost server (you may have to contact support to get this enabled), and created an archive of kadavy.net:
tar -cvf kadavy.tar kadavy.net
I then transferred that archive over to my Rackspace Cloud server using Secure Copy:
scp kadavy.tar root@111.111.11.111:/home
Then I decompressed the file on my Rackspace Cloud:
cd /home
tar -xvf kadavy.tar
Setting it up
I then used PHPMyAdmin to export my database from Dreamhost, and import it onto my Rackspace Cloud instance. I had to change a few settings in the options table of my database to match the IP address of my server, rather than my domain, so that it would run properly before setting up my DNS. I also made a few changes to my wp-settings.php so the installation was pointed at the right database.
Using the easy instructions from the Ubuntu documentation, I set up the virtual host on Apache, and started up the server.
After I felt everything was right – and after messing around with optimization tricks below – I pointed the DNS to this new server. Rackspace has a DNS management tool, but I found that GoDaddy (my registrar) had more user-friendly DNS management.
Optimizing WordPress / The Front-End
Now that I was on a much faster server, there were a few other things I learned that made my pages load even faster. After learning these tricks, I found that there was one WordPress plugin that used many of these tricks. I used the YSlow Firefox plugin to benchmark the speed of page loads, and also to get tips on ways I could optimize my pages. Here’s some of the more important tactics I learned.
Page Caching
The most popular WordPress optimization advice I found was to cache the pages. Instead of having to hit the database every time a page is called, caching allows your server to serve up static HTML. The server doesn’t have to process all of that PHP and build the pages from the database. There are several plugins for WordPress which automate this, one of them being W3 Total Cache, which I’ll talk about more in a minute.
Using a CDN (Amazon Cloudfront)
This was the most intimidating sounding advice I received, but it turned out to be pretty simple. A Content Delivery Network is basically a bunch of servers around the world through which you serve your larger files, such as images, CSS, and Javascript. When someone visits your site, the assets are served from the closest server to them, thus speeding up load time. I had heard of Amazon Web Services many times before, not really understanding what it was, but their Cloudfront service is a very cheap CDN (looks like it will cost me less than $1 a month). You can sign up for it at aws.amazon.com, and can freely upload assets using S3 Browser, amongst other applications.
Once you’ve signed up for Amazon, you can create a “bucket” on Cloudfront by clicking on the Cloudfront tab, then Create Distribution. Name your bucket, and you can set up CNAMEs (media1.mydomain.com, media2.mydomain.com). You’ll have to set these up in your DNS with your registrar as well. I’ll get to why you would even want to do this in a bit, but this gives you various subdomains you can use to access the same resources in your bucket. In addition to these subdomains, you’ll be able to access your resources at locations indicated under “Domain Name” and “Origin Bucket.”
You can get the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key required to upload resources via S3 Browser by creating an Access Key under Account > Security Credentials.
The most daunting thought about using Cloudfront was uploading all of my resources, and pointing my code to them, but there are a number of WordPress plugins that automate parts this process, including W3 Total Cache, which I’ll cover in a bit.
Using Multiple Domain Names
Why did I set up multiple subdomains on my Cloudfront media bucket? It turns out, the HTTP spec states that “A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy,” and, even though this spec was written in 1999, many browsers still adhere to this specification. So, if you are accessing more than two assets from one domain – be they images, CSS files, or Javascript files – many users’ browsers will only download them two at a time.
The workaround for this is to set up multiple subdomains that all point to your Cloudfront bucket (media1.mydomain.com, media2.mydomain.com, media3.mydomain.com, media4.mydomain.com), and rotate through them as you code URLs to various media assets. I’ve been advised that 4 subdomains is plenty, as this will allow any browser to download as many as 8 files at once.
Doing it all (almost) with W3 Total Cache
The caching component of the advice I found has been around long enough that not only is there a WordPress Plugin called WP-Cache, there is also another plugin called WP-Super Cache. Now, there is the amazing W3 Total Cache, which not only caches your pages, it also minifies (removes line breaks to save space), and uploads files in your media library to a CDN, such as Amazon Cloudfront.
While W3 Total Cache does upload to a CDN your wp-includes, theme files, CSS, Javascript files, and any other files you specify, it does not soon will change the paths to any images within your CSS files , and in your theme files, so you have to do this manually. But, since W3 Total Cache doesn’t soon will support the multiple subdomains I was talking about, this is probably for the best. I manually inserted different subdomains into my CSS and theme files.
Be careful with minifying your Javascript files, as I found that doing so broke Google Website Optimizer tracking code.
Other Optimization Tricks
- CSS Sprites: This is the technique of putting all of your design graphics in one giant file, and selectively displaying parts of it through CSS. This reduces the number of HTTP requests, and the total size of graphics to be downloaded, this reducing load time by quite a bit. It’s also a bit of a pain in the ass, so I’m saving it for a future redesign.
- Putting CSS and Javascript inline instead of in separate files (for pages that are usually the only one visited): Since I have a couple of pages that visitors hit from a search engine, and then tend to leave, I did this on a dedicated template for a few posts. This really only helps if the page in question is the only page a user is likely to visit on your site. This is not a good technique for visitors that visit multiple pages, as they will have to re-download all of your styles.
- Gzip files: but Amazon Cloudfront does this automatically.
- Yahoo outlines some other best practices you may want to try, depending on how much effort you’d like to put in.
It still remains to be seen whether this performance enhancement will improve my Google rankings, but I hope this document helps some less technical publishers understand just how much impact they can expect from the choices they make in hosting platform and front-end development.
P.S. If you do decide to use The Rackspace Cloud, I sure would appreciate it if you signed up through this link. Clearly they’ve worked well for me, but I wouldn’t mind the referral bonus.
Elsewhere on the web: How to speed up your blog (the non technical guide)
- - -You should follow me on Twitter here.
Laura Roeder said,
April 21, 2010 @ 7:07 pm
I kept reading through this post waiting for the “easy part” to come! Never did :p
Very good instruction though!
kadavy said,
April 21, 2010 @ 7:13 pm
Hey Laura, yeah, unfortunately, it’s not very simple. Hopefully I’ve removed some of the mystery from the terminology that gets thrown around with assumptions about prior knowledge.
Sid Savara said,
April 21, 2010 @ 7:52 pm
Hi David!
Great instructions – I have been putting off doing this for a while myself (and honestly, it is flat out embarrassing how long my site takes to load)
Bill Cherne said,
April 21, 2010 @ 8:10 pm
Hi David, great article about integrating with the Amazon CDN. Do you have any idea if the rackspace cloud architecture would qualify as a PCI compliant architecture for eCommerce sites?
Volomike said,
April 21, 2010 @ 9:04 pm
You should read up also on the Chennai Central plugin and read its source code to see the magic it does with 304 headers.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/chennai-central/
steve said,
April 21, 2010 @ 9:34 pm
Nice work on the workpress optimization, thanks for the tips
kadavy said,
April 21, 2010 @ 10:00 pm
Hey Bill. I don’t know anything about PCI compliance. A quick Google search indicates to me that their Managed hosting is PCI compliant, though.
Stijn said,
April 21, 2010 @ 11:42 pm
Yahoo! Smush.it is nice for when you want to compress your images. http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ I take this to the limit. Am currently on Dreamhost, and not so happy since they are in the US and I am in EU (which gives me a slow site). Your article will definately be bookmarked to my delicious. Thanks for explaininge everything so clearly.
kadavy said,
April 21, 2010 @ 11:47 pm
Stijn, thanks so much for sharing Smushit! I’ll definitely use that once I get the patience to actually optimize the images on my site.
WA said,
April 22, 2010 @ 1:43 am
As for CSS and JS-Scripts: The inline-style doesn’t do much sense as you pointed out already, since they have to be redownloaded on every request which increases file size. Instead, it is better to have them in extra files, because the user’s browser caches these files. The way to improvement is to put all JS-files in ONE single file (especially important for jQuery, if you use it with several plugins). The same goes for css.
Another improvement you didn’t mention is some kind of PHP-cache. I don’t know anything about W3 Total Cache, but does it “compile” PHP scripts to speed up run time? I’ve got some pretty decent results with eAccelerator.
Rafael Montilla said,
April 22, 2010 @ 4:07 am
I have bad experience with Rackspace. I bought a VPS 256MB for $10.95 per month, I had some problem, one month past and I could not up load any Website.
Then they billed me $130.45.
They over charge me and I do not why.
Items of interest » Blog Archive » Bookmarks for April 22nd from 09:41 to 09:43 said,
April 22, 2010 @ 4:15 am
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April 22, 2010 @ 4:41 am
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Deluxe Blog Tips said,
April 22, 2010 @ 4:53 am
Great information. I’m using shared host at BlueHost, it’s good but I cannot get the A or B grade in YSlow even try all on-page optimization that I know. I’m considering about switch to a VPS and using CDN. Your information about Rackspace is really useful for me. Thanks for sharing.
Rob Wallace said,
April 22, 2010 @ 6:13 am
I have a WP site and this info is useful. Thanks for the heads up.
Daniel Miessler said,
April 22, 2010 @ 7:04 am
So you never told us the good part: the before and after pageload times!
kadavy said,
April 22, 2010 @ 7:43 am
@WA, actually, I only put the CSS and JS inline on a couple of pages that are usually visited only once. As Yahoo says:
Regarding PHP caching – I believe we’re talking about the same thing. W3 Total Cache makes it so the server isn’t compiling your PHP every time the page is accessed.
@Daniel: It’s hard to get a truly objective reading, but as you can see from the Webmaster Tools graph at the top, load time went from about 12 seconds to about 3 seconds. In my own benchmarking with YSlow, load time went from 4.72 seconds to 1.47 seconds.
Devin Price said,
April 22, 2010 @ 8:51 am
Nice instructions David. I just moved to a VPS server last week, so this is all very fresh in the mind. It’s a ton of work- thanks for posting your steps.
After I changed hosts (pretty much how you did it), I realized there was cPanel export/import option. That would have saved all my e-mails settings etc, and I’m wondering if anyone has tried that with success.
Another tip for WordPress optimization is to load javascript and css files conditionally. A lot of plug-ins will add their specific scripts to every page on the site, when really the contact form css and javascript should only be loading on the contact page. I wrote an article about this here: http://wptheming.com/2009/12/optimize-plug-in-script-wordpress/.
On the site I was working with, we had about 200k of javascript files we were able to eliminate.
dp said,
April 22, 2010 @ 2:52 pm
You say: “Gzip files: but Amazon Cloudfront does this automatically.”
From our tests we know that Cloudfront does NOT support GZIP. The AWS forums even suggest to zip the files before uploading (your website then needs to refer visitors that can’t accept zip encoded files to not-zipped-versions).
Cristian Lavaque said,
April 22, 2010 @ 3:43 pm
Very nice tutorial. I learned a few tricks I wasn’t aware of: particularly the W3 Total Cache plugin. I didn’t know there was a plugin that uploaded the cache files to a CDN server. Thanks!
Rob Lambert said,
April 22, 2010 @ 4:36 pm
Good article … I see that this writeup got quite popular (saw in on http://delicious.com/popular) … how did your site perform with all the extra traffic ?
Ben said,
April 22, 2010 @ 5:46 pm
This post got me looking into w3 total cache plugin, and Amazon as a CDN… 4 hours later i have several of my sites using them both! I cut my load time down 70%
Pretty incredible. I had no idea that this would make such a difference.
Side note: Use the developer version of W3 Total Cache as it has better image handling and the basic performance updates hinted at in the article above.
Ferodynamics said,
April 22, 2010 @ 6:04 pm
Here’s one tip that can make things a little easier. Instead of using PhpMyAdmin, you can use MySQL Administrator on your desktop–there is now a Linux version too. So you load up MySQL Administrator and enter your credentials, then run a backup–assuming your host allows external MySQL connections. I find this is easier because you’re not confronted with a big page of radio buttons and check boxes. Now you can restore this backup to your new VPS, or anywhere you want.
PS: I use Linode.
Ferodynamics said,
April 22, 2010 @ 7:44 pm
While you’re at it, try NginX which is faster than Apache. I would say avoid cPanel as I hear it’s a big resource hog, uses up a ton of memory.
I don’t think VPS is for everyone, I would recommend you get a VPS up and running before you cancel your shared account. It’s a lot more work and now you’re responsible for security problems.
Also I think “a whole bunch of other sites” is an understatement. Your shared host may have 1000s of accounts per server–this is why they kick you out if you’re only moderately successful. And think about it, your shared account could be running on a VPS.
kadavy said,
April 23, 2010 @ 11:17 am
Rob: Yeah, I’m glad people are liking this. Yesterday was a record day for kadavy.net, but still only about 7k pageviews. I think my server handled it just fine.
Ben: Wow! I’m really glad to hear that you had results like that so fast. That alone makes writing this worth it. I agree with you on the developer version of W3 Total Cache. I couldn’t figure out why some of my images weren’t getting uploaded until I tried that out.
Ferodynamics: I keep having NginX recommended to me, so I guess I’ll have to try it eventually, but as you said, the VPS is a lot of work as it is, so I’m sticking with what I’m familiar with for now. I’m not cancelling my Dreamhost account anytime soon. I really do love their Shared Hosting for throwing little experimental websites onto.
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April 25, 2010 @ 7:34 pm
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April 26, 2010 @ 5:45 am
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Gianni said,
April 26, 2010 @ 2:21 pm
good tip on the w3 total cache, I am now using it and I must say the difference is noticeable. Thanks!
Sarah Lam said,
April 27, 2010 @ 9:58 am
It is all too technical for me to really understand how it works. However, I did try the W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin and so far it is working well.
Thu Nguyen said,
April 27, 2010 @ 5:36 pm
Interesting post David. I liked that you outlined and showed how you went about it. This would be good referencing for future efforts if I reach the amount of traffic you have. Great job!
Cheers!
Thu Nguyen
Rick Beckman said,
April 27, 2010 @ 10:02 pm
I took your suggestion and signed up for Rackspace, but it’s proving to be an infuriating mess. They have great documentation for some things, but in other areas, it’s terrible.
For instance, how did you manage to get FTP working on your server? I’ve found plenty of instructions on installing the server itself — both at Rackspace & Ubuntu’s site — but I can’t find a thing on how to use the server. What domain do I use in my FTP client? Do I have to setup any special DNS for it?
All I get are “Cannot connect” errors. There’s no way I can use SSH to manage my site completely… I *need* my Dreamweaver!
kadavy said,
April 27, 2010 @ 10:54 pm
Hey Rick,
I can’t remember a time when switching hosts wasn’t “an infuriating mess,” this time included.
That said, I haven’t even touched FTP on Rackspace, and I’m not sure why you need Dreamweaver, but if that is the case, you may be in over your head in administering your own server. I might be in over my head myself, but time will tell!
Rick Beckman said,
April 27, 2010 @ 11:03 pm
I do a lot of file tweaking and some WP plugin development, so I like to be able to use Dreamweaver to manage my files. Makes my whole workload much easier.
The up side is that I figured out my problem seconds before I got the topic reply notification for this thread. I followed Rackspace’s tutorial for setting up the IPTABLES firewall on my new server… Problem was, it completely blocked FTP.
Through some research & trial&error, I managed to get the proper ports allowed for FTP.
Everything is working smoothly now.
kadavy said,
April 27, 2010 @ 11:24 pm
Rick,
Awesome! Can’t wait to hear about your performance improvements
Erica Douglass said,
April 28, 2010 @ 11:16 am
Is this an unmanaged VPS? If you’re already paying close to $50/month, why not just use ServInt? They offer managed VPSes around that price range, so you don’t have to muck with stuff. They also come with a control panel so you don’t have to know SSH to have them. And they do include root access.
I use a ServInt VPS ($49/month) to run erica.biz and several other sites that get ~40K pageviews per month total. My page load times on erica.biz are under 1 second. I’m using WP Super Cache.
-Erica
kadavy said,
April 28, 2010 @ 11:25 am
Hey Erica! I hadn’t heard of ServInt, but I’ll have to check them out – thanks for the recommendation. And *you* should check out W3 Total Cache
Susan said,
April 30, 2010 @ 9:54 pm
I’m guessing the VPS is not under managed services? Also, is the Amazon Cloud setup as a mirror? I’m surprised it will be only be $1/month!
WTB said,
May 1, 2010 @ 3:11 pm
Thanks for the informations. I know the cache but did not know the Amazon Cloudfront. I will test it.
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May 3, 2010 @ 1:05 am
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Jared Huber said,
May 5, 2010 @ 8:09 am
Great post! Very thorough. I went through the ‘lite’ version of what you did above, moving to a somewhat faster, though still shared, host, changing my theme and killing a bunch of slow plugins. After that somewhat painful experience, I’m crossing my fingers that I don’t have to go that extra mile!
Ivand said,
May 7, 2010 @ 8:17 am
May I know what settings did you use for the Amazon AWS? I’ve been trying to calculate my estimated costs and I honestly have no idea in how to calculate everything.
When i try to use some of the presets they have it always goes to 7-8K per month
Tiyo Kamtiyono said,
May 7, 2010 @ 8:55 am
A very long article, don’t even think to read all, I just want the point about the 75%, Nice tough
dkadavy said,
May 7, 2010 @ 11:23 am
Ivand, I’m not sure what settings you mean. You say it’s 7-8k DOLLARS a month? Are you sure you’re talking about CloudFront and not some other AWS? I just got my first bill from Amazon and it was $1.75
moses adrien said,
May 8, 2010 @ 7:15 pm
Great Article. Just a few days ago I was reading on VPS hosting. Thinking of switching to this as it seems to be way better than shared. Thanks again for sharing.
Nimit kashyap said,
May 10, 2010 @ 8:34 am
very important and useful post, as Google is also giving a boost in rankings of a site that has a fast loading time.
Balaji J H said,
May 11, 2010 @ 10:06 am
Hi,
Excellent article!
Will try amazon now
Thanks
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Emor said,
May 29, 2010 @ 6:42 am
Awesome guide
. I learned about W3 Total cache from this post and after 3 hours with it, my site is blazing fast
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Marin Todorov said,
June 28, 2010 @ 5:29 am
Hi David,
that’s incredibly informative post, thanks a lot for sharing!
I have very good impression from Rackspace support – I’ve been working with them some 5-6 years ago and looking at the figures they really have a good offer.
One thing that bothers me is the setting up of the Apache/MySQL etc. It’s surely great you were able to do it yourself, but how sure are you on the security of your server? I usually use the services of sysadmin to install and configure everything according to a specs list I prepare when setting up a new server … just thinking aloud ..
Thanks again for the post, and please do post insights when the 1 bill hits you!
cheers, Marin
admin@technofreaky said,
July 5, 2010 @ 4:10 am
Great tips there..liked it
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Chris Beaman said,
July 17, 2010 @ 9:52 pm
Super informative post. On Dreamhost now, wondering why my WordPress sites are so slow… Thank you so much for this!
Aaron said,
July 21, 2010 @ 8:45 pm
Awesome job David. I am really a big fan of W3 Total Cache. I’ve seen it increase the speed of many blogs, especially on shared hosting. Good tips on using sprites as well. If you check out blogReaction, you will notice almost every image is served from a single ~50kb sprite png. Really good tutorial on moving from shared to dedicated/cloud as well – Thanks.
Paul said,
August 8, 2010 @ 11:47 am
What a great post! I Stumbled it right when I needed it because I’m going to make an identical change. In the course of last couple years I managed to create some websites and blogs and now each one of them is on a separate host. This makes it hard to maintain them as I have to upgrade WordPress one by one (and I run blogs in multiple languages so it’s even more work). I want it all in one place. Now thanks to your article I have confidence that this is the right choice and most stumbling points are eliminated. Kudos!