Some businesses are able to do well enough with sales and growth without having a website, but these days there are fewer and fewer of them doing that. If you’re an eCommerce venture of any sort then you’re definitely not going to be one of them as the very nature of what you’re doing will require the website to be the ‘place’ where purchases are made. Even if you’re not selling goods or services online you will likely still have a website and rely on it to give you the visibility you want. Linux server hosting is the best fit for most websites, but for WordPress business sites it may be necessary to make setup changes to have your site operating at its best.
Those changes are usually best understood and implemented by someone who’s web-savvy and for a lot of business owners with a website that’s not one of their strengths. Which is perfectly fine, and it’s for reasons like this that managed WordPress hosting Canada is such a good option. Business owners pay more for their web hosting each month but have the reassurance that everything required to have their site optimized is taken care of by the web hosting provider. The most important objective there will be higher search results rankings for their site, but there are a lot of other big advantages to this type of web hosting too.
There will be instances where a WordPress-built site is on a Linux server, and sometimes when a site requires the space and resource-access that that comes with a virtual private server and VPS hosting there is no choice but to be on the host’s Linux servers. Even with the best Linux web hosting in Canada it can be the case that a Wordpress site isn’t incompatible with that type of web hosting, but just that there are functional aspects of it that aren’t compatible in the most ideal way. The hosts are going to continue to have themselves set up for proving Linux server hosting because it’s the best fit for most sites though.
So what we’ll do with this week’s entry here is look at what is needed to optimize Linux on WordPress hosting servers. That may fall within the limits of what you’re able to do on your own via your website’s cPanel controls if you’re with us here at 4GoodHosting, or it may also be possible with whatever webmaster controls your host has provided for you.
Speedier Site
We glanced off the topic of better website SEO earlier, and your site’s web hosting can factor into how high your site is coming up in search results when you are on Linux server hosting. Google’s ranking algorithm has been adapted to this because page loading speeds are that important, and a site that’s not a good component fit with its web hosting may have slower loading times.
That’s not good for obvious reasons, because a slow site means less visitors and that is always going to be detrimental to a small business that’s looking to grow itself online an via the website. Fortunately there are optimization techniques that can help with getting the best performances of your WordPress site and your Linux VPS, but some of them may be limited based on the web host you’re currently working with. That leads us to remind you that you can always get a free website transfer if you’re looking to move to a Canadian web hosting provider that has superior servers and ones that fit your website better.
Shared web hosting with any of them is probably going to be an insufficient match if you have an eCommerce site that has increasing inflow volumes of site visitors. If you’re in business this is exactly what you want to be happening, but it may eventually mean you need to upgrade to VPS hosting if you want to have the full menu of advanced optimization techniques being doable. And some managed VPS providers won’t give you full control (root access) to your VPS.
Linux VPS hosting powered by enterprise SSD drives is going to best for any WordPress web site and having full control (root access) over the server is what you will need to perform the server-side optimizations we’re about to recommend here.
The Smart 7
- Use a Solid Software Stack
Using a solid software stack like LEMP is right in line with getting the best of your WordPress installation. Most importantly, it consists of Nginx - the number one choice for running the busiest sites on the Internet. Big time improvements with the performance of your WordPress site and your server can be had with this software stock. If you don’t have LEMP installed on your WordPress server then it’s a good choice to install Nginx, MySQL and PHP-FPM. Running the latest version of the software is very important too, so make sure that all your WordPress code, Nginx and the other server software are up to date.
Updating your PHP to PHP 7 will be very beneficial too as PHP 7 is considered as twice as faster than PHP 5.6, plus using an approximately 30% less memory and being able to respond to three times as many server requests. Do this and you’ll quickly see that reducing the server load by disabling the unused services running on it will have a huge impact on the performance of your site. The server will be set up to handle more traffic and the stability and availability of your database server is much more assured.
- Cache
Caching is a standard approach for any site master aiming to speed up a WordPress website. Cache with maximum effectiveness and it’s possible to improve the performance of your site several hundred times over. Server-side caching has the most value here, and adding an opcode caching like OPcache to your PHP will improve its performances significantly. This is very simple method as OPcache comes with the PHP core by default as long as your PHP version.
We’re focusing on WordPress eCommerce sites here, and so as is always the case with these websites it’s all about plugins if you want to improve any aspect of the site and its usability / performance. Caching plugins for WordPress can be used here to cache WordPress posts and pages as static files. Installing a caching plugin in WordPress is fairly simple, just as any caching plugin in WordPress.
Leverage browser caching is also effective. Browser caching can be paired with the best Linux web hosting Canada to improve page load speeds and overall website snappiness. What this involves is having the client’s web browser downloading and storing assets like CSS, JS and images into the local storage for a certain amount of time. This then reduces the number of requests for each page and minimizes resulting server load.
- Add Gzip Compression
Gzip compression works well to decrease the size of data origination from your server. Less of it to be handled and transmitted with server requests means a faster loading WordPress site even if it is on Linux server hosting. We talked about some plugins are super helpful for these site reorientations, but you should still be selective about which ones you use. Installing unnecessary plugins and plugins that are coded inefficiently may take away from your site’s performance. The recommendation is to install and enable the WordPress plugins that you truly need for your project as well as to make sure that those plugins are not slowing down your site.
- Choose Better Site Themes
Having a well-coded theme for a WordPress site will usually result in a faster-loading website. Some of the ones developers included with their products are a bit expensive but there are plenty of well-coded WordPress themes out there that are either free or don’t cost too much. Not much more than a small amount of research will be needed for you to find and select a theme that will be conducive to faster loading times for you WordPress site’s pages.
- Image Optimization
Even people who aren’t experts with the workings of a website will know that especially large images on a web page can be problematic. Unoptimized and large images will load slowly which and this can lead visitors and potential customers to decide to click away from your site while it’s still loading. To save time, bandwidth and improve your search engine ranking you need to take care of the graphics displayed on your website. Optimize the images by using any of the WordPress plugins developed for this reason.
WP Smush is a good one, and sometimes it’s also helpful if you can reduce the number of images by replacing them with text.
- Minify CSS & JavaScript Files
Minifying CSS files is also a standard recommendation if you’re looking to optimize a WordPress site that’s on a Linux server. You can try to combine them into a single, optimized file and this applies for the JS files too. Have a look at the many plugins that can help with this, including Total Cache ones.
- Use a CDN
The reason a Content Delivery Network is so helpful when optimizing WordPress on Linux servers has everything to do with proximity. This means the geographical distance between the server where your website is hosted and where the site visitor is located will factor into faster or slower loading speeds. Having a CDN on your site means you can offload the static files as well as the images so your website visitors can have better and speedier site experience that’s the result of reduced server load.
A CDN is an easily-implementable fix for enhancing a site’s performance and especially when both the web host’s data center and the bulk of your customer base are local. And most of the hosts in Canada will have Linux server hosting as their primary offering simply because it’s the best fit for most websites. WordPress sites tend to be the exception to that, but what we’ve laid out here today reinforces the fact that there’s no real reason why you absolutely can’t have a WordPress site on a Linux server.
