A High-Performance Wordpress Installation

Why

Performance is already important for modern Wordpress sites as users don't want to wait for loading.

However, Google Core Web Vitals update this year will make performance more important page ranking will be impacted significantly. This is measured using tools such as Pagespeed.

What Can I do about this for my Wordpress site?

1. Get faster hosting.
2. Get a caching plugin.
3. Get away from Wordpress page builders, and use Gutenberg with a light theme.

But I already have Siteground, Kinsta or WP Engine

Using Siteground, WP Engine or Kinsta are all great options for the average user.

However with the solution here you can improve your Pagespeed, in my tests, by 10 points (do a Kinsta comparison in next video)

and Monthly Cost ?

For this example I will use Google Cloud + Cloudflare. You can get $300 credits if you sign up for a new Google Cloud account.

Kinsta is $30 for 1 WP install, 25k visits, 10gb disk, SSL + CDN.

This solution is [free (VM), $7.67 (Mysql)] for many WP installs, unlimited visits, 10gb disk, SSL +CDN with fast Litespeed caching.

You can scale the VM and database specs as necessary when your site grows.

Let's get started.

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1: Faster Hosting

Setup a VM Instance with Google Cloud

You can use any cloud (I've used Oracle, AWS, Azure), but Google seems to be the most cost-effective option.

We will use the (f1-micro) which costs nothing... for ever! . You can upgrade this to a better CPU if needed later.

• choose location
• open ports: HTTP, HTTPS
• Boot disk: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
• Networking apply tag: wordpressvm ,
• use a startup script to install OpenLitespeed, Wordpress, PHP :

#!/bin/bash
apt update -y
apt install firewalld -y
firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=80/tcp
firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=443/tcp
firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=7080/tcp
firewall-cmd --reload
wget -O - http://rpms.litespeedtech.com/debian/enable_lst_debian_repo.sh | sudo bash
apt-get install lsphp74 -y
apt install lsphp74-common lsphp74-curl lsphp74-imap lsphp74-json lsphp74-mysql lsphp74-opcache lsphp74-imagick lsphp74-memcached lsphp74-redis -y
apt-get install openlitespeed -y
/usr/local/lsws/bin/lswsctrl start
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/andygrillo/litespeed-wordpress-vm.git
cp litespeed-wordpress-vm**/**httpd_config.conf /usr/local/lsws/conf/
cp litespeed-wordpress-vm/vhconf.conf /usr/local/lsws/conf/vhosts/Example/
/usr/local/lsws/bin/lswsctrl restart
apt install redis -y
systemctl start redis-server
systemctl enable redis-server
cd /usr/local/lsws/Example/html/
wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xvfz latest.tar.gz
chown -R nobody:nogroup /usr/local/lsws/Example/html/wordpress
find /usr/local/lsws/Example/html/wordpress/ -type d -exec chmod 750 {} \;
find /usr/local/lsws/Example/html/wordpress/ -type f -exec chmod 640 {} \;
chown -R nobody:nogroup /usr/local/lsws/Example/html/wordpress

Add Networking Rules

• Networking>VPC Networks>Firewall
• add 7080 firewall rule with IP range: 0.0.0.0/0
• add 3306, 33060 firewall rule with IP range: 10.0.0.0/0

At this point, go and make a coffee. It takes some time for your new VM to process the startup script. You will know its ready when you can successfully do the following command in SSH:

• SSH connect, from the Google cloud portal next to your VM, to create password for OpenLitespeed dashboard:

sudo /usr/local/lsws/admin/misc/admpass.sh

• go to dashboard:

http://102.021.03.2:7080

• Add ip address or domain and do Soft Restart

>Listeners>Default>Virtual Host Mappings>Domains

• Copy the Primary Internal IP 10.128.0.2

Setup a separate MySQL database

We will then use a separate managed MySQL database (db.t2.micro)

• Machine type: Shared core
• Same location as VM
• Add root password
• Storage: 10GB
• Connections: Private IP, default automatic IP range.
• Connections: no Public
• Connect to add IP of VM: 10.128.0.2 (or your specific IP)
• Click on instance to get IP of database
• Create database wordpress

Now you can login to your website again, using the IP of your instance, and enter the details:

Database name: Wordpress
Username: Root
Password: (password created with MySQSL)
Database Host: Internal IP of MySQL
Table Prefix: wp_

Your site should now be ready!