Optimize WordPress For Heavy Traffic

Following on from Faster WordPress, which went up on Shout a couple of weeks ago, this post explores how to optimise WordPress for high traffic. We’ll take high traffic in a small blog context — 1,000 or so visits in a day, but exactly the same techniques apply to much larger traffic blogs.

The average WordPress theme isn’t optimised. Whilst it may claim to be or may in fact be to an extent, the nature of WordPress themes means they have to be able to fit in any situation and so they are never going to be as well optimised as a theme which has been designed specifically for a single purpose. I’m not saying don’t use an off-the-shelf theme, just you’ll need to customise it in order to get the best performance out of it.

As we go through this post, the methods we’re going to use will get increasingly complicated — start with the first and go as far as you can!

Get a good host

You can do all the optimisation you like, but if your hosting isn’t up to scratch, it’ll have absolutely no use. Avoid over subscribed shared plans on the likes of GoDaddy and HostGator and get a plan that suits the level of traffic you’re likely to get. WPShout is hosted by WPWebHost and is on the equivalent of the Buddy Plan but is still on a server with 164 other sites — something far from ideal. I would, however, recommend WPWebHost. The support is on the whole good and, more importantly, the site stays up the vast majority of the time.

You can see which other sites are on your server with this tool.