WordPress Performance Optimization Best Practice For Membership Websites
Maximize your membership website’s potential with expert WordPress performance optimization practices. Enhance speed and user satisfaction now.
Dive deep into WordPress performance optimization specifically tailored for membership websites. Explore practical techniques and expert insights that will help you enhance your site’s speed, security, and overall functionality. Don’t miss out on this valuable resource.
With regular co-host Haroon Q. Raja.
This Week Show’s Sponsors
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The Show’s Main Transcript
Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to Dubai. Sorry. Three, two, one. Welcome back, folks, to the membership machine show. This is episode 81. In this episode, we will be talking about WordPress performance with a focus on a membership or community membership website. What are the key things that you need to know in 2024? I’ve got my regular co-host with me. So Harun, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:17:12.500] – Haroon Q. Raja
Thank you, Jonathan, and hi, everyone. So I’ve been working in the tech industry for around two and a half decades and with WordPress for over almost a decade and a half. Excuse me. And over the years, I’ve worked with pretty much every tool under my belt when it comes to WordPress. During this time, I’ve had to optimize my client sites to sell them when they started experiencing lots of traffic. So that’s what today’s show is going to be all about. The performance of a website dictates what sort of traffic can it serve efficiently without your users pulling their hair out because the site is taking way too long to load. So yeah, that’s where we’re coming from.
[00:18:00.510] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. We will be talking about the different types of hosting providers, such as PHP, PHP workers, and a host of different things. But before we go into the meat potatoes of this show, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out that I’ve, we’ve got some great special offers you can get from the sponsors and a created list of the best plugins for a membership website. You can get all these goodies by going over to WP-Tonic.com/deals and WP-Tonic.com/deals, and you find all the goodies there. So let’s go straight into it, Harun. So I think then let’s start with the different types of hosting solutions out there. We provide hosting at WP-Tonic, but I think I can still reasonably be black-balanced about the competition and the different offerings. We’re not going to mostly talk about any specific solution, but there are different types like shared hosting, VPS, and managed WordPress hosting. So what are some key things that you think people need to know?
[00:19:29.330] – Haroon Q. Raja
Harry, first and foremost, you’ve got to differentiate between two types of hosting. One is just cookie-cutter hosting sites that aim to sell as many accounts as possible without caring too much about providing any personalized service, without being particular about having clients deliver the best experience to their visitors. They just want to sell as many accounts as possible. And then there’s the type of hosts that care about your site running well on their hosting, that care about providing you with the right tech stack, with the right tools to help you run your site on it in an efficient manner, to help you serve traffic in an efficient manner. So you’ve got to differentiate between these two types of hosts and avoid a lot of mainstream hosts that are owned by the same company. Not going to name names, but they usually run data centers cramped with old hardware and put as many sites as possible on each server, and the support is usually very lackluster as well. You have to avoid those, you have to pick a hosting provider that cares about your site as well.
[00:20:57.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s very confusing for people, isn’t it, Harun? Because you’ve got different types of hosting providers with different business models, you’ve got a host of new technologies that have come around in the hosting area around cloud hosting. Some of these terms, shared hosting, are just like the normal model where you’ve got a server and you just have shared hosting resources, which is all kind of mixed up with cloud solutions. But the fundamentals are still there. What Harine said is that the cheaper hosting providers are about cramming as many websites on a particular solution as possible. I think these discount providers, even if they’re trying to persuade you to sign up for a more expensive hosting account, I personally wouldn’t utilize these because I just don’t think their technology and their business model will work. With a membership and a community membership website that’s got a reasonable amount of members, I think you’re gonna have problems. But with better hosting solutions from reputable companies like WP Engine or Kinster or similar, you can still have problems because they will help you out a lot more and provide much better support.
[00:22:42.930] – Jonathan Denwood
But their business model relies a lot on their technology stack with relies a lot on cashing and cashing is really an enemy of having a membership and a community membership website that has a really good experience for the students and the end users. Would you agree with some of the things I’ve outlined, Emily?
[00:23:06.760] – Haroon Q. Raja
I’ll agree, and I’ll add here a bit more description about the sort of hosting setups we’re talking about. So some of these hosts, the typical shared host, they operate on the basis of just running hardware servers stacked up in racks that are just like every server, has limited resources and the servers cannot be scaled. You can’t just simply add more ram to a server. Within seconds someone actually has to go in and plug more ram into that hardware, into that hardware computer. Same goes for cpu’s and all. And then there are cloud hosts that have sort of virtualized the infrastructure in a way that there’s very little friction when it comes to adding more resources to a particular client’s hardware, because that particular client is given virtualized cpu, virtualized ram and adding more ram. Adding more cpu just takes minutes and doesn’t actually involve a person physically walking into the data center and plugging in more hardware, because they’ve already got huge data centers with all the hardware configured in a way that they can serve their clients virtualized versions of that hardware at will. So that’s the difference between typical shared hosting and cloud hosting.
[00:24:29.480] – Haroon Q. Raja
That’s where choosing cloud hosting is more beneficial to sites that may need to scale at any given time, that may need to start serving more traffic at any given time. Distinction between shared and cloud. And some people are under the impression that cloud isn’t shared, which is wrong. Cloud hosting is also shared. You are sharing vps resources when you’re on, let’s say, Digitalocean or vulture or AWS. But at the same time, you can scale easily. That’s the main difference between shared and cloud hosting. And then there’s managed and unmanaged. So unmanaged hosts just give you a control panel and the hardware resources tied to it, and then you run everything on it. You deploy the site, you take care of backups, you take care of security other than server level security and backups. And managed hosts give you a lot more tools. They give you a lot like properly managed hosts, they give you a lot more hand holding too, at times, depending on the provider and the package you’ve got with them. So that can also go a long way towards running a successful business site beyond just a brochure site that gets some odd traffic on and off.
[00:25:45.550] – Haroon Q. Raja
And then there are fully managed hosts who practically act technology partners with you who help you make tech decisions rather than just providing you with a pre built solution. And those are generally the most expensive, but worth every penny, in my opinion, for any serious business. Now coming to what Jonathan said about caching. So caching is I think the most major factor when it comes to sites that involve a lot of user interaction because we’re going to discuss it in detail in the next few topics today. Today in which we are going to discuss caching in particular. But caching doesn’t really work the typical way for membership sites and for e commerce sites and for elearning sites and all. So as Jonathan mentioned, you have to make sure that you pick a host that doesn’t just rely on serving as much data of the customers as well.
[00:26:58.500] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re frozen there. Oh, you come back, you’re freezing a little bit. Hopefully you’re on the right, your right network. You need to check.
[00:27:08.510] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yeah, I should be on the right temperature.
[00:27:10.470] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, right. No, you come back. Actually it’s not too bad.
[00:27:16.960] – Haroon Q. Raja
Okay.
[00:27:17.550] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. So let’s move on because I is confusing. And the only other thing I would say is that when it comes to managed hosting in the WordPress space, folks, it’s one of the most abused terms in my opinion. In the WordPress hosting space, it’s been utilized for all different types on kind of managed hosting, which I don’t consider managed. It’s got to the stage where it’s become degraded as a term. So at Wptonic we say we’re hosting plus because we update all the plugins on all our client websites every week. If you’re not on a support plus plan with us, if there’s a problem with a plugin update, you’ve got to self report it to us, but then we will sort it out as part of you, the normal hosting package. But like I say, it’s been degraded to such an extent that in some ways it doesn’t mean much. Let’s move on then. I think it’s linked to the cheaper kind of hosting providers because a lot of them don’t update the version of PHP. And then especially when more demanding membership and community focus high buddy boss websites, the amount of PHP workers that you have is important.
[00:28:58.270] – Jonathan Denwood
What would you say about this? The PHP version, the PHP workers.
[00:29:04.790] – Haroon Q. Raja
So with PHP, especially after version five for quite a while, despite PHP seven being out, lots and lots of hosts had continued to just stick with PHP five because that was the supported version, the earliest supported version from WordPress. But then over the past few years they decided to upgrade to PHP seven, and some were very slow to upgrade to PHP seven. And since eight came out. So every new PHP version since seven has been adding substantial performance improvements. And if the host isn’t supporting the latest and greatest PHP version, you’re missing out on all the benefits of those improvements in PHP itself. Because your site score runs on PHP, WordPress runs on PHP. So you’ve got to pick a host that supports the latest versions of PHP. That’s very important. And then when it comes to PHP workers, workers are basically server processes. So if your site is on a, let’s say eight core server, but you are assigned only one PHP worker, that means your site can only utilize one core of that server. The rest, seven cores, cannot be utilized at any given time. But if you are provided with, let’s say, four PHP workers, that means four of those cores can be utilized at any given time.
[00:30:34.250] – Haroon Q. Raja
One PHP worker utilizing one server core to actually provide four times the performance, literally four times the performance when it comes to serving dynamic visitors, like visitors who are actually interacting with your site, rather than just visiting a page. So let’s actually now, before we move on further, let’s now digging. Otherwise it’s number seven on today’s list and I don’t think we’re going to be able to cover the entire list of this session today. We’re going to split it, we’re going to have to split it into two, but I think we’re going to move the caching bit up here rather than discussing it later. So let’s discuss the types of caching. So caching is basically serving visitors data that was generated for a previous visitor. So let’s say your server has just booted, you’ve just made your site live on it, and a visitor comes to the site, the site does all the work and it generates a page to be sent to the user. Now what the server can do is with server level caching, the server can take a copy of that generated page and keep it in a separate fast storage area, so that when the next visitor comes requesting for the same page, requesting for the same resource, the server does not have to do all the grunt work of running PHP and then fetching the data from the database and putting it together in the format required, and then serving it to users.
[00:32:07.150] – Haroon Q. Raja
PHP processing requires a lot of server resources and then fetching data from the database requires even more server resources. So if the server doesn’t have to do that repeatedly, it can serve more traffic. If the full page cache is available, then the next visitor who requests, the same resource is going to be served the version of the page that is in the cache. Now that’s one layer of cache that’s called full page server cache. Then there’s opcode cache. So when PHP runs some code, it first compiles it into another form of code that’s called opcode, which is what that computer actually runs. And with every request, if PHP is going to compile the code of that page into opcode, that’s also going to take resources. If that code hasn’t changed, that means that code doesn’t need to be compiled on every single visit to that page. So with proper opcode caching, that code, once compiled, is kept and run for next subsequent visits without having to be recompiled. And then there’s database caching. So whenever a site requests any data from the database that is also kept in a cache, and for subsequent requests, that cache data can be used even by PHP, rather than every single time having to go to the database server and fetch that data afresh.
[00:33:35.820] – Haroon Q. Raja
So all of these caching layers combined and then there’s browser cache. For example, the CSS files and JavaScript files can be set to be reused from your browser. You visit one page of a website and the CSS in JavaScript was loaded. Then you visit another page of the same website that uses the same styling because it’s the same site and that uses pretty much same or similar JavaScript scripts and images, logos, certain images that are shared across the site. If those resources were downloaded on a previous visit, they don’t need to be downloaded again for your browser. So all of these caching layers combined can speed up a user’s experience and can allow the server to serve more users at any given time. Now the issue with membership sites is if Jonathan is a member and I’m a member, as long as we don’t log into the site, it’s fine if we get served the same cached results. But the moment we log in, Jonathan needs a different page and I need a different page in the user dashboard. Because Jonathan’s dashboard will show Jonathan’s progress, the courses Jonathan is enrolled in, and so on, while my dashboard will show my progress, the courses I’m enrolled in, the lesson I’m currently on.
[00:34:47.130] – Haroon Q. Raja
So being served the exact same cached page is no longer relevant. So for logged in users on e commerce sites where there’s cart activity, and for membership sites for elearning sites, it’s important that we don’t rely on full page caching. Although full page caching does come into play for pages that don’t have different content. But we need servers that are way more efficient at database caching. Because if Jonathan and I are requesting the same list of courses we’re on a page that shows the same list of courses. Then at least the query that is run to fetch that list of courses from the database doesn’t need to be repeated. If Jonathan has visited, has returned that query, I can be shown that secretly results without again knocking at the door of the database to ask for the same results. So it’s important that more nuanced caching, more per case basis caching is deployed. In such cases, opcode caching and data processing becomes way more important in such scenarios.
[00:35:56.020] – Jonathan Denwood
I think we probably lost quite a few of the people listening to this. But the main, the main thing I think you’ve got to get by listening to Harun is that this can get complicated, folks. What I mean by that, based on my experience, I’m not, I have a fair bit of experience in my company. I’m more the person that deals with customers and marketing. Haroon has more experience than the technical side of servers. But based on my experience folks, a lot of people get into a bit of a hot mess. They have, they can have multiple caching plugins installed. They don’t. They can have caching as part their server and then you can add cashing with what is called a CDN, which is a way of, that can be introduced into the mixture. So you can end up with a bit of a hot mess. Am I on the right if you don’t have people? And that’s why it’s important to go with a provider that kind of specialize in this area a bit because you can get into a bit of a hot mess here. Would you, am I on the right track here, Harold?
[00:37:25.520] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yes, you are right.
[00:37:28.470] – Jonathan Denwood
So we cover the cash and then you, then you got the host uses this different software, used to be Apache. And how do you pronounce the one? Is it Nixon?
[00:37:41.710] – Haroon Q. Raja
Nginx.
[00:37:43.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, Nginx. I always do that. And I think Nginx, not so. I think there’s some others out there as well. But Nginx. I think it was developed by Facebook, wasn’t it? Originally. I think it’s open source, isn’t it? But I think the open source. But I think it was originally developed by Facebook because they were having problems with the enormous data setup. And basically this is a kind of, it’s the software that on top where the website works with the hardware, it controls various elements. And so really if you’re dealing with a more high performance website, which you are with a membership or community, you do really probably need Nginx. But I’m not sure if you would agree with that. What’s your own view?
[00:38:46.280] – Haroon Q. Raja
That I agree, although the differences have reduced over time. But Apache, which was like the standard HTTP web server from the early days of the Internet, and Nginx have huge differences in the way they serve traffic. So in fact Nginx was created because Apache couldn’t serve a lot of concurrent users actively engaging with the site. That was why Nginx was created in the first place. And the differences were massive. Massive. Till a few years back the differences were massive. Even now the differences are very very substantial because Apache starts to lag when it starts serving many users at any particular given time interacting with the website. So the differences could be as much as like ten times. It’s not like 10% or 20% difference, it’s more like ten x difference, 20 x difference, which is huge. So choosing a server that runs Nginx goes a long way towards scaling your site compared to Apache. And then there’s lightspeed as well, which is another server technology.
[00:40:04.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah that’s, that’s, that seems, that seems to be the main, it either seems Nginx or lightspeed.
[00:40:12.170] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yes.
[00:40:12.640] – Jonathan Denwood
What are quickly I don’t want to go too far because I think we can get through all this quick if we have we’re but Lightspeed with Nginx, are there any real when it comes to membership and buddy boss, are there any major differences between those two in performance?
[00:40:31.700] – Haroon Q. Raja
One major difference for certain users who need to use Apache like htaccess files. Nginx doesn’t support htaccess files for any custom rules. It has its own configuration format of files which need to be set in the server configuration level rather than at your, in your sites folder. Htaccess files require either Apache or Nginx or, sorry, Lightspeed. And the free version of Lightspeed has limited support for htaccess files, while the pro version Lightspeed enterprise has better support for htaccess files. I personally don’t use hd access files.
[00:41:13.180] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s the benefit of that support?
[00:41:15.870] – Haroon Q. Raja
When it comes voice, the user can put a file called dot htaccess in their document root and use it to change a lot of server directives. I personally am not a fan of that approach in the first place.
[00:41:31.320] – Jonathan Denwood
No, I’m not either. Right, so let’s go on to one more before we go for a break and then we can bomb through the others.
[00:41:41.560] – Haroon Q. Raja
Right?
[00:41:42.320] – Jonathan Denwood
I think the other last thing I touched on it is cdNs. In my experience, adding this to a setup that’s not been set up in the right way, you can get into a real witch’s brew. As I put it. What CDN is, folks, is a kind of form of cash in at the service center. You can have your website hosted in North America. And if somebody was looking at the website in India, even though the information has been sent at light speed almost, or getting close to it, there’s going to be a lag. So to deal with that and to improve the situation, they can take a copy of the website, the images and maybe audio videos and do some don’t and they can store them in data centers that are closer to the person that’s viewing the website in India. So it makes the website seem to load quicker. Have I got the fundamentals right there, Harun?
[00:42:56.920] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yes, yes you do. So basically, if you’re serving global traffic, if your visitors are spread all across the world, then having a CDN is very very important because then someone from a particular region requests like visits your website. Then the static data, which is the images, audio, video, certain cases video, not all cases video, but certain cases video and CSS files, JavaScript files. These static resources are going to get cached on the nearest data center to that visitor’s location. And CDN providers have data centers all across the world. They could have like hundred locations across the world in which those copies are kept as soon as a user nearest to that particular data center requests your site. So for next visits, not just from that user, but from any user in that region, they’re not going to have to download all of those static resources from your server. It has two benefits. Firstly, your server’s bandwidth usage decreases because it doesn’t need to supply the same resources to 100 users from a particular region. It needs to supply them to one user and they’re cached at the data center nearest to that user. The data center of the CDN provider and subsequent users get those resources from that CDN provider.
[00:44:16.370] – Haroon Q. Raja
So your bandwidth usage per month decreases a lot if you’re serving global traffic. And the other benefit is speed. Those people get better speed because they get lots of resources from a data center that is like 80 milliseconds away from them compared to your data center, which might be 1 second away from them.
[00:44:34.780] – Jonathan Denwood
I found though, if, if it’s not set up correctly and people, it’s because some of the circumstances where you can have multiple different caching instances and it, it can cause a lot of confusion if it’s yes. Am I about right about that?
[00:44:54.720] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yes, you’re right. So basically, caching doesn’t go well with sites that have content that’s changing a lot. If a particular page is going to change, then the cached version needs to have this data added to it, that this is the time for which this cache is valid. If, let’s say a cached page is valid for 24 hours, then within 24 hours everyone is going to be served that cache page. If you make changes within those 24 hours, they are going to be reflected after 24 hours when the previous cache has expired, and then the new cached version is generated. If your site is changing every 1520 minutes, then you can’t serve that part of a site as a cached page for 24 hours. For that, you might need to set up cache to expire within like half an hour or maybe 20 minutes, maybe 15 minutes. So it all depends on being set up correctly based on your traffic, based on your particular site’s requirements, rather than a one size fit all solution.
[00:45:54.890] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, we’re going to go firm with break and then we’re going to attempt to blast through the others. We’ve made quicker progress. I think we can get through most of it by the end of the show. So I say we’re going to go for our break, folks. Got cut messages from a couple other sponsors. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a bit of a discussion about hosting. Don’t worry though, if you go with the right hosting provider and the right setup, it goes pretty well. It’s just that you’ve got to get things set up and then it normally runs pretty sweet. But before we go into the other part, the show, I just want to mention that we’ve got a great Facebook community Facebook group page, the membership machine show. It’s totally free and you can get some free knowledge there. And it’s a great little community of WordPress people and people building a business, a membership business on WordPress and anything else you want to ask, like I say, just go to Facebook and put in membership machine show and the group should show up and you can join it.
[00:47:08.930] – Jonathan Denwood
So let’s move on. I found this on various lists, premier DNS and free DNS. We use Cloudflare a lot with people. I’m not sure if this makes a big difference. I don’t know what your faults about because most of them are getting their DNS from there where they’ve got the domain hosted, and we just use Cloudflare to, to take over the DNS record side of it. So what’s your thoughts about this one?
[00:47:43.210] – Haroon Q. Raja
So DNS basically is responsible for turning like HQ Raja.com into the IP address of the site where the IP address of the server where the site is situated. So a free DNS provider, like your hosting DNS provider, usually would take something like 200 milliseconds or 300 milliseconds to make that translation. But something like Cloudflare or AWS is route 53. They would probably take somewhere like 20 milliseconds. So it’s like several orders of magnitude difference in the resolution time. It’s called resolution time, the time it takes to turn a domain name into its IP address. That’s the DNS resolution time. So yes, it does make a difference. It does make a substantial enough difference to matter. And you don’t really need premium DNS. Cloudflare is the best in class in the world. The only rival that comes close to it and goes neck to neck with it, rather, is Amazon’s DNS, which is route 53 or route 51? Route 53. Unless you are on Amazon’s infrastructure already, you don’t really need to go for AWS’s DNS. Cloudflare is the best DNS provider on earth, period.
[00:49:07.070] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. On to the next thing. But I’m going to keep this sweet because we could have a whole show about this subject. It’s linked to what Harun said about PHP and having the latest version. If you don’t have the right page builder that’s updated or the right theme based on the page builder you’re using, plus the plugins, if they’re not all kept up to date, you can have the latest version of PHP and you still, you’re not going to benefit. Now, to me, you’ve got two choices. In 204, you can either go the the Gutenberg route or you can go bricks and now you go to Gutenberg. There’s, I’ve listed three here, WP Cadence spectra, which is Astra generatepress. I think either three of those you could go with. I’ve also listed elementor because it’s still got an enormous amount of market share. But when it comes to pure performance, I don’t think I would really use it with a membership buddy boss website unless I had to, if I was going with either Cadence, Spectra, Astra, generatepress or bricks if I was looking for performance with WordPress. So what’s your response to what I’ve just said?
[00:50:39.550] – Haroon Q. Raja
I completely agree. I personally use bricks, but for those who choose to stay in the Gutenberg ecosystem, the three you listed, cadence spectra and generate press with its generate blocks add on, they are among the best of the best. And there’s also green shift. That’s also pretty good. You can’t go wrong with that either. There was quickly, but that’s no more, unfortunately. So yeah, let’s, let’s not get into the.
[00:51:14.710] – Jonathan Denwood
That could be another whole show on its own.
[00:51:17.350] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yeah, but bricks performance elementor. Because I personally use bricks and I used to use Elementor, the performance difference is like not just ten x, it’s like for me it’s been more like 2030 x with bricks, I just build in a sensible manner and not just throwing every add on pack out there for just a couple of different blocks that I need, I just built sensibly in bricks. And the results speak for themselves. It’s like more than 90 pagespeeds score on Google page speed insights without any optimization, which is like unheard of in the elementor world. So yes, choosing the right page builder matters a lot. It matters immensely.
[00:52:02.970] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, we’ve gone with most of our people that want to build something themselves and we offer a set of Pacific themes that we developed or starter websites is WP cadence because we found that for the DIY, for the person that wants to build out a website themselves, that’s not a professional like Haroon, it offers the best performance metrics. But if you’re going full custom and you’re hiring a professional, you can’t go too long with bricks. There’s different tools and different setups for different types of people and different scenarios. So it’s not so it just depends, folks. But I think what we’ve listed it, you know, you can still have a reasonable experience with Elementor, but it’s not going to impure performance. It can’t match of any of the others that we’ve outlined. What’s your insights about plugins? Because I think the same thing applies to plugins. If you don’t keep the plugins up to date and you don’t, and you just keep to the most core plugins that you need, you just don’t throw every plugin that you want on, but you’ve got to keep them updated and you’ve got to really know which are the ones that you should really go for.
[00:53:31.410] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s the key to it. What was your own thoughts on that?
[00:53:37.690] – Haroon Q. Raja
Coming from a self learning background where I just tried things and figured them out. While trying them, I used to throw plugins at every problem that I would come across in WordPress, and I’d try the first one that I do a Google search, how to do, blah blah blah, in WordPress. The first plugin that would come up, I would use that. And then if it solved the problem fine and dandy, I would stick with it. And if I came across any issues, I would look for options other than that. Eventually I started realizing that not all plugins are created equal. The code that goes behind the plugins could be really optimized or it could be all over the place. Utilizing maybe 50 times, 100 times more resources than it needs to. Picking the right plugins for the job that are minimal, that do one job and they do that one job really well and they have been coded to the best of coding standards, could go a really, really long way towards having an optimized website. Throwing random plugins from. What’s that plugin shop? Code Canyon theme for us.
[00:54:46.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes.
[00:54:47.810] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yeah, it’s Code Canyon, right? Yeah, envato. Picking random plugins from Envato for like $40 and then throwing them on a site because they’re the first one that came up when you searched for a particular solution, not a good idea. So yeah, having the right set of plugins, minimal set of plugins. And also some people are under the impression that less is necessarily better, but in this case, quality is necessarily better. If you have five plugins, but they’re all like monolithic plugins that do everything but the kitchen sink, it’s going to slow down the site a lot. If you have like 25 plugins, each of them few lines of code, does one job, does that job really, really well and efficiently, that 25 plugin site is going to be more performant than a five plugin site with five bad, poorly coded, monolithic monsters of plugins. So yeah, it’s quality over quantity over here. And then you have to keep them updated. You have to have the latest versions, and you’ve got to test the latest versions before you deploy them live because there could be breaking changes, there could be incompatibilities with the theme, there could be incompatibilities with other plugins you’re running.
[00:55:57.280] – Haroon Q. Raja
So that’s also important. You’ve got to pick a host, you’ve got to pick a solution that lets you spin up a staging site on which you can try out the updates, on which you can make sure that nothing breaks before deploying those changes to the live site to your actual visitors and customers and members.
[00:56:13.360] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s what we do at wpton. It does that have gone beyond launch and have got membership. We can provide a staging site and you can update all the plugins on the staging site, or you can hire us with one of our support plus plans. And we update all the plugins in the staging before we update them on the production and we give it a visual look over. But that comes with the support plus plans that we offer. We don’t insist on those that are starting out because they normally are not in the zone where they’re making any real income. So we give them the option. They can do it themselves or when they do get actual paying students, they can ask us to do it or they could ask somebody else. But we offer those type of solutions. Well yeah, it could be you. It’s real eron, but you’re normally dealing with the larger websites. Yes? In truth, are you not so. But I agree with everything, Arun. It’s not exactly quantity, but you’ve got to keep some control over it. But we provide a very extensive list of places plugins as part of our hosting package.
[00:57:37.260] – Jonathan Denwood
They’re premier plugins with, we’ve bought licenses so we can offer it to our clients, but we deal with the support area, with some support from the plugin providers. That’s why we manage to do special deals. But we got a very extensive list. But we don’t put all that list on every client’s website that hosts.
[00:58:02.670] – Haroon Q. Raja
That would be a nightmare.
[00:58:04.240] – Jonathan Denwood
We have a white glove session, we find out what your requirements are and then we choose from our library, the mixture that would work for you. That’s how we get. Sorry.
[00:58:19.690] – Haroon Q. Raja
And this is what’s lacking from most hosting environments. A lot of people are trying to figure out why their site is just not scaling. Why is it having issues converting people they don’t even know that visitors might be dropping off because of long page load times or being served a cached result that is not relevant to them, that is old, that is stale. So they, and secondly, a lot of business owners don’t know the right tech to choose by themselves. If they’ve got white club service, if they’ve got personalized session with their host, with the technical people who know all of this, they could help them pick the right technology stack. And that’s what people like Jonathan or I, because I also offer similar services at an individual level as a consultant to lots of clients when they need to grow and scale their sites. So with both of us, what you get is that white glove service. As Jonathan said, a session with you in which we help you determine the best technology stack for your particular use case requirements, because every site is different, so that’s what you don’t get with just going and signing up for a shared hosting plan or even a cloud plan with one of those mainstream providers, which is something very important to keep in mind, right?
[00:59:38.260] – Jonathan Denwood
So the next thing is image optimization. Basically, if you take a photo with your iPhone or your smartphone, it could be enormous in what is called pixel density. And if you just upload that enormous image, you can crop it in WordPress, but it’s still going to be enormous if you keep doing that. And we give some advice to people when they decide to host with us around that. And we also use one of the more premier image compression plugin solution and short pixel. We utilize that as well and we try and give some advice. But even with short pixel, if you keep uploading, it’s not always this case, but it’s one of the bugbears. Images from your smartphone directly out and you don’t crop them or don’t do any preference optimization before you upload them. You’re going to if you keep doing that, and it depends on the number of images, you can slow your website. So what’s your response to that?
[01:00:54.400] – Haroon Q. Raja
I also love shortpixel. Use it on pretty much every client site and my sites. It’s one of the best out there. And so, with images, you’ve got to be careful about two things. First and foremost, the images should ideally be cropped and uploaded in the size displayed on the site. Ideally, if you’ve got developers working on your site who are handling all the image uploads, then usually that works fine. But once non-developer clients, employees, nontechnical employees of clients, and data entry operators start working on a site rather than developers, they just start uploading images in the format that they have, in the size that they have. When selecting the image to be included in the page builder widget, they don’t select the right version generated by WordPress in the image widget in the block either. They might be using a thumbnail size, and they would pick the full size when working in the editor, be it Elementor, be it bricks, be it Gutenberg, or Guidance. So they select the full size, and it’s going to display 150 by 150 pixels on the site.
[01:02:08.370] – Haroon Q. Raja
The image being loaded is 1920 by 1080 pixels, or worse, a full 4k image. So that is usually one of the biggest factors in sites being slow because you’ve got 1520 such images on the site, all using the full size and being displayed in small thumbnails. The difference is going to be like MBs and MBs and MBs. So, with the right plugins configured correctly, those images will be resized and served in the right size. However, your team also needs some education on selecting the right size when building pages and adding data to the site. So it’s a combination of a plugin and education to pick the right version.
[01:02:49.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, plug-in on its own helps a lot, but you do need to wear it. The last thing, and I think you touched on it is for very demanding membership and buddy boss with Learndash and lift lms we do put on Redis, and I’ve used it on some of my sites, and it has made a difference. It is a technology that speeds up the actual database because everything in WordPress is in a database, and its called-upon images, text, and layout, are all stored in a database. And Redis, I don’t know about the other one I’ve listed. Was it Malia DP? Yeah, I don’t know if that does the same thing as Redis, but Reddit is different, so maybe you can explain what the two do quickly, and then we can wrap it up.
[01:03:54.660] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yes. So as I had mentioned earlier in discussing cache, whenever a page is generated for all the data that is dynamic, for example, Jonathan would have his progress, I would have my course progress. Jonathan may also have access to different plans and resources he has purchased. I would have different ones, different course lists, and different virtual products. So we need to be shown our respective data, and WordPress would run a query on the database. That query is one of the most resource-intensive tasks of a website, as it involves getting data from the database. So if Jonathan’s repeat sessions request the same data from the database, why not just serve him the last copy that he generated during his previous visit or the same session but on a previous page load? If the exact same data is to be shown, why fetch it from the database every single time? So that’s where an object cache, a database cache, or an object cache like Redis comes into play. This is a very fast object cache. It keeps database queries and results from database queries stored in the database so that the same query result doesn’t need to be fetched from the database on the next visit.
[01:05:08.080] – Haroon Q. Raja
That can improve performance by orders of magnitude. MariaDB is more of a database technology. There are different versions of web servers, and there are different versions of database servers. There’s Mariadb, there’s mySql itself. So Mariadb was a more performant version of MySQL, but not anymore. Since MySQL eight came out with eight onward, the performance differences aren’t just there. So that’s why I stick with MySQL eight. Before it, I used to prefer Mariadb. I think you might have meant memcached. Memcached. Memcached is an alternative to Redis as well. So Redis has become the gold standard in object caching.
[01:05:49.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, we don’t put it on everything because it’s unnecessary. But on the more demanding websites that we’re helping with that got thousands of memberships, we put Redis on, and it does make a difference, and it’s been pretty reliable. It hasn’t caused a lot of problems. You’ve got to get everything else. It’s not a solvable technology solution. Some people say, oh, you know, put that on it, solve all your problems. You’ve got to get all the other things that we’ve discussed just correct. But like I say, if you’ve got people like Haroon or WP tonic with some experience on this, it can all go a lot more. It will go a lot smoother and a lot sweeter. So Haru, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[01:06:50.530] – Haroon Q. Raja
Haru, they can visit me on my website@hqraja.com, which is hq raja.com. Reach out to me using the contact form over there, especially if they need help with something like scaling a website or any of the solutions that we’ve discussed today.
[01:07:11.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’ll make sure Harun’s website address is in the show notes, folks. Or you can contact wptonic if you’re looking for a specialized hosting provider and a partner around that as well. We’ll be back next week with some knowledge sharing that help you build a market or sustain your membership community website. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
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